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| Philip Wilkinson on Social Shopping and Web 2.0 start-ups | ||||
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In this issue: 1. Philip Wilkinson on Social Shopping and Web 2.0 start-ups 2. The Watercooler ... what we've been writing about this week 3. JOBS: Internet and e-commerce jobs 4. Top Forum Post: Google Analytics 5. Top Forum Post: Microsoft adCenter demographic predictor |
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| 1. Philip Wilkinson on Social Shopping and Web 2.0 start-ups | ||||||
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Philip Wilkinson is co-founder of Crowdstorm, an online social shopping website that is scaling up for a public beta launch this summer. Philip is best known as a founder first of Shopgenie in December 1998 and later of internet heavyweight Kelkoo UK (now part of Yahoo!). He has also founded Genie Group, which has a range of vertical comparison search sites covering areas such as broadband, loans, credit cards and poker. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Tell us about your latest venture Crowdstorm is a new innovation in online social shopping that works out the buzz around products to show what everyone is talking about and helps you find what to buy. Users can directly add and edit products in the system, recommend them with a simple click, comment on them, blog them, send to friends, and even add to wishlists. All this adds up to a community-driven product database of buzz! Friends can see all the products you have recommended or interacted on, and receive alerts when things are updated. Crowdstorm is scaling up for a public beta launch some time in July and anyone can sign up to keep informed of the progress by visiting www.crowdstorm.com. We’ve also been keeping regular blog entries at http://crowdstorm.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Sounds very ‘Web 2.0’. What do you understand by this ubiquitous term? The web has been evolving this way for many years now and is a combination of many things finally falling into place. I contributed to a Wikipedia article on it some time ago and came up with the following market drivers of a web 2.0 world: * Broadband has become mainstream and widespread, resulting in an increased usage of the internet for even small tasks on different devices. So now it is all about two-way interaction and the ability to express your identity online. The fact that this evolution has been given a name helps to highlight the changes that have taken place but at the same time it has resulted in too many businesses being launched around the hype and creating "cool technical features" rather than sustainable and useful products. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. What do you think of attempts by more well known online brands to build up their user generated content and social elements, such as efforts by MSN (Windows Live Shopping) and Yahoo! Shopping. They seem quite Web 2.0? Not really as they still focus very much on price comparison and they still want you to search in that way. Choose a category, choose a brand, select a price range - now look at these products. Adding a bit of Ajax, a shareable wishlist, and some tags do not make a full social shopping experience. Their focus is to get customers into their site, quickly narrow down their choices, and then push them to a merchant where they can get a commission kick-back from the transaction. Also, these sites still use 5-star ratings of products and big reviews which don't really mean anything any more. I remember discussing this in detail in your Shopping Comparison Engines Buyer’s Guide. I had a good example of this last night where I opened up a consumer electronics magazine to look for a set of surround sound speakers and saw a round-up of 6 or 7 systems all that had been rated as "five star". What use is that to me? There still remains no way to tell which one to get. I'd much rather know which one was the most buzzy or talked about, and if any of my friends or other trusted users had any experiences about one of them and would recommend it to me. I'm sure MSN and Yahoo will evolve their products over the next year but right now they are missing the point of Social Shopping which is a good thing for us! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Did the idea of Crowdstorm come to you in a flash of inspiration or was it a gradual process? It has been an idea I've been waiting to do for many years now but the market was not quite ready for it. With Kelkoo, I wanted to help people see where to buy a product and find the best price. After that, I always wanted to take a step back in the shopping psychology process and focus on using the power of the crowd and your friends to help you find what to buy. It’s one of those things that you see happening around you every day with interaction between individuals and you just want to improve on it and bring technology into the equation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. How long has it taken to get Crowdstorm from inception into Beta? Pretty much about six months alongside my co-founder Chris Scollo who was the ex VP Technology at Ciao. Chris had just moved to the UK at the end of last year and was looking for new ventures and entrepreneurs to get involved with. He found my details, set up a lunch meeting. I told him my idea and the rest, as they say, is history. In that time, we have been building the core technology behind the site, fleshing out the site design and usability, and building the core of the business in the background in terms of structure. Our next stage is to get ready for a beta launch and let everyone loose on our concept.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. Was it difficult to get people involved during the Alpha stage, to help you with testing? Yes! Everyone is busy with their own jobs or ventures and often find very little time to help you with yours. Generally we got some great feedback from a few key individuals but some people visited it once and didn't bother coming back again, saying they would rather wait until there was more content on the site! I think that unless you actually pay people to test your site then this stage will remain difficult. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. Can you explain your set-up, in terms of developers / designers? In-house or outsourced? Chris does all the core back-end PHP development and has been for the last few months. We've got a set of Polish developers who are amazing in their ability and energy. In terms of the design, we outsourced this to an individual who has his own agency at Mutado and he did an amazing job on creating a clean, fresh web 2.0 feel to the site that is completely different to other sites out there right now. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. How structured were you in terms of project management and incorporating design and usability into the process? To be honest, I find project management very dull and often a waste of time when you are a small company. Everyone knows what they need to do and that everything is high priority and needs to be done as quickly as possible, so all you really need is one or two key dates that need to be hit. We always sit down first to outline the requirements, then meet up regularly to discuss progress and answer any problems. This allows us to move quickly and not get bogged down with charts and spreadsheets. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think we would have brought on some extra developers early on to speed up the technical side of things although, saying that, this may have slowed us down as we would have had to spend time on co-ordination and team building instead of knuckling down to creating the core elements of the site. I'd always like the marketing side of things to progress faster but it does take time to build awareness and share the vision and benefits of a new venture such as Crowdstorm. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The main thing I've learnt from the past is that you need to surround yourself with other people who are better at the job than you are! I'm a great fan of outsourcing work that you can't do as well yourself or don't have the resources for really focus on those tasks, and also networking and getting advice and help wherever you can. In the past, I tended to go off and do most things myself but you soon realise how inefficient it is to do that. An entrepreneur’s skills are always those of a general all-rounder, visionary, team builder and resource "transferrer" - so I have no qualms in getting a team of experienced specialists on board to focus on areas such as marketing and sales / biz development. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11. Can you explain the business model for Crowdstorm, or do you worry about that later when you’ve reached a certain critical mass? I'm a firm believer in making sure you establish multiple potential revenue streams from day one, even if you will get very little money through them in the early days. We aim to make money through commission referrals once someone has finally decided they want to buy something and then send that highly qualified customer through to a price comparison engine, auction site, merchant, or wherever they want to go. We'll also look at general advertising opportunities and look at how we can help brands to communicate more with the Crowdstorm community about their new products and features. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12. What are the five things you’ve learned during this particular start-up process? 1: European VCs are still cautious animals ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13. How do you see Crowdstorm evolving over the next year? We are really excited about the possibilities for the "power of crowds" and how finding the right product can be an element of buzz and recommendations from people you trust to influence your purchasing decision. We want to bring brands and customers together so that brands can get their message across, while customers can express their opinions and give feedback directly to the brands in question. Crowdstorm wants to act as the facilitator of this process and help everyone share and communicate in the shopping space. If 1,000 people want a particular product then we should go and arrange a special deal directly with a manufacturer or merchant. If there is a large amount of buzz being generated around bad customer service from a particular brand or product, then we want to get the brand to respond directly to those users and explain the situation. We want our active users to be invited to product launch events, try new products before they are launched to the general public, get the best deals they can, and help others understand the best products to buy. After all, shopping has always been a social experience and now it has never been so easy to connect people and brands in such large numbers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Philip Wilkinson talked to Linus Gregoriadis. (linus@e-consultancy.com). |
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| 2. The Watercooler ... what we've been writing about this week | ||||||
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Our second week of blogging ...
Web 2.0 and customer relationships (E-consultancy) |
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| 4. Top Forum Post: Google Analytics | ||||||
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Jon Bovard joins the debate on the pros and cons of Google Analytics
View Forum Message » |
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| 5. Top Forum Post: Microsoft adCenter demographic predictor | ||||||
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Online marketing guru Dave Chaffey tries out Microsoft's paid search analysis tools for adCenter. He wants to know if anyone out there has done any extensive testing.
View Forum Message » |
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