NAPA -- A rapidly expanding company that aims to make it easier to build websites and attract visitors to them itself is finding it easier than expected to entice prospective employees to work at its south Napa headquarters.
Attracta (707-320-2050, attracta.com) aims to hire nearly 150 employees by the end of this year but has stopped fully outfitting a Sacramento-area office because Attracta has been able to hire quickly enough locally, according to Ken Leonard, co-founder and chief executive officer. [See "Fast-growing Napa web startup plans hires," Dec. 10.]
"Many come from Vacaville and Vallejo as well as a few from Marin (County)," he said. "We find it pretty good to recruit from the North Bay. Even if you're coming from far away, it is a reverse commute and better than going to San Francisco and the South Bay."
The company, started in 2009, tripled the size of its Napa Valley Commons business park headquarters to 13,000 square feet late last year. An 8,000-square-foot office was secured around the same time to accommodate 30 to 40 employees.
Attracta develops software that helps owners of about 3 million websites more easily get found among the billions of pages indexed by major search services. Such a service is usually called search-engine optimization, or SEO.
The customer base is growing by several thousand accounts a day, largely thanks to distribution agreements through more than 1,500 website hosting companies and major site-management software provider cPanel.
Last week the company said it reached 3 million users, up from 2.7 million in December, 2 million a year ago and 1 million in late 2011.
A major driver of the growth in websites using services going forward will be a patent-pending cloud services distribution system that allows website owners to quickly install and manage Internet-based services such as Google apps, advertising and safe-surfing verification services.
More than 65 percent of small businesses sign up for such services for their websites but don't install them because of technical challenges, according to market research cited by Attracta. Other surveys of smaller ventures the company points to suggest 43 percent will adopt cloud services for their websites in the next three years, and most of such business will double the number of cloud apps they pay for.
Attracta's business model has been "freemium," giving away SEO services that tell Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Google and other Internet search providers what's new on a website. Premium services include one-click installations of cloud software.
