This week we speak with Dror Ceder, CEO of Wibiya, an application marketplace for web publishers. He tells us how his current business developed out of a vertical search engine and how Wibiya  came to be used by 2,000 bloggers with two months of beta-launch.

How would you describe what Wibiya does?

Wibiya is an application marketplace for web publishers to easily integrate apps and services with just a few clicks without any knowledge of coding. Today, one of the most popular tools is the Wibiya bar. Our main goal is to enable publishers/websites to focus on what they do best. For all the other things for your site, such as sharing your content and adding social media tools, come to Wibiya. If you’re a content site, write good content. If you’re a small business, create good leads. Leave you website’s needs to us.

How did you come up with the idea?

Our first company was Joongel which was a type of vertical search engine. But ultimately we decided that we don’t want to be in the search engine market because it was already oversaturated.  So we decided to offer publishers a search option within their websites where they could select the search engine of their choice. We launched that aspect in September 2008.  After 400 pitches, publishers were all saying the same thing – they wanted to easily add functionalities to their websites like games, viewing posts, or integrating Twitter.  And at that moment we shifted. Until Wibiya, there was no marketplace for publishers to integrate all functionalities into their site.

How long did it take you to get the business off the ground?

We did early concept testing with bloggers who were the most interested in our solutions.  We believed bloggers would also offer the viral component to Wibiya because bloggers like to discuss new things that they’re trying out.  In June 2009 we launched a private beta with the hope of getting 50 bloggers. After two months, we had 2,000 bloggers. In January 2010 we launched our platform to the public.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up the company?

The rollercoaster ride that is launching a startup. One day things are great, and the next day you don’t know what’s going to happen. You need to stay very up-to-date with the market.  Also, educating the market is difficult. How do you convince publishers they need to add something new to their site? While the product speaks for itself, it still had to be made very easy to use for the publisher.

What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business?

We love using Zen Desk as our white label support service. Balsamiq is perfect for wire frames, Get Satisfaction is great for user feedback and ClickTale for analytics.

Can you tell our readers a bit about your business model?

We offer a broad range of options such as a premium a app store model where premium apps are offered on a monthly subscription basis. There is also an option for revenue sharing on ads.

What has been your biggest success?

With Conduit’s acquisition of Wibiya in May we are growing the company and taking it to next level.  Wibiya includes the traction of 180,000 websites and 200 million unique monthly users which we were able to reach without spending a dime on marketing. It’s all been viral through social media and websites. We believe that when you create a good product, the product will market itself. And that’s the approach we’re offering to our publishers; excel at what you do and Conduit’s offerings will provide you with all the tools necessary to engage your users.

How are you promoting Wibiya?

Through constant Twitter and Facebook activity. From day one, anyone who mentioned Wibiya on Twitter or other channels received a personal response and to this day we always stay in touch.  We also have a ‘Powered by Wibiya’ on the bars, which publishers can remove.

What advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

First, I would say if you are creating a web product, get it out into the market within three months. Features are your enemy; don’t pay too much attention to them. Rather focus on one or two things that you know you’ll do best. Use third party tools at the beginning. They’re cheap, you can scale with them, and they don’t demand a lot of resources on your end. Don’t read too much technology news. Sure, following the news is important in order to keep you informed and to inspire you, but just don’t get too caught up in it. And finally, don’t look too much at your competitors and it can bring negative vibes.

Where do you hope your business will be in the next five years?

We want Wibiya’s impact on the web to be even greater and for Conduit to become the source for web publishers when it comes to user engagement on multiple levels. Providing web publishers of all sizes with solutions to enhance engagement with their users is the essence of Wibiya and Conduit’s shared vision for the future. Ultimately when publishers use a CMS and create their website, we want the next stop for their website to naturally be Wibiya for a social bar on their website, Conduit for their community toolbar and browser apps, and Conduit Mobile for a native mobile app.

This week we speak with Marius Stanciu about his new online image editor, Picozu, that he developed from scratch. He tells us the challenges of moving his product on from the beta stage and his hopes for the future.

How would you describe what Picozu does?

Picozu is an online image editor built in the latest web technology namely HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. It enables the users to edit and retouch their photos, create drawings as well as other various functions (fractal generation and visualisation, demotivator creations, colour palette generation and more) and share images with your friends through social apps like Facebook and Twitter.

How did you come up with the idea?

I was playing with HTML5 and discovered its amazing features such as graphic capabilities through canvas, offline storage and web workers, and I thought building an application with them will be a great idea. One of my friends embraced the idea and decided to help. We’ve put our heads together and come up with a front-end for the edited images. After a week of planning we had a pretty solid idea of what we were about to make by adding social features and an image browser to the already developed editor.

How long did it take you to get Picozu off the ground?

Well about two months ago we had just an idea, now it’s materialized into a website and an editor. We’ve opted for the ‘just start the work and share it to the world at fast as possible’ way to do it. We realize that there is yet plenty of work to be done, but we’re not afraid of criticism, we actually love it when someone takes the time to write to us, and we can assure them that every line they write is taken into consideration. The feedback we received from our users during those two weeks of beta testing was very positive.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up the company?

Every aspect of a start-up has challenges: getting started, convincing myself and my friends that this is a good opportunity, the development period and having to find an equilibrium between various features I could add to the editor and the short amount of time I had to get it done. Now it’s time for the beta test period, when we need to solve various problems and bugs on a daily basis, as soon as they get reported. We’re not afraid of the new and we enjoy every step we make.

What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business? Why?

Being a developer has some advantages, I have created most of the tools and applications, so for me the most useful tool is my IDE, I could not work without Oracle NetBeans . We’re using internally-developed applications for issue tracking, project management, newsletter system, content management and so on.

How are you different to your main competitors?

Most of the other web based online editor technologies are based on Adobe Flash but we decided not to use it and go for a pure HTML5 implementation that would keep the door open for mobile users (phone, tablets, graphic pads, etc). That was a bold step because there is a wide range of problems we need to surpass to make this feasible. I will not get into technical details but those who know programming would know the challenges of working with canvas.

What has been your biggest success?

Our biggest success would be getting out of the beta. We’re not there yet but we’re pretty confident that once we complete our current project milestone Picozu can be considered stable.  Other than that we can call a success the positive feedback and the amount of visitors we received so far. It motivates us to continue our work and improve our application.

How have you funded your start-up and how hard was it to get financial backing?

For the current time we’re self-funded but we do hope that as Picozu becomes more popular we’ll get some of the big players in the market to see it as a major opportunity and invest.

What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

I’d advise them to stop planning and dreaming and get the thing done. There are so many great, wonderful, creative startup ideas out there and the internet has enough space for every single one of them.  If you have the skills or the money to do it, do not hesitate, even if you don’t succeed to make your idea a killer startup, it will be a great ride, you will gain experience and friends and it will boost your creativity and challenge your mind.

This week we speak with Miles McEathron, the co-founder of WWHIM, a travel website that allows you to find a destination with the weather you desire. He tells us how he has used freelance web developers to bring his idea to life and his tips for other start-ups.

How would you describe what WWHIM does?

WWHIM (pronounced whim) is an informative website that provides weather information within an interactive and easy interface. Visitors can sort weather forecasts within a user defined radius from hot to cold or filter weather conditions to only see the weather they desire. When a destination is selected, useful links to travel planning sites are provided.  WWHIM also provides weather notifications for users who wish to be notified when their favourite location reaches a user-defined temperature. WWHIM caters to a variety of travel enthusiasts including couples, families, the retired RV’ers and college students.

How did you come up with the idea?

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States we are used to rainy weather.  As Memorial weekend approached in May of 2011, we reflected on how rain tends to dampen the fun of the three day holiday weekend.  In order to find nice weather, we figured the best bet would be to head out of town.  Searching the internet for a location within driving distance where the weather would be nice proved unsuccessful and we discovered first-hand the need for a website that could do a reverse weather search.

How long did it take you to get the business off the ground?

We decided to present the project to freelancer.com in order to find a suitable partner for the programming.  An alpha version of the website was live and functional approximately one month after hiring our programmer.  With several design upgrades, improving the user interface of the filtering function and adding the ‘notification capability’, the beta version went live a little over four months after the idea.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up the company?

The most difficult aspect of setting up the company has been finding time to work on WWHIM.  The three of us work full time jobs, and all WWHIM work is completed after our day jobs.  Many late nights and long weekends have been spent working on the company, but we have found the work extremely rewarding.

What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business? Why?

The freelancer.com website has been vital to the development and improvement of our website.  After evaluating several programmers’ applications to partner with us on this project, we selected an extremely knowledgeable resource in Bulgaria.  Our partner has been very innovative on this project, provided valuable insight and is always extremely responsive and executes deliverables quickly.

How are you different to your main competitors?

What sets WWHIM apart from other weather websites is the interactive searching and filtering capabilities.  Competitors only allow a user to search the weather at a desired location, where WWHIM takes the approach in reverse – searching for a location with a desired weather.  Users can sort, refine and filter their weather search in several ways, allowing for a fresh approach to travel planning – letting the weather forecast be the guide.

Can you tell our readers a bit about your business model?

WWHIM was developed to meet a need of the travel marketplace – and our goal is to stay connected to the users to provide the most easy-to-use tool to meet this need.  Our success relies on staying in close contact with the visitors to WWHIM and transforming the site to become indispensable in their lives.  The project has been completely self-funded and we now are looking to connect with affiliate programs and start an advertising and marketing plan for WWHIM.  Feel free to contact us if you are interested in partnering opportunities at WWHIM.  contactus@wwhim.com

What has been your biggest success?

WWHIM was built completely through email correspondences with our web developer located in Bulgaria.  There has not yet been a meeting or telephone conversation with our colleague and a remarkable working relationship has been established.  The limited amount of time and level of communication required to execute the successful and complicated WWHIM website is a notable achievement.

How important a role has social media played in promoting WWHIM?

The launch of WWHIM was announced through Twitter and Facebook, and both social networks have been used to promote the website from the beginning.  Currently, Posterous is used to consolidate and distribute social media messages.  Contrary to what is popularly posted on the web we do not think social media has provided a drastic impact to the website, but we continue to use these resources as they provide us with an additional presence on the web.

What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

For all considering setting up a start-up, it’s important to not worry about doing everything “right” from the beginning.  Define milestones for the project and start small with a defined timeline for the next steps. It’s important to have a final end-state for the company written on paper, along with a strategy for getting from the beginning to the end.  It’s also important to keep in mind each project will be unique!  There is no right way and you will learn new things along the way that you can always go back and work on.

Where do you hope to have the business in the next five years? 

In five years, we hope WWHIM will be well known in the travel community as the source for finding the ideal weather for a weekend vacation.  We picture a day when the answer to ‘what are you doing this weekend?’ will be ‘I’m going to WWHIM it!’

This week we speak with Matt Wickstrand, founder of Kareer.me, an online platform to create personalised and sophisticated resumes. He tells us why he decided to learn to develop the technical side of his business himself and the applications he has found most useful along the way.

How would you describe your business?

Kareer.me is a service to help job seekers get more interviews and increase their chances of getting hired. While most job sites are optimized for employers and recruiters, Kareer.me is focused on helping job seekers; something that will always remain our focus. We’re a small team striving to make an impact in the way people find jobs.

How did you come up with the idea?

After hitting the wall on a previous startup, I was faced with two options; look for a job, or start another company. I considered both for a period of time, but was really frustrated at the lack of options that I had to create a professional online resume that allowed me to display myself in a more personal fashion. I’m not a great writer, but I knew that I had a compelling story to tell recruiters and employers through video and work samples. Kareer.me was born out of personal frustration and a burning desire to start another company. It wasn’t long before I was spending 80% of my time developing a plan and a vision for Kareer.me and 20% on my job search.

How long did it take you to get Kareer off the ground?

That’s an interesting story. While the idea for Kareer.me came to me in March 2011, I was actually faced with a larger obstacle at the time that really prevented me from a full-blown pursuit of the development of the site. I wasn’t a developer and I didn’t have enough capital left after the previous startup to continue to outsource the development effort. I was quickly forced into a single option: to become my own tech co-founder. I spent about six weeks learning to develop using different development frameworks and I was able to build a rough draft of Kareer.me during that time. I later re-built the site from scratch using all the knowledge I had acquired the first time around. I would estimate the build time to have taken ten weeks before I opened the site up for private beta.

What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business? Why?

I could honestly go on for days about the tools that have helped me grow and develop Kareer.me to this point. I’ll mention a few that have been indispensable as tools or resources for any tech founder:
Stackoverflow.com – If you’re a developer, then you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, then this is a great place to start searching for answers to your technical questions.
Google – Google, you are awesome. Google makes running your small business super easy with its Google for business accounts. And it’s free. Host you email and get access to docs, spreadsheets, and everything else you need; all hosted in the cloud.
Rackspace.com – An affordable cloud serves. The near-zero overhead business is now a reality with services like Rackspace which also allows you to scale your site with ease.
ThisWeekInStartups.com – Hosted by Santa Monica entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis, this site hosts hundreds of interviews with high profile tech entrepreneurs. It gets you as close to a free MBA in tech startups as you’re going to get and is an awesome resource.
NetTuts.com – Tons of great tutorials for web development. If you’re interested in learning to develop your own site, start here.
There are a lot of other great paid resources, but these recommendations will give you a great start.

Can you tell our readers a bit about your business model?

Kareer.me works a bit different from other online resume services. In its simplest form, Kareer.me allows job seekers to create personalized web resumes for each job that they apply to. Each online resume is given a unique URL that you can share via email, online application form, twitter, linkedin, facebook, job boards, etc. Since each resume is unique, you’ll get feedback when your resume has been viewed by its intended recipient, so that you’ll know exactly when to follow up for an interview. Job seekers are given an opportunity to try the service and build and share three resumes completely free, and can upgrade their plan to create more resumes at a nominal monthly fee. Eventually, this service cost may be subsidized by other revenue streams, but I prefer to keep advertising to a minimum.

What is your growth strategy?

Kareer.me is a great fit for candidates with little-to-no work history and I think students are a prime example of this. While graduating, college-level students may not have a lot of work history but they have spent a lot of effort writing papers, researching, and working on various other projects. Since Kareer.me allows job seekers to show their personality and work portfolio, we’re focusing on developing and growing in this target market.

How are you promoting your company?

While it would be nice to throw a lot of money at SEM or other forms of paid advertising, it’s really not in the cards for a lot of new startups. Promotion for Kareer.me is a combination of both offline and online strategies. We’ve started conversation with several university career services centres to offer special services to their students and have worked diligently to get placement in several online blogs. Both have been great strategies, but it’s still too early to tell which method is best.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up your business?

Learning to develop the site myself has definitely been one of the largest challenges, but also one of the most rewarding. I would say for any business, going-to-market is generally one of the most difficult challenges. Startups have a limited amount of time they can distribute across business functions and it’s difficult to track and understand where you are getting the most value.

What have you learned along the way?

For any new entrepreneur it’s important to understand one thing: everything takes at least three times longer than you think! Even if you can build the product quickly, there is still a learning curve to understand your customers and adjust your product to fulfil their needs. I recommend having at least a year of runway, but 18 months is ideal. Always keep an eye on your market and the subtle trends that are occurring so that you can be the first to capitalize.

What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

For me, it’s been extremely important to have a deep technical understanding of the product.  I wouldn’t recommend building a tech company without either having a technical co-founder or being able to develop yourself.  I’ve done both and having the ability to develop the site within your team makes decision making and development much faster. 

Nirav Tolia talks to use this week about Nextdoor, the online social network for local neighbourhoods, that he co-founded. He tells us how he found a niche in the crowded world of social networking and how its future business model won’t effect the user experience.

How would you describe your business?

Nextdoor is a free online platform that enables neighbours to create private social networks for their neighbourhood. Using Nextdoor, neighbours can communicate with one another to build stronger and safer neighbourhoods. We believe that the neighbourhood is one of the most important and useful communities in a person’s life. We believe that when neighbours start talking, good things happen. Our mission is to bring back a sense of community to the neighbourhood.

Neighbours use Nextdoor to: track down trustworthy babysitters, plumbers, and dentists; get the word out about break-ins and other safety concerns; organize neighbourhood garage sales, BBQs, and block parties; ask for assistance in finding lost pets and missing packages; create emergency response plans to prepare for crisis situations

How did you come up with the idea?

Nextdoor was founded by a group of experienced technology executives whose careers have been focused on building strong online communities. These days, almost everyone uses social networks. There are social networks specifically designed for our friends and family (Facebook), for our business contacts (LinkedIn), and for those with similar interests (Twitter). But there is no social network specifically designed for the neighbourhood, one of the most important communities in each of our lives. There are so many ways our neighbours can help us, but many of us don’t know our neighbours, or how to contact them. Nextdoor was created to change that.

How long did it take you to get Nextdoor.com off the ground?

Nextdoor was created and conceived of in the summer of 2010 and our first pilot neighbourhood was created in October 2010 in Menlo Park, CA. We now have over 440 neighbourhoods in 40 states.

What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business?

We work almost entirely with open-source tools such as Python, Django, and PostgreSQL. Our production service runs entirely in the cloud using Amazon Web Services.  For day-to-day productivity, we use the full suite of Google Apps because they are fast, easy-to-use, and make it possible for our team to work from any computer anywhere in the world. We are big believers in user-driven software design and use Usertesting.com and Survey Monkey to understand our user base and collect feedback from people across the country.

Can you tell our readers a bit about your business model?

Nextdoor will always be free for users and neighbourhoods. We will never sell personal information or bombard users with banners or pop-ups. Our business model will focus on working with local businesses to provide special offers to neighbours. This will enable neighbours to both support their local businesses and save money. Like most successful consumer internet companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter), we will not begin revenue efforts until we have perfected our user experience.

What is your growth strategy?

We have experienced a tremendous response to our nationwide launch and expect to continue to grow by word-of-mouth and member referral.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up your business?

The most difficult aspect of any business is building a great team. Specific to Nextdoor, one of our biggest challenges is the “chicken-and-egg” problem: how do we convince neighbours to adopt Nextdoor for their neighborhoods without being able to use it first. Creating an introduction video and descriptive product tour have helped us overcome this obstacle.

What have you learned along the way?

Our greatest learning is to always stay focused on the user. We spent over a year working closely with hundreds of neighbourhoods across the country to create a platform specifically designed to make neighbours feel comfortable sharing information with one another. As we learned from our launch, when you create a product that people find useful in their everyday lives, the demand and positive response comes organically.

What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

Surround yourself with great people. Build something that people really want. Enjoy the journey – entrepreneurship is all about experiencing the highest of highs and the lowest of lows – and learning and improving all along.

This week we speak to Ivo Oltmans, co-founder of Typekids, an online touch typing course for children.  He tells us the importance of testing every aspect of a new business and the psychological stresses of being an entrepreneur.

How would you describe your business?

Few people ever stop to realize that we do almost all our writing on a keyboard. This is especially true for children, because computers are increasingly used at schools. By learning touch typing children can increase their writing speed by up to five times. In addition, adopting a correct body posture can prevent stress related injuries such as RSI.

Our business is a touch typing course for children. The course is completely online so that kids can learn without having to leave the house. We added two elements to keep children engaged throughout the course. They will join a pirate captain on an adventure that unfolds as the course progresses. At the end of each lesson students also get to play a game that is fun and at the same time reinforces the skills learnt.

The use of the latest technologies guarantees an optimal learning experience in the shortest amount of time. Error patterns are automatically detected and exercises are adapted accordingly for each student. If a student frequently mixes, for instance, the letters J and K more exercises with these letters are given.

How did you come up with the idea?

David Temes, one of the two TypeKids founders, is a programmer and noticed that most of his colleagues typed rather slowly despite spending their days behind a computer. By discussing it with me, who would later be his co-founder, we reached the conclusion that many people would benefit from learning touch typing and that this is especially true for children.

How long did it take you to get TypeKids off the ground?

It took us one year to develop the course.

What applications or tools do you find most useful for your business? Why?

We used Unbounce which is a platform that allowed us to easily create different versions of the same page and test them against each other to find-out which one converts better. We’ve also used Google analytics to track website traffic statistics and Highrise which is a CRM system that allows us to manage our contacts and keep track of interactions.

Can you tell our readers a bit about your business model?

We sell to two different types of customers: individual users and schools. We offer a different licensing model for both groups. Individual users pay a monthly subscription. Schools can buy a site license that is renewed annually.

How are you promoting your service?

At the moment we do all promotion through search engine marketing. We will soon launch some new initiatives to reach more potential customers.

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up your business?

There were two difficult aspects, a technical and psychological one.  On the technical side we had to start from scratch with everything: functional and graphic design, programming, the course structure, all of which was technically challenging.

Another factor was the psychological one. It is tough spending a year working on a product that we did not know for sure was going to sell. Other entrepreneurs warned us in advance that it would be a rollercoaster ride, but the only way to really find out is to experience it yourself.

What have you learned along the way?

We learned so many things we could write a book about it. We learned new skills such as online marketing, PR, SEO and many others. We also learned about the fear, uncertainty and doubt as to whether you are doing the right thing. Most importantly, we found out what an incredibly rewarding feeling it is to get the first clients!

What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

A/B test everything you can think of, measure the impact and improve. You never know in advance what is going to work.

Where do you see the business in five years’ time?

In five years’ time TypeKids will be localized to eight other languages and hope it will be the product of choice for any parent that wants their kids to learn one of the most basic and overlooked computing skills.