Mormons may have done some of the work to help build out Ancestry.com's database, but they also have built a free competitor: FamilySearch.org
From a startup perspective, the base of records is important, but the 1.6 billion dollar purchase came from lots of paying customers who aren't Mormon (there just aren't enough Mormons who are devout to the point where they will pay for a genealogy resource when a free one built by their own faith exists). The Ancestry folks just took a relatively cheap/free pool of data, and did the work necessary to feed that data to customers willing to pay. I'd guess there are a lot more startups that can be built on readily available data sets like this. Congrats to the Ancestry.com team.
Edited to add how cool this whole business model is. Something that could be thought of as a "lifestyle business" ended up with a huge win by having the silly ideas of charging customers and building something people wanted.
From a startup perspective, the base of records is important, but the 1.6 billion dollar purchase came from lots of paying customers who aren't Mormon (there just aren't enough Mormons who are devout to the point where they will pay for a genealogy resource when a free one built by their own faith exists). The Ancestry folks just took a relatively cheap/free pool of data, and did the work necessary to feed that data to customers willing to pay. I'd guess there are a lot more startups that can be built on readily available data sets like this. Congrats to the Ancestry.com team.
Edited to add how cool this whole business model is. Something that could be thought of as a "lifestyle business" ended up with a huge win by having the silly ideas of charging customers and building something people wanted.
Disclosure: I'm a Mormon.