Interview: Collis Ta’eed of Envato
If you haven’t seen one of the Envato design marketplaces or graphic design tutorial sites at least once in your life then odds are you don’t do web design. That’s ok because the network that Collis and his team have built up is just incredible for any business person interested in developing high traffic sites or other kinds of online marketplaces. The amount of content this community generates is absolutely astounding. And community is exactly what Envato is about. These guys are very, very good at what they do.
Many people know Envato websites but they don’t know Collis Ta’eed. How did you get into this business?
Although my background is in design, I think entrepreneurship must have been in my blood. I’ve always loved starting things, even as a kid I had various dubious schemes and plans. Sometime after becoming a designer and then freelancer, my wife and I found ourselves discussing how much better life would be if we didn’t have any clients to please. After a whole lot of working weekends and nights, together with a super talented rails developer, we managed to launch our first site, and we’ve never looked back!
What is the Envato network?
Our company Envato has spread out a lot since those early days and we’ve launched a whole series of websites in different areas. They mostly cater to creatives, developers and freelancers and collectively we refer to them as the Envato network. Broadly speaking we have a set of digital goods marketplaces like FlashDen where people can buy and sell Adobe Flash components, and a set of educational blogs that teach technical and creative skills like Psdtuts+ where you can master Photoshop!
Along with these we like to support creatives in whatever way we can find, so we operate a popular freelancing community where there’s advice, tools and jobs for freelancers, and Creattica which offers daily design news and inspiration, and actually there are a whole lot of sites in our network. Sometimes even I have a hard time keeping up with them all.
If you were to add another site to the network what would feel natural to you?
We have a few sites up our sleeve, the one we’re working on currently is a new tutorial site called Cgtuts+ which is going to be all about 3d. We’re very excited to be growing the Tuts+ line of sites because we’re so passionate about education. I think the internet is a great equalizer for the spread of information and I’m hopeful that the Tuts+ sites will help that movement. The bulk of our content is completely free and we offer some really top grade tutorials by industry professionals. Cgtuts+ will be the sixth site in the line, and following that we’re planning a higher level education site to complement the current batch of tech skills sites.
Teaching online poses some interesting challenges but also some wonderful advantages. For instance it’s difficult to replicate one on one contact, but on the other hand the potential to make one piece of educational content and then use it an infinite number of times is hugely efficient. So I’m very excited about growing Tuts+ in the future, as well as all our other sites.
Do you consider yourself a design guy, a marketing guy or a technical guy?
These days I think of myself as an entrepreneur, but beyond that I have a very definite specialty in design. I design all our sites myself, though these days I’m not sure I can keep that up. So this year I’m faced with the challenge of replacing myself in my favourite job … oh well, all good things come to an end!
Your success is evident. Why do you think you’ve done well growing Envato? What suited you well to this task?
I think you could attribute a lot of our success to the fact that we’ve been meticulously honest and open with our business. We have a large community of users who we care about very deeply. It’s our goal to help them succeed in whatever way we can, and I think people instinctively understand and react to that.
Favorite hobby when not working?
Drinking tea! I love tea, though to be fair I do a lot of thinking about work while drinking tea. I also love playing the piano and play them whenever I find one, even when it’s at inappropriate times like in a restaurant full of people.
Interview: David Geller of EyeJot and WhatCounts
You've been around this technology game for awhile. How'd you get started? Hopefully it hasn't been too long! I was lucky to be selected for an internship at GTE Telenet when I was in my second year at GWU in Washington, DC. It was funny in the beginning. They asked for my salary requirements and the number I gave them was several thousand dollars per year less than the minimum they were setup to pay for FTEs. So, I had to accept more, which was totally cool. It was a great job, but only an internship. I then went to Computer Consoles which had its roots in early directory assistance systems and related telephony stuff. Big time Unix shop. We even designed our own processor called the "Tahoe" to compete with DEC's Vax product line. I worked alongside some of the people that would go on to create BSD Unix and form the big Internet ISP UUNet that Microsoft eventually bought. So, you are associated with both WhatCounts and EyeJot is that right? You run both? Yep - founded them both. I have been involved in email-related technologies since the early 90's. That's what brought me to Seattle, from DC. I had written a small office email system named NvMail. It was pretty good. Even had integrated voice mail capabilities. So, I've always loved building tools and platforms that help people communicate. This led me to start WhatCounts with a former colleague of mine Brian Ratzliff, who serves as WhatCounts' President. We met at Starwave (one of Paul Allen's companies that created ESPN.com, ABCNews.com and many other important sites) and decided in 2000 to create something that would provide email publishing and analytic tools for companies that need to communicate, efficiently, with their customers. We were one of the first, robust ASP solutions in the ESP (email service provider) space. Today we're lucky to count as clients companies like Alaska Airlines, Costco, Ziff-Davis, The Seattle Times and many other firms located throughout North America and Europe. And we sell our solution on an appliance in addition to our ASP/SaaS solution. We're really the only vendor to do that. A few years ago I was having trouble coordinating live video chats between my, then, three-year-old daughter and my parents in California. Suffice it to say, I thought a product like Eyejot would be useful - something that married video with a communications model like email, something I knew a lot about. So, I started that firm and it has been growing steadily the last two years. Today we're merging some of the functionality that's in Eyejot with the advanced email and analytic capabilities of WhatCounts. The key to my being involved with both companies is really quite simple. Eyejot is small enough to almost be on auto-pilot (thankfully, we designed it extremely well and it's been one of the most stable platforms I've every worked on) and WhatCounts has a great leadership team and a very professional and dedicated staff. And, truth be told, I run both companies very conservatively. Both are privately held, largely self-funded and have grown organically, relying upon great customers to expand our opportunities. How is Eyejot different than say, email and/or YouTube for communicating? Eyejot is principally a way for one person to create and send a private video to another individual or a small group of people. For consumers it's most often used to connect family and friends - whether they're spread across the country or the world. Many families with members serving in the armed forces overseas rely on Eyejot to keep in touch. No one wants those private conversations on YouTube! Businesses, too, have started realizing the potential that video mail has and have started using it to communicate with their customers. We have professionals in numerous fields using Eyejot including real estate, life sciences and medicine, finance, customer support, publicity, education and more. These types of users are actually the centerpiece of Eyejot's business model. And yes, Eyejot is profitable and self-sustaining. You've seen some success as an entrepreneur. Why do you think you've been so successful? I'm passionate about the projects I get involved with and I'm lucky to, I suppose, have skills both as an organizer and a technology person. I really enjoy programming and think I'm pretty good at it. I'm in touching the Eyejot code-base at least every few days - whether it's to add new features or improve the ones we already have. WhatCounts is a little bigger, as a company, so it has matured to the point that I'm not actively working on the code there. But, I remain involved in technology architecture planning for both companies. And, I think, it's my roots as a software developer that has helped me grow both companies wisely. I always wonder what my fellow tech geeks do when not sitting behind their computer. What are your hobbies? Beside spending time with my family I'm a big movie fan - especially going to a theater with a huge screen. I'm not even that particular about what's playing. I just thoroughly enjoy being in an environment that forces my attention in one direction and entertains me. That's something most of us can't do in our homes. It's even more fun when I can bring my six year old daughter and observe her getting caught up in something big and magical. The only thing that has interfered with my love of movies was taking a film course a couple of years ago to learn more about the movie making process. It was extremely cool and I'm amazed at how complex it is to produce a movie - even a bad one. But, I found myself spending too much time looking at how movies were made, from lighting, to camera placement, to sound that it became hard to follow the actual stories. Thankfully I've backed off a bit from that and am back to being a fairly normal movie watcher.
Interview: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
I have to tell you. This was an interview that I was thrilled to do. We here at Curious Office are investors in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners but that isn’t why I was excited about this post. First off, I REALLY love the SEOmoz products. I have so many other things to worry about besides SEO but the truth is that I always WANT to spend more time playing with these tools and learning about how search engines work. More importantly, Rand is just an incredibly bright guy. He is articulate and probably one of the most knowledgeable folks in the SEO game. He’s certainly one of the most visible. Because of his knowledge and the hard work of everyone at SEOmoz, you have here an interview from the founder of one of the top search optimization resources sites on the whole webernet. Enjoy folks.
Outside SEO circles you might be lesser known. Tell us about Rand Fishkin. Where are you from and how did you become an SEO super star?
Well, Rand Fishkin is a total asshole. I hear that guy barely has time to make his wife dinner anymore or take out the trash 
Seriously, though, I’m New Jersey born, Seattle raised, and come from a pretty normal family. My Dad was recruited by Boeing to be an engineer out of college in ‘79. My Mom worked at an ad agency in Manhattan and when they moved out, she started her own marketing & print design business. When I was in college, her clients started needing websites and I was convenient and cheap.
In 2002, we’d been working together a few years and SEO became a huge subject. It was hard to find good contractors, so I learned it myself and actually struggled quite a bit. SEOmoz is the result of those struggles – the harder I tried, the more I’d write about successes, failures, frustrations and experiments. As the blog & tools became popular, I was invited to speak at more and more events, and eventually reached the niche popularity we’ve achieved today.
Honestly, it still amazes me how influential and well-known the brand is inside SEO, particularly compared to the relative obscurity of the company (and even the practice of SEO in general) in the wider business and technology world. Sadly, I think that the early dominance of the SEO field by spammers, snake-oil salesmen and swindlers has poisoned many smart businesspeople & developers against a very legitimate and effective form of marketing.
How would you describe what SEOmoz is all about if you just had a few moments to talk with someone who didnt know about your firm?
First off, I usually have to explain SEO. Here’s how that goes:
When you search on Google, there are two kinds of results that come up – ads (that Google charges money to list) and organic results that appear based on their ranking algorithms. SEO is the practice of improving the accessibility, targeting & marketing of websites and their content in order to achieve greater visibility in the organic listings.
Then I can get to SEOmoz:
SEOmoz is a community hub for SEO topics of all varieties. Our primary business is the “PRO membership,” a subscription model that gives access to our advanced tools & SEO resources. We also serve tens of thousands of daily readers via our blog, free tools and free SEO services marketplace.
You thought hard about financing this company. Why did you finally decide to do it the way you did?
I wrote about that decision extensively in a few blog posts – If You Were SEOmoz, Would You Take Outside Investment? – and – SEOmoz’s Venture Capital Deal Closes. Essentially, as a first-time entrepreneur with a profit-generating company, it was hard to justify the value of giving up equity for cash. However, a few things made that decision easier:
Institutional investment made us a much more serious company – from metrics to processes to accountability, it turned us from a “project” into a “Business” (capital “B”). Investment gave us a much quicker growth path, one we couldn’t have achieved alone
Venture capital enhances the “sale-ability” of a company tremendously. We gave up equity, but we’re far more likely to have a large exit than we would have been operating on our own (for a myriad of reasons).
We couldn’t have built Linkscape (a web index that attempts to replicate many of the metrics search engines use to evaluate websites and pages – and a longtime dream of mine)
I think that overall, the investment has been incredibly positive for us. That said, it’s not the case for every business or every entrepreneur. I’d urge everyone to be extremely cautious in making decisions like this.
What is a common SEO practice that is largely misunderstood by people?
I get more tough questions about canonicalization than anything else. It’s a very hard subject to understand, but it’s getting increasingly simple to properly address and correct. Here’s how it works:
You have multiple URLs on which the same content is accessible. Examples could include:
http://www.curiousoffice.com vs. http://curiousoffice.com vs. http://www.curiousoffice.com/index.php
http://www.curiousoffice.com/blogpost?id=123 vs. http://www.curiousoffice.com/blogpost?id=123&display=print
http://www.curiousoffice.com/store/item2 vs. http://www.curiousoffice.com/store/item2?refid=6a43j
The search engines come, crawl all those different versions of the same material and see some overlap/duplication, but don’t necessarily know which ones they should filter out.
Links come in from across the web to the different versions – some earn more links than others, but all are getting referenced somehow, somewhere
The engines see the different links and only count some of them (to the version they kept included in their index)
You lose out on two fronts – link love and popularity metrics don’t properly flow AND engines may filter out pages that you intended to be separate or not filter those that are duplicate.
This is a really hard problem, but the engines have two tools that make it easier. The first is the 301 re-direct (good article on that topic here), which instructs the engines to pass link metrics from one version to another (unfortunately, they also direct visitors from one version to another, but this can be practical sometimes). The second, new initiative is the Canonical URL Tag, which allows a site to tell the engines to “canonicalize” all the versions of a page to one URL via an HTML tag in the header of the document.
Linkscape blows me away. Why should others care about it?
I’m thrilled that you like it so much; we’re certainly really excited about it, too. Essentially, Linkscape is a method to see the web the ways the engines do and to have metrics and data points that are common to folks like Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live. My favorite feedback so far was from an engineer with one of the engines who commented that “this looks just like our internal tool for diagnosing links.”
Linkscape is two things, really – it’s a data source powered by a search-engine sized crawl of the web (~30 billion pages, updated every 3-4 weeks) – and it’s also a tool that lets you dig into the links that point to a site or page. From that data, you can extrapolate answers to a lot of critical SEO related questions – everything from “How can I find the links that are helping my competition rank well?” and “Who’s linking to me and what are they saying?” to “Which of these partnerships I’m thinking about are going to get me more link value for SEO?” and “Which sites have earned high quality/trustworthy links?”
We always felt that an accessible, SEO-built link graph was one of the biggest missing pieces to solving SEO issues and answering critical questions. Linkscape, particularly as it improves, is making that a reality.
If you weren’t an SEO guru what might your other career be?
I love writing and I like to travel. I’m also a big kitchen guy – love to cook. Maybe a travel/cooking author? Perhaps a chef (although I’d really have to work on my knife skills)?
Interview: Max Ciccotosto of Wishpot
I’ve know Max for quite sometime. In fact, we share offices together down in Pioneer Square. He’s a rare technical guy who has an amazing marketing mind. If you were to ask me what one could learn from Max? I’d tell you that he keeps a level head even in tough times. Here’s his interview:
Tell us a few words about yourself. How’d you come to run Wishpot and what is your work background?
I was born and raised in Italy. Came the first time to Seattle as a visiting graduate at UW and and ended up working on the Exchange Server learning lots of things about software and products After seven years it was about time for me to get back to my entrepreneurial roots. I had this idea about being able to capture all the stuff I wanted in one place from anywhere and make such space super smart about helping me getting those things and that became Wishpot. We have been around for more than two years now, raised a small Series A round, went through few ups and downs, but growing nicely now with some good stuff coming soon.
How do you describe Wishpot to friends in a noisy bar?
It’s a super smart online wish list where you add anything you want from anywhere.
You have an interesting connections with Italy to this day. Tell us about H-Farm.
H-Farm is a global venture incubator. There are three main things that H-Farm does for entrepreneurs (1) They provide the funds and operational support in super early stage, allowing the founders to really focus on what’s key early on – a great product and plan (2) they accelerate the company growth both locally supporting them with marketing, PR and bizdev and (3) allows companies to quickly expand internationally using their local “hubs”.
The company was started by a couple of great entrepreneurs (Riccardo Donadon and Maurizio Rossi). They are very supportive and engaged, especially when things get tough.
Myself and few other great entrepreneurs in Seattle and Bay Area are helping them to get their operations going in the US.
What areas of the site are the most popular?
The wedding area has been the fastest growing for us. It does make a lot of sense. Today’s couples have different needs when they get married compared to the past and Wishpot provides them the flexibility they need.
What aspect or feature of Wishpot do you think is most under-appreciated?
Mobile features. I think it’s totally cool that you can take a pix of stuff that you want, enter the ISBN or UPC and get price/rating information. We definitely need to do a better job there. There is some cool stuff coming.
What’s the hardest thing about your job?
Wearing a lot of different hats, some that you like more but cannot wear as much and some that you like less, but still need to be worn.
What’s your favorite thing about this whole experience?
The energy and interestingness. Every day I get to learn something new from our team, our partners and the many people in the startup scene. I feel I learn so much every day.
Interview: Mark Britton, founder of Avvo
We both know some of the same Expedia folk (Rich Barton, Erik Blachford, Matt Hulett). Those guys get plenty of press Let’s talk about Mark Britton. Where did you grow up and how did you wind up in Seattle?
My journey to Seattle has a boomerang trajectory. I grew up in Montana, and like many Montanans spent a lot of time in Seattle growing up. The Seahawks and Mariners were the closest professional teams, so they also drew our attention to Seattle on a weekly basis. Even though I grew up 400 miles away, Seattle always felt like home in a lot of ways. So after graduating from college (Gonzaga), I decided to try something new and attend law school on the east coast (George Washington). I spent eight years in Washington DC and sincerely loved it; but at about year five I found myself missing the west. To make a longer story short, I interviewed with law firms up and down the west coast and decided to join Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates) in Seattle. In my first trip back to Seattle, it just felt right, and PGE felt right. It ended up being a great choice for me – at a minimum PGE Seattle is how I wound up at Expedia!
You’ve been closer to more large online ventures than most. What was a typical day for Mark Britton at InterActiveCorp?
I would love to serve it up as something exotic, but by the time Expedia was acquired by IAC it was your typical big company gig. A lot of hard but really interesting work, a lot of meetings to keep all of the different operations pulling on the same oar and a lot of resources to get it all done. There was also a fair amount of travel considering that our parent was in New York and many strategy initiatives were in Europe. Layer on meetings with partners, speaking engagements, lobbying, conferences, etc., and I was on the road quite a bit. Still, I look back on the Expedia and IAC Travel days as some of the most enjoyable of my professional career.
I am the type to always pine for the other side though. When I left IAC Travel, I thought, “Man, I want to get back to that small company atmosphere – where we can dream up something today and see it in action tomorrow.” Now that I have been through the start-up crucible, I often find myself reminiscing about all of the resources and market influence that Expedia had. It is very good to be king.
We’re talking about Avvo in a noisy, crowded bar. How do you distill the company down into a few sentences?
Best place to go if have a legal issue or need to hire a lawyer. Free legal guides. Free legal advice. Free legal directory that rates and profiles 85% of lawyers in U.S.
Who uses Avvo the most? People looking for any lawyer or people who want to evaluate a specific lawyer they already found?
People who are looking for a lawyer in their area (e.g., San Diego Personal Injury Lawyer. Also people who are asking questions in our Q/A forum. Those are our two biggies. We also get a lot of individual lawyer name searches, and we see that traffic also coming in from the search engines, but the real power of the site is pointing consumers in the right direction during their time of legal need.
The reality is that, when it comes to choosing a lawyer or evaluating their legal situation, most people have no idea where to start. That is why the Yellow Pages continues to make so much money on lawyer advertising. Our mission is to get consumers more information and better guidance so that they are more informed and not simply playing roulette with the pay-to-play directories.
Do you see the Avvo model extending into other areas? For example, certain ‘for fee’ services? Partnerships?
Our big focus right now is getting our advertising platform off the ground. We launched this in earnest last month, and we are already selling a lot of advertising. We are always exploring different ways we might monetize our site, but we don’t want to do anything to jeopardize our rapid growth. In less than two years, we are already the second most trafficked legal directory on the web and we are gaining on #1 very quickly. We get around 1.5 million visits to the site every month. We have been able to do this because we offer so much great FREE information and guidance. For the time being, we would like to continue to play to this strength.
As far as partnerships go, we already have a number of them; but we are always open to new ones that make our marketplace stronger. If anyone reading this is interested in an Avvo partnership of some sort, please give us a call.
Working with Barry Diller must have been interesting. What was that like?
Barry is a solid guy – very bright and charming. The only times I found him unreasonable were when he disagreed with me, but that seems to be a common problem of mine. With IAC, it was the first time I had ever been part of an acquired organization. I had acquired a number of companies but never been acquired. That is an inherently painful equation because it is full of compromise, and successful organizations like to do things their own way. That being said, Barry and company never asked me to do anything that I didn’t ask (or wouldn’t have asked) of my own acquired companies. What really amazed me about the guy was his ability to talk travel shop on the fly – he would come into town (or we would go to him in NYC or LA) and he would be able to discuss our business in great detail. That is a real talent considering the breadth of his holdings.
Favorite food and the sport your most likely to want to watch on television?
My Dad’s in the cattle business, so I don’t think I could offer any answer other than a well-seasoned steak. The key is pairing it with a quality wine, and a nice Bordeaux or Brunello will usually do the trick. As for television, I watch very little network TV. About the only network program I watch is The Office – it has many elements that remind me of my time at the Securities & Exchange Commission (I left the SEC to join PGE). I also love to watch college football and basketball, but with three little kids Gonzaga basketball games are the only thing I get to watch in full (and that’s because I watch the DVR version after everyone else has gone to bed).
Interview: Divvy lets you design our own reservation and billing engine.
Divvy let’s you design your own online reservation and billing system for just about anything. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting founder Aaron Freed but I do know one of his colleagues Jenny Hall who formerly ran Trendi.com. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to meet Aaron soon but until then, I’ll let him talk a bit about his latest venture.
So I understand you came into web technology through a slightly different path. Tell us about yourself.
I spent 16 years in the Air Force: four at the Academy and 12 as an active-duty pilot. When I got out (about four years ago), I found that when I had nothing to do, I had no time to do it. So, I became a barista at Starbucks. That job got me out of bed and moving, albeit at 4:30 in the morning. One day short of one year after my first day on the job, I hung up my apron and started Divvy. As they say, fools rush in…
They way people develop ideas is always interesting to me. How did you decide on the Divvy concept?
Necessity and serendipity. About three years ago, I was running around Lake Union with my friend, Chris Wood (CEO of Clario, Inc.), and talking about creating a way to share an asset (such as a car) between friends. I started building something like that around two years ago – a tool that allowed people within a community to borrow stuff from each other. While I loved the values of the business, I didn’t know to overcome the cold start problem, social networking seemed to be reaching saturation, and there wasn’t a viable revenue model. So, when my condo association decided to end its contract with then-Flexcar and lease its own community vehicle, I offered to build a website which would allow homeowners to book and pay for the car. We completed that project in February and I thought to myself: why stop with just the car? What about a system for reserving and paying for all the other amenities? And then I thought: why stop with just a condo and its amenities? What about any type of entity and any type of asset? Thus Divvy was born…an erector set for building your own reservation system.
Give a few examples of how someone might use Divvy.
Current formal community uses include condo residents booking their common amenities, company employees scheduling financial advice sessions, and a coworking space scheduling desks. Within the next couple of weeks, we should be up and running in a church to schedule Sunday school rooms, in a fitness club for scheduling spa services and group classes, and in a community association for scheduling its facilities. Informal community (or peer-to-peer) applications currently include an airplane owner renting out his airplane to his pilot friends, a couple with a parking space they rarely use who are making it available to their friends and neighbors on an hourly basis (for a buck an hour), and me, sharing my Vespa with my friends (it’s a sweet ride. Here’s a picture).
How do you think you are most likely going to find users? Partnerships? SEO? Advertising?
For starters, the usual suspects: we just brought on a social media marketer (An Bui), an SEO tech (Stuart Jenner of Marketek), and a PR firm (Scoville PR) to help insert Divvy into existing conversations, to establish an online presence, and to tell Divvy’s story. We have all sorts of stories to tell — ones that are particularly relevant in today’s economy and ‘greengeist’. Product complete and beta-tested, we’re squarely in a channel validation phase for the next two months, listening to the market to tell us where to go; even though we have some initial targets, we don’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket quite yet. Condominiums are an under-served market when it comes to automated scheduling; management companies and community web service providers are excellent partners for that vertical. Coworking groups are showing an interest in our service and so we have joined that conversation. I was just contacted by someone who wants to partner with Divvy to create a city-wide reservable space repository (training rooms, party venues, etc…), which makes me believe that there could be a franchise angle. Ultimately, however, all these enterprise installations are intended to be revenue-generating trojan horses which put Divvy in front of people like you and me, who may in turn be nudged to create our own Divvy subdomains. We aim to transform community and to transform commerce. As I like to put it: we’re Web 2.0, getting down to business.
What are two of your other favorite start-ups in Seattle?
Kashless and i-booze. The former because Martin’s notion of ‘recommerce’ is a category which suits Divvy and I think he has executed his vision well. The latter because I get it; we run out of beer at Divvy’s fun Fridays every week.
Personal hero?
I have never been able to answer this question. I guess I prefer to think in terms of heroic moments created by people who are no grander than the rest of us. I saw a man at a restaurant recently. He was with his special needs son and he was being so patient, serene and loving in what I have no doubt is a trying reality. He was my hero that day.
Interview: Tony Wright of RescueTime
I’ll admit right up front that I really like Tony. He is the co-founder and CEO of RescueTime, a company he started in September of 2007 with a vision to allow individuals and businesses to understand how they spend their time and to help them spend it more effectively. Tony and I have a lot in common. That is, we like to wear a lot of different hats in order to push the company forward. Tony will wrangle Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS on one day and turn around and make direct sales or PR calls the next. Anyway, Tony is extremely hands on. He has a rare capacity to do many things quite well.
Tell us about Tony Wright. Where are you from and how did you end up here in Seattle working in this industry?
Most recently I was from sunny Anchorage, Alaska, where I ran a 20ish person web development consultancy for a number of years. I sold that and started a little recruiting software startup, which got purchased in 2007 by a company called Jobster here in Seattle.
You’ve started this company RescueTime. How do you describe it to people like my parents who just figured out how to use email?
The modern knowledge worker is often bombarded with hundreds of emails, instant messages, and phone calls in a day– not to mention that all of those web sites that make money by being funny/distracting are getting better every day at their craft. Between all of these distractions, people are simply getting less done. RescueTime shines a light into this dark corner, and shows individuals and managers how time and attention is being spent in a non-evil way. It starts off much like a graphical “credit card statement for your time” (which gets automatically recorded) and then we provide tools and suggestions to help you spend your time more effectively. To keep this from being a creepy “big brother” application, we’ve got all sorts of privacy features and limits that are available.
You could have settled on any number of business ideas. What got you going about time tracking?
Productivity and time management has always been fascinating to me. When you read all of the self-help books in the area, many of them start with the concept of keeping a log of how you spend your day. I tried this– I found the exercise valuable, but staggeringly difficult. How can a knowledge worker who is alt-tabbing between apps and sites dozens of times per hour have any idea how they really spend their time? The data was fascinating and motivating– but the act of recording it was annoying and time consuming.
To be honest, it wasn’t an overt business idea… It was a very organic process of building something that we wanted to have, and then hearing from other people that they wanted it too. It just grew from there.
What feature about RescueTime do you think is most under-appreciated?
The transparency that it offers business teams. Managers are often scared of introducing a tool like this– because people don’t always like what they see in the data. But transparency is a magical thing. Every day, knowledge workers are doing things for the sake of appearances that they really shouldn’t have to do. Hasty alt-tabbing as a peer walks by, refusing to leave early when they are burned out because it might look lazy, surfing the web for 15 minutes instead of taking a nice walk because it looks like they’re working. We’ve all done it– and people who are bad at these games (or refuse to indulge in them) look less productive than those that are good at them. It’s a huge waste of energy and time and can cause resentment or burnout in the workplace.
Running a start-up in a down market can’t be easy. What do you think is most hard about your job?
No question: Sales and Marketing. As a product guy, I like to think that everything is a product problem. But creating something that people love to use is only the first step. We’ve gotten great love from our users, fabulous PR, and great word of mouth. All of that helps, but it doesn’t result in businesses buying stuff.
What do you love most about being a start-up CEO?
The responsibility. With big teams in big companies, no one owns the product– and that’s bad. If the product (or any part of it) sucks, everyone is saying the same thing: “It’s not MY fault”. When you’re on a small startup team, it IS your fault. And you have the power to make everything that sucks stop sucking. Of course, it’s a double-edged sword… Because anything bad/broken about what you’ve built sits squarly on your shoulders.
If you were going to offer any single bit of advice to any tech veteran thinking about doing their first start-up, what would you say?
Build automated sales/distribution into your product/business from day 1. Don’t rely on PR/word-of-mouth Ideally, that means some sort of loop where, when you acquire a customer/user, there is a good chance that they will bring in at least one other user. That means getting good at SEO. It means considering widgets or other viral channels. It means identifying resellers who will help you find customers. If this kind of thing isn’t interesting to you– think hard about doing a startup, because you’ll find that building a great web app is only the first step to building a great web business.
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I think Tony forgot to mention that he’d also highly recommend a high quality time tracking tool
Want to reach Tony? Catch him on any of these links. Thanks for the interview!
http://tonywright.com (blog)
http://rescuetime.com (company)
http://twitter.com/webwright (Twitter?!?!)
Interview: Matt Hulett of WidgetBucks
Interview with Matt Hulett of WidgetBucks
Matt is an old friend of mine going back to the days when we worked at RealNetworks together. He went on to work with my old friend Mika Salmi of AtomFilms and eventually found himself running WidgetBucks. Today, WidgetBucks is easily one of the most popular ad networks around. It doesn’t matter how far you go back into Matt’s past. People always describe him as being immensely capable and creative. He’s also a heck of a nice guy. I knew he’d be a good candidate for a Curious Interview.
Tell us a few words about yourself. How’d you come to run WidgetBucks and what is your work background?
I am a pragmatic guy. I am a fourth generation Northwestern, father of 2 and husband
to an amazing woman. I got involved with Mpire/WidgetBucks almost three years ago.
I was a Board member for the company and was asked to come aboard and restart the company.
It was an eBay seller tool business at the time. Of course, the fact that we’re an online ad
optimization company makes total sense. ;}
How do you describe WidgetBucks to friends in a noisy bar?
Well, if its in a bar, then I would say, “we make ads that don’t suck.”
Many business success stories happen in very unexpected ways. Is this the case for WidgetBucks?
Most definitely. The most important part of a startup is the team itself. This is what attracted me to the company. The company was a LAMP stack eatin’, hungry, and scrappy team looking to have a win. There was no interesting business when I joined and we literally started to figure it out as soon as we all huddled together as a team.
How many impressions do you serve each month?
1.5 billion impressions per month
Why do you think publishers like WidgetBucks so much?
We make them more money that other alternatives and our ads are more interesting than
other display or text-based ad formats. Net/net, I think we have cool ads.
Advertising is going to be much more intelligent and more emotive over time. The space
is huge and it is still ripe for more innovation.
What’s the hardest thing about your job?
Managing a tremendous amount of complexity with a small team.
What’s your favorite thing about being the CEO of WidgetBucks?
We are the most effective team in our space. Ideas leave our staff meetings and end up live to billions of impressions within a day. We make real-time decisions using software and we can sit around as a team and analyze the data. That is pretty darn cool.
Just got my TechFlash Live tickets
Please join John Cook, Todd Bishop, Eric Engleman and the rest of the TechFlash team on the evening of April 29!
Monitor the brand called YOU via Friendscall.me
So, many of you are probably familiar with Colour Lovers. Intended for colour professionals, colour obsessives and designers who want to up their palette game, this site offers entry into a subject many don’t think about much but which affects us in an infinitesimal number of ways. There are breakdowns of the colours used in magazines, movie posters and websites (all oddly interesting), plus shade matching games, advice on fluffing up your social networking and discussions on such thorny topics as “Is black a colour?”, the colour world equivalent to “Are Jaffa Cakes biscuits?”
The founder of Colour Lovers, Darius A Monsef IV, dropped in to give us the low-down on his latest project called friendscall.me I checked out the site last week and got hooked. Rather than try to describe it for you, I got Darius to write a few notes about the app.
#1: For those folks who don’t know Darius, tell us a few words about yourself
I call myself an “internet astronaut.” I’m passionate about building web startups and incubating ideas. I dream of the what the future of the web holds like young aspiring astronauts look up at the stars… and know I might crash and burn attempting to see what is our there. A few years back I transformed an uninspiring color theory class into COLOURlovers.com, an international color & design resource that now welcomes 1 million visitors a month. At the same time I started COLOURlovers I left the states to spend 5 months in Thailand organizing a tsunami volunteer relief center and co-founded www.HODR.org. I now spend my time between running COLOURlovers, incubating new ideas and bringing some community support and web vision to www.Photosynth.com at Microsoft.
#2: What prompted you to do friendscall.me over all the other ideas you surely had? (How’d you get the idea?)
First, it was a pretty simple idea so I knew we could execute it quickly (It took us 18 days from concept to launch). We’re actually right in the middle of finishing some new feature updates for COLOURlovers and we’d promised ourselves we wouldn’t work on anything else… but the idea was simple, the timing was perfect… so we jumped on it. The idea was inspired by a similar service called UsernameCheck by Jon Sykes. I actually knew about it because it was sending a good amount of traffic to COLOURlovers from people searching for their usernames. When I went back to use the service a few weeks ago to check on the saturation of a name I had for a different startup, I found out that he’d turned his service off. I’m not much for just copying an old idea though, so we evolved the service and thought about how we could add more value. 1. List more sites but break them up in to categories so it is easier to digest. 2. Let people claim the profiles that they have on one page to help them share all the places they are on the social web.
The idea we executed is only part of an larger idea I’ve been kicking around for several months now. What we have up at FriendsCall.Me now is phase one of three.
#3: So, if you had to put the description of the company into one sentence how would you summarize it?
Making sure the name you use online is yours everywhere you want it to be and that all your profiles are organized in one easy to share place.
#4: How many different sites do you actively participate in yourself? Top 5?
Being active on the web is part of my passion and my business, so I try and use as many sites / services as I can. Right now I’m moderately active on maybe 20. I’m most active on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter & (COLOURlovers obviously 
I am a content consumer, but less active on a publishing side on Flickr, YouTube & Yelp.
#5: I noticed I can easily use this service to see if my common username profile is already taken (which on Flickr it is). Does Friendcall.me still help me when things are just going to be fractured anyway? Don’t most people have to deal with 3-5 different logins as it stands?
Yes. When you claim your aggregated profile page, ie www.FriendsCall.Me/dariusmonsef you can change the usernames that deviate from your most common. My example of that would be Delicious… for some reason I didn’t get dariusmonsef which I use everywhere else.
#6: Can to talk about the community aspect of this platform? Can I learn from or share with others?
The phase we’re in right now, we’re mostly supporting external communities. The web is exploding with social features. Almost every new site / service has social networking and profiles features and this gets harder and harder to keep well connected. When a user claims their FriendsCall.Me profile they can share that link on any one of the communities they participate in, opening up that social network to all the others that they participate in. A secondary usefulness of what FriendsCall.Me offers is the discovery of new and interesting sites that match a users interests. For example if you’re really into photography and we add a new photo related site, we can send you a notification about the site and give you the opportunity to grab your name before somebody else does.
#7: So, I found 47 sites where my preferred username is available. What now?
Unfortunately now you need to go and register at each one of those sites individually. We plan to turn the ability to have a 1-click registration feature built right into our site in the coming weeks. We’ll be launching this feature with some of our partner sites, but hope to expand it to all the sites listed on FriendsCall.Me in the not so distant future. Once you’re registered with us and have filled our your basic profile, we can then step through the process on the back end with each of those sites you want to register at. You’ll still need to click a button to register and acknowledge each site’s terms of use and privacy policy, but we’re hoping this is the first step in providing some much needed organization around the fragmenting world of social profiles.
#8: Anything else you want to say about Friendscall.me?
A question a lot of people have asked us since launching FriendsCall.Me is, Why don’t you include Facebook? Unfortunately a lot of really great sites don’t support vanity urls (web addresses that include a username as the unique identifier rather than a jumble of numbers). Facebook offers vanity urls for some celebrities, but a lot of other great sites like Yelp don’t offer vanity urls at all. This makes it really hard to remember a friend’s url and not so easy for us to tie those sites into our current service. But as an extension of our current service, in the near future we will be launching a new feature that will provide “vanity urls for the entire social web.” Facebook might not give you a vanity url, but we will.
We’re big fans of Curious Office and your projects. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share with you what we’re working on.
Cheers,
+D
Darius A Monsef IV
Executive Editor | www.COLOURlovers.com
Profile Wrangler | www.FriendsCall.Me
Internet Astronaut | www.InternetAstronauts.com
Community Organizer | www.Photosynth.com
Maybe Inkd will be an award winner?
I have the honor of being a panelist/judge for the upcoming Seattle 2.0 Awards event on May 7!
The Seattle 2.0 Awards recognizes the amazing accomplishments of the best of over 300 Seattle area technology startups (despite the challenging economy), and the exceptional people who are behind their heroic efforts. They will single out the very best of the best, as judged by the people who knows best: their peers in the startup community. Maybe even Inkd will win something! Attend the awards ceremony on May 7 if you can make it to Seattle!
Here are the categories!
Best Startup
Best Boot-strapped Startup
Best Startup CEO
Best Startup Technologist
Best Venture Capitalist
Best Angel Investor
Best Startup Product Designer
Best Service Provider to Startups
Best Blog from/about Startup
Best Social Event for Startups
Curious about the browser stats for our new company Inkd.com?
The results are amazing.
Internet Explorer is just 11%!
Check out the rest of the browser stats for Inkd.com here.
Thanks to Seattle Times for mentioning the Inkd launch!
Thanks to TechFlash for mentioning Inkd launch today!
John Cook was kind enough to make mention of our latest company Inkd on TechFlash today!
Inkd.com has launched today!
The latest project from Curious Office and Second Avenue Partners launches today! Inkd is the World’s First Market for Original Print Design. Get printing templates such as brochures and business cards for free. Thanks to everyone on the Inkd team for their hard work over the last several months! Download free brochure templates, newsletters, flyers, business cards, letterhead templates and more!
Download free brochure template
Download free letterhead template
Download free business card template
Here’s a nice write-up from TechCrunch.
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Curious Office Companies
Inkd
Inkd is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We are developing the World's First Market for Original Print Design.
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CafePress
Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. -
Imagekind
Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists. -
SEOmoz.org
Curious Office invested in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners in 2007. SEOmoz serves as one of the largest online hubs for search marketers worldwide by providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help make every SEO the best they can be. -
Shelfari
Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers -
Fanzter
Fanzter is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut and are the creators of the wildly popular celebrity style and entertainment platform Coolspotters.com, which launched in May 2008. Fanzter secured $2 Million In Series B Funding Led By Steamboat Ventures in March 2009. -
Wishpot
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netConcepts
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Rouxbe
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RocketVox
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FeedDigest
