About Us
This business was created together with a befriended programmer. However, when starting this website, I was still an Internet Marketeer pur sang.
Like many businesses, it started out as a small tool, because of the frustrations with the existing options:
- How was I supposed to install the scraped files on my domain? Internet Marketeers are usually not very technical people – including myself. SEO'ers are business people. They need clear instructions and don't want to spend hours browsing forums, to find the solution for some technical problem.
- Nobody offered a free demo. Why not? Some websites are difficult to scrape, because their files are hosted on a different domain, or they use ancient web techniques like iframes and Flash navigation. It's inheritent to this type of service, since you are going to come across a lot of old websites.
- Why did nobody offer good support? The existing service didn't respond to support messages. Let's be honest: scraping a website for $15 isn't that cheap. Any customer deserves at least to get an answer to a normally written email.
- Why did no service offer an unlimited subscription? During some months, I had to recover 50+ domains from the Wayback Machine. Did they really expect me to pay 50x $15 for this?! I looked at using an open source ruby script, but that was full of bugs. Or maybe – probably actually – I just didn't have the patience to learn how to work with an alternative scripting language.
- Why could no other service offer obvious features like removing broken images? Or changing HTML tags for a different domain? Those things are important for SEO! Making all those small edits takes a lot of time to do it manually.
- And then there is the WordPress “integration”. This was the final reason to start our own tool. Let's be clear: our own WordPress conversion is far from perfect. We are constantly working to improve it, but it's a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. However: we are still the only service that allows you to recover a website in WordPress, which looks the same, and allows you to make edits on the backend – including the menu.
After customers showed an appreciation for our Wayback Machine Downloader, we started offering other SEO services, such as: expired domains, expired content and web development. However, every service was created with the same reason as the wayback downloader: out of frustration with the existing options.
- Michael Schwartzman
Press