When Steve Mallett entered the Launch36 accelerator last autumn, he did so as one of the most experienced entrepreneurs ever to go through the tech development program.

Based in the Saint John suburb of Quispamsis, Mallett is the CEO of RUMAnalytics, a software-as-a-service product that accelerates the speed at which browsers call up e-commerce sites so clients aren’t driven away by slow browsing before the site gets a chance to sell its wares.

It’s the product of a guy who launched his first web enterprise in 1999 — a pure-content site called OSDir.com, which provided news, blogs and discussions on open source and Linux technology. He launched that site before Google became the dominant search engine in the world, which meant it had an incredible volume of traffic because Google implicitly trusts sites that existed before it did.

As a result, OSDir.com built up 50 million pages of content and was once one of the top 4,000 most-viewed sites in the world. Mallett has also been an editor of O’Reilly Media, which publishes books and magazines about technology, and is a co-founder of the Google O’Reilly Open Source Award.

By 2008, the rest of the Internet had progressed and Mallett and his colleague Chris Clarke were looking for something new. They weren’t quite sure what they should turn to.

 “It took us another eight months to discover that what we were really good at was web performance,” said Mallett in an interview. “With 50 million documents on the Internet, we’d become exceptionally good at servicing Google.”

They got the idea for a new project when Mallett attended a conference in Las Vegas last year for people who have bootstrapped Internet companies.

He learned that e-commerce entrepreneurs have a huge problem — far bigger than you might suppose. Small and medium-sized e-commerce sites frequently lose customers because they grow impatient with the time it takes to reach the site and select products. It’s even a problem for mega-sites, which are often the worst offenders. Research has shown that Google itself would lose 20 per cent of its revenue if customers have to wait, on average, another half second to find what they’re looking for, said Mallett.

So they set to work producing RUMAnalytics, which lets e-commerce providers embed a small bit of code in their websites to analyze where the bottlenecks that slow things down are occurring. Once it identifies the problems, the software can correct them and speed up the site.

 “We help e-commerce websites that are typically very slow become a lot faster to emulate the success of Amazon and become very fast,” he said. “Amazon has created the mould of the e-commerce site in that they are incredibly fast as a first priority. Others don’t have the expertise to become fast, so they just try to look good and concentrate on marketing.”

Mallet said a couple of customers have been beta testing the product for about a month, and he’s approaching a few high-profile companies to join the beta program. He expects a full launch in about six months.

RUMAnalytics is trying to raise about $500,000 to $1 million in funding, and Mallett says it has received strong interest, though no commitments as yet.