I’ve known Ed for many years now. We first met working on a project together at Intuit. As we worked on the project, our friendship grew – there were a few of us on the project who spent way too much time together. We had lunches together at Tung Kee Noodle House (TKNH), we had code acronyms like T.K.MOOT, and we argued over whether Buffy really was a quality show (I think I was the only one who didn’t enjoy it).
Ed has since left Intuit – encouraged by the entrepreneurial spirit not only from the Valley but also from his parents, who were self-employed. His latest project, on which he’s been working for the past few years is CostHelper.com. This site is designed to provide quality information about the many costs that we face on a day-to-day basis, like hiring a plumber or buying an HDTV.
The idea behind the site is to create one location with reliable, well-written information where you can research costs for whatever it is you have coming up in your life with which you might not be that familiar. In the industry it’s what we call an SEO play – in other words, trying to get good placement in the search engines so that if a customer searches Google or Yahoo for “How much do Kitchen Cabinets cost?” (or as most people would probably shortcut “kitchen cabinets cost”) his site will be one of the first links provided and with each visit to his site, he makes money off of the ads served up on the right-hand side of the page.
It’s great to see this site taking off, and I’ve been impressed with the quality of the information provided as well as Ed’s strategy of attacking the content and features on the site, making sure he balances the investment in the right areas so that the site is constantly improving.