Absolutely I plan to

🙂

Thanks for the feedback, what data is there to support that?

Thanks David, I was wondering about them since I remembered this post about 1 million members:
http://www.techstars.com/j-squared-media-1-million-users-served/

I am working on a way to include a portfolio of apps (Facebook, mobile, etc.) under a single company umbrella so they’ll get credit for all that growth. I think this will be done in time for the next index in May.

At this point I am mainly focused on figuring out how much data I can collect and attempting to organize it in a useful way. There are certainly companies who don’t have a strong web presence, but they are in the minority when it comes to investing in “tech startups”.

I think the most useful thing – which hasn’t been done with the TechStars index yet – is to see the changes in traffic, social reach, pagerank, inbound links, etc. over time. These are signals that a company is either gaining or losing momentum, and I think there are many more pieces of trackable public data that can help us understand how well a business is doing. No single data point swings the entire index, they are combined together and rated based on the type of business. For example a B2B startup with 10,000 Twitter followers is arguably equivalent to a consumer-facing startup with 10x that many.

Ultimately I think I will refine this to the point where it does strongly indicate which companies are doing well, and my hope is that it will shine a light on companies that don’t necessarily get a ton of buzz but are just quietly killing it and deserve to get recognition.

I’m curious what your goal is for the purpose of the index? How do you want people to be perceiving what a company’s position means?

-Alex Schiff
Fetchnotes, Boston Fall 2012

Thanks Leith, I feel I have good reason not to reveal the exact algorithm right now. You’re right that startups *should* focus on other things, but you’d be surprised how tempting it is for people to game things. This list measures things companies are focused on every day like hiring new people, gaining customers and gaining awareness.

A high ranking means that the company is doing well across several indicators including web traffic, company size, inbound links, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, page rank, etc. These are all external indicators of health for a company, and I weight them based several variables to allow the B2B companies to stack up correctly next to consumer ones.

I didn’t realize DailyBurn was acquired, I will remove them. If you know of others who have been acquired please let me know and I will remove them too. This is for active pre-exit companies.

Company age is an interesting factor, I think it is in reflecting in things like employee count, inbound links, and social media following. There is not currently a direct measurement of company age being done.

Keep the feedback coming!