Judd Lyon and Sebastian Brocher recently sold their startup, SiteCondor to gShift of Canada. Courtesy photo.
They recently sold SiteCondor, website auditing tools for digital agencies and content marketers, to gShift Labs, based in Toronto, Canada. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“The acquisition of SiteCondor is a significant step forward in our strategy to empower digital marketers to fully maximize their investments in owned and earned media,” Krista LaRiviere, cofounder and CEO, gShift, said in a news release.
“As a joint customer of gShift and SiteCondor, this acquisition makes perfect sense,” Nick Baken, managing partner at Purple Hat Marketing & Invixio, said in a news statement. “As content remains king, it’s critical to know how to optimize it. With SiteCondor integrated into gShift, my company is able to advise clients on how, where, why and when to execute their content, search and social campaigns.”
Lyon and Brocher built SiteCondor, founded in 2013, through word of mouth advertising and bootstrapping. They subleased space at Capitol Tower downtown from You Earned It.
The idea for SiteCondor sprung out of work they were doing for a client. The client wanted information about its images extracted from 30 different websites. They wanted other information from all of their websites. They were going to have one employee manually do it. Instead, Lyon and Brocher created a computer program, which evolved into SiteCondor, to do the work automatically. SiteCondor lets agencies and brands quickly extract meta information from their clients’ websites.
Lyon and Brocher met volunteering for SCORE, the Service Corp. of Retired Executives. They helped the advisors in Austin with technology issues and taught web page design.
Brocher, with a background in engineering, is originally from Argentina. Lyon, with a background as a coder and designer, moved to Austin from California.
“Between the two of us we had what we needed to build the product end to end,” Lyon said.
“We built it for that first client. We started getting more requests for similar things,” Lyon said.
Slowly Lyon and Brocher built up the customer base for SiteCondor. They went to online marketing conferences to spread the word about the product and its features. They also went to meetups.
Lyon and Brocher never had any outside employees and they ran on revenue.
“It’s not for the faint of heart. You got to really believe in what you’re doing. But it gave us a lot of flexibility and freedom to take the company in the direction we wanted to,” Lyon said.
Lyon and Brocher are helping gShift as consultants to help integrate the product, but then they’ll be looking to launch their next venture.
But first, Lyon wants to travel the world for a little while.
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