Launch days. They’re equal parts thrilling and terrifying for many start-up business founders, but they don’t get much worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.
It was June 2006 and the couple’s trailblazing price comparison website Foundem - one they had sacrificed well-paid jobs for and built from scratch - had just gone fully live.
They didn’t know it at the time but that day, and those that followed, would mark the beginning of the end for their company.
Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like "price comparison" and "comparison shopping".
It meant the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on their product listings through to other websites, struggled to make any money.