Now this is what I call "execution"!

This is some blatant promotion, but I'm seriously impressed by these guys, so they are getting a mention here again. verwandt.de has already reached close to 11 million profiles on their site and have surpassed 900,000 trees in total. If you don't know what they do, check out their site (available in multiple languages). verwandt allows users to create family trees and facilitates all sorts of interaction amongst families. I've been a huge fan of setting up online family trees and we were very quick to invest in verwandt, having seen early on the potential (even though monetization still remains one of the major hurdles). At the same time, we weren't expecting for such rapid uptake. The ability for families to find a site to interact around has really seemed to hit a nerve in Europe as well as the other regions verwandt is already serving.

Yet, at the same time, in addition to hitting a nerve, both Sven and Daniel have executed extremely well. These two founders have shown me that if you focus on the right things and quickly change course as necessary, you can outperform well-funded competiton (hello Geni!) A lot of what these guys have tried didn't work right from the start. So, they quickly re-grouped or killed the idea and focused on the next challenge, at times being extremely creative in their apporach to problems. Speed is of the essence in this space, and Sven and Daniel have shown that they can easily keep up and hopefully soon lead the competition.

Techcrunch has already twice written about them as being "German copycats". (Here's the other post!) Yet, what they've also written is how quickly verwandt is catching up to Geni. This is all about execution and who cares if you're simply smart enough to find an underserved market and take advantage of it! Even though the tone of the post on Techcrunch is quite negative, when you read through the lines, you can sense that they know a US company is being shown how it's done!