All Star Directories, the five year-old online education lead generation firm based in Seattle, was purchased recently by Austin Ventures. It is the firms first such acquisition in the interactive lead generation space and from the sounds of it, not the last.
John Cook of the Seattle Post Intelligencer first covered the story after the press embargo ended.
Of the online lead generation companies, All Star Directories is among the larger, more established; the receive their traffic from search, but unlike other major players, they receive mostly organic search traffic rather than engaging in the more common and more scalable paid search arbitrage. This means that their $15 million in revenues as reported in the Seattle P-I had little traffic acquistion costs but with 65 people has some overhead associated with maintaining their thousands of pages of content. Interestingly, All Star Directories started as a pet project of founder Mike Mathieu, an ex-Microsoft exec who was looking for something to do after leaving the world's largest software company.
All Star Directories is not the only successful lead generation firm in that area. World Class Strategy is another group that has ranked in the top 3 or 4 among fastest private companies according the Puget Sound Business Journal and ahead of All Star Directories.
