Razvan Girmacea & Monitor Backlinks – an entrepreneur, his start-up and the story

Razvan Girmacea is a Romanian entrepreneur from Iasi who launched his start-up, Monitor Backlinks, in 2012 and was a finalist at How To Web in 2012.

This year, Razvan presents his company at Webit, in front of 10,000 participants, 300 journalits and 400 investors.

Until now, the company was backed up by Venture Capital Ireland with Euro 50,000 and also was awarded 10,000 as it ranked 4th at Lisbon Challenge.

Monitor Backlinks makes available easy-to-use web instruments for SEO professionals and amateurs from all over the world.

Razvan told AdHugger a little more about the start-up world and Monitor Backlinks.

AdH: Is Monitor Backlinks your first start-up?

Razvan Girmacea: I founded Monitor Backlinks in 2012, as a start-up offering easy-to-use web instruments for SEO, available for use both for professionals and for normal people that want to use SEO for their businesses.

This isn’t my first start-up. Over the time, I initiated several projects within the start-up area, such are: Presa Zilei, SEOBugz, Edukid, Books Translation & Traduceri ca la Carte, Numele meu and others .

AdH: How did Monitor Backlinks started?

R.G.: Well, in the first stage, Monitor Backlinks started without external financing resources and all the profit obtained was reinvested to help develop the project.

The investments came later, after we were present at Startup Spotlight at How to Web. We were than selected among the best start-ups in the region. Our project’s idea and potential attracted, last year, an Euro 50,000 seed investment from Venture Connect Ireland. Bill Liao from Venture made the decision to support us after we a short meeting during which I presented the project and its strenghts. And we had their support after a 15 minutes call over Skype.

AdH: How did the product and the team working on it developed until now?

R.G.: I developed it myself, from scratch, building something that the users could pay and use, just to validate the idea. As soon as I got the investment, I hired Eugen, a very good developer from Russia, and he helped me transform the back end, making it scalable and more secure.

This year, two more developers joined the team so we can keep up with the product roadmap.

We are a distributed team and I believe that if you want to hire the best people, you must search outside the city; and technology allows us to do it!

AdH: What does Monitor Backlinks do for its users?

R .G.:  Monitor Backlinks detects the historic of a business’ links and is detecting daily the new links towards a certain website. Moreover, through a suite of metrics, the ones that use our service can find out if the received link will have a negative or positive influence over its Google ranking.

There are many ways of attracting people on a website, efficient and less efficient, costly or less costly, but the important thing is to be able to measure them.

One of the most efficient and less costly channels to bring on the website visitors interested to buy your product is SEO. Ideally, when someone searches on Google a product a certain business sales would be for that business’ website to be the first to appear in Google, so the users will reach to its website.

To achieve that, a business need an optimized code and links towards its website, which Monitor Backlinks offers more: overview and monitoring for website’s evolution, daily notifications when the website receives or looses links, checks if competition received new links, offers SEO metrics for all links, checks the position of key words in Google,  and has a special module – Disavow – to recover websites penalized or to prevent them from being penalized.

AdH: You mentioned Monitor Backlinks offers SEO metrics for all the links. Which are those metrics?

R.G.: Well, our platform gathers a lot of SEO relevant information for any link. This helps website owners realize how important is a particulary link and estimate what impact it might have over a website.

For example, among the metrics gathered are link status (nofollow, meta nofollow, meta noindex, robots.txt blocked, 302 redirects, wrong anchor, not found pages, server errors), anchor texts, PageRank & MozRank, Page & Domain Google Index status, TLD & server country, Same Class C Ip host detection, social shares or external link count

AdH: How much does it cost to use your services?

R.G.: The service costs $20 / month for two small websites up to $100 / month for more or larger websites. You can see the full details of what each plan includes in the Pricing page.

AdH: Who are your clients?

Half of our clients are SEO professionals that recover their clients websites from Google penalties or they build new links based on the competitors data we provide, the other half are marketers and entrepreneurs use our SEO Autodiscover technology, getting a lot of info on their website & competitors backlinks and measuring their progress.

AdH: What are your plans for the future?

R.G. We are getting a lot of custom requests from very large agencies that want to use Monitor Backlinks with some additional features, so we are shaping our product to be ready for Enterprise level companies.