The Internet has made it easy for people to find and obtain information they want, but as a side effect it has left us with too much information on our hands. ArchetypeMe, a New York based startup founded by veteran retail entrepreneur Cristina Carlino with former HP CMO Michael Mendenhall, seeks to solve this problem by curating editorial content, commerce and community in a personalized manner. After raising $19 million last year from private investors, Mendenhall swung by our offices last week to detail their new site that launched in beta last November, and is already seeing impressive traffic and reader retention.

I was impressed with the vision and execution of turning the publishing business upside down by focusing on me the individual.  Creating a site that targets down to the persona level.

Using Data to Revolutionize Personal Search

ArchetypeMe.com, the company’s flagship product, matches an individual’s preferences based on an algorithm that maps back to the concept of archetypes from Plato and Carl Jung. Their approach to content discovery flips the classic model on its head – instead of having people search to find content (the pull model), they are building a predictive model that accurately identifies what content you will be interested in (the push model). They have plans to marry this approach with an interesting monetization model that will dump banner ads for more integrated promotions with retail brands.

By querying the user first through an eight question personality assessment that identifies your three strongest archetypes (there’s a total of 10), the site continues to leverage user data to help develop content that will be in high demand. While most other sites’ recommendations are based on a user’s general search history or purchasing behavior, ArchetypeMe takes it a step further by generating recommendations based on the user’s personality, or archetype. For example, if the website sees a spike in searches for “summer dresses” among the Caregiver archetype, the content team comes together to develop an article that recommends summer fashion trends for them. Or since editors know the Intellectual archetypes are interested in Neil deGrasse Tyson, they had Lee Woodruff do a two part interview with him that reportedly generated substantial traffic.

It’s All About “Me”

This proactive and constant analysis of users is one of the reasons ArchetypeMe stands out from other content curators like Pinterest, Flipboard, Reddit. Mendenhall says “it ultimately comes down to us delivering against the user’s wish to ‘know me and be relevant to me’”. The company also has an extensive editorial team that creates original content daily for each of its archetypes. The team is led by Lisa Gabor, a content specialist with years of editorial experience, and is publishing a significant number of articles a day.

User generated content makes up about 40% of the mix, according to Mendenhall, and he noted they have built social elements that allow users to add content directly to their “ME Board”, a public space on the network where you can add, receive and post new content. Like Pinterest, a “ME” button is used to add content from other sites to a user’s personal ME Board, but ArchetypeMe takes it one step further by organizing it around archetypes to make things easier to find.

Where ArchetypeMe is Heading

Mendenhall says their team is nearly split 50/50 between tech and editorial, and it shows with how polished the site looks and the amount of content they are putting out. The company has grown to ~40 employees and is positioned for an exciting next few months as new functionality is rolled out. They have a pipeline of additional features they will launch in July, including a mobile application and enhanced commerce capabilities on the site.

Big data is driving innovation and ArchetypeMe is unique in this regard.  Other companies like Flipboard which put a nice “coat of paint” as a user interface as their differentiation.  Big data and personalization give ArchetypeMe a scale advantage over the competition.  ArchetypeMe can level the playing field in the consumer magazine business by creating content for the individual with both technology and crowd sourced curation.