« Interview with Kindley Walsh-Lawlor, Senior Director of Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs with Gap Inc. | Main | Interview with James Sheppard, President of Vetrazzo »
Interview with Dan Gill, CEO and Co-Founder of Huddler
“Giving passionate, knowledgeable people a platform and a voice”
Combine people, products, and passion… mix in user-generated content, product reviews and discussions… and you have an ambitious web site called Huddler, that aims to create a “social commerce” community.
In this interview, “chief Huddler” Dan Gill shares with us how he started the business and his vision for the growth of their Green Home Huddle, which focuses on products and content connected to sustainability. Hear the inside business scoop on lessons they’ve learned along the way, how their business is funded, and how they engage their community.
- Huddler’s unique efforts to build communities to provide a more informed and social shopping experience
- How Huddler develops partnerships to get new green products in consumers’ hands and boost site activity
- How Huddler monetizes traffic to its site
- Lesson learned: The “release early, release often” approach allows users to guide web site development
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amie with Green Business Innovators and I am here with Dan Gill, CEO of Huddler.com. Do you want to introduce yourself quickly?
DAN GILL: Hi everyone out there in the green blogosphere world. This is Dan Gill. I’m the co-founder and CEO of a site called Huddler.com. I guess most specifically we’ll be talking about our site, GreenHome.Huddler.com, which you can find a link to directly from Huddler.com and we’ll talk all about it and tell you a little bit about what we’re up to.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Great. So do you want to tell us a little bit about Huddler.com and what you do here?
DAN GILL: Sure, sure. Huddler was actually, the concept that my brother… My oldest brother and I founded Huddler together. And the impetus for Huddler comes from “old school” discussion forums. Some people are really familiar with them, some people are not, but they’re pretty well unchanged from the mid-90s. So if you’ve ever seen the discussion forum at some point where someone can post a question and anyone can come back and respond and a conversation begins in a threaded fashion. There are some wildly popular sites out there that are great resources for people. And they’re always very topical.
The sites that we used the most, they are sites focused on cell phones and mobile technology, and they are sites focused on home theater equipment and really, really deep diving into those topics because they are specific to a given interest. The really knowledgeable, passionate people, they gravitate towards those sites. But from a technology perspective they’re very, very broken from a content creation perspective and from a content distribution perspective. So the original impetus for Huddler was, we wanted to build a platform that really empowers those knowledgeable, passionate people who have all this knowledge and they want to share and they want to interact with other like-minded people, but provide a much better interface, so that we can distribute that content and make it broadly available. Because if you have ever seen a discussion forum before, my mom couldn’t use it if her life depended on it, and that’s not to say there’s not information that would be really valuable to her in there, but the interface is just really hard to use.
So we decided to focus on product oriented discussion forums because that’s where a lot of this kind of, not only– what are good products to use– but how do you better use the products that you already own? That kind of information gets really, really varied, and so we decided to really focus on products, and we built these tools. We built customer discussion forums and integrated it with Wiki functionality and product reviews and image hosting and video hosting. And as I said, all these different tools to empower really knowledgeable, passionate people to communicate with one another. But then we built a secondary layer to kind of abstract out this great content and make it broadly available. So that’s the really broad verbose introduction to what Huddler is broadly.
The reason that we’re talking today is we call each of these sites huddles, right? Each one is a huddle under Huddler.com because each one is specific to an interest. Like I said, that’s what makes the discussion forums go, is they’re very specific and so they attract knowledgeable people. And we started off with green and sustainability because it was sort of opportunity meets interest.
I’ve had a passion and a curiosity for sustainability. I really liked all the high-tech stuff, all the renewable energy technologies that are getting a lot of funding and attention these days, all the transportation technologies are really compelling to me and then also all the waste management, and renewed, huge focus on recycling. That was all of interest to me, and just the time when we were launching Huddler was also the time when it’s become so, so, so hip to be green. And so many products flooding into the market and so we thought well if we can build a community of really knowledgeable, passionate people who know about all this stuff and we know a little bit about it, then we could be a really invaluable resource for people. So GreenHome.Huddler.com came out of that, and we’ve got products from solar panels and Tesla Roadster, all the way down to toothpaste and yogurt. Kind of product reviews and things to watch out for, ingredients to watch out for, all user-generated, all very anecdotal-type content.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So what is your long-term vision for Huddler.com and for the Green Home Huddle in particular?
DAN GILL: It’s a bit in flux at the moment because the original vision was always build out a network of twenty-five to thirty huddles, and there are a lot of topics that make sense, so right now we experimented. We did Green Home and that takes the majority of our resources. On the side we’ve launched a mobile focus huddles with cell phones and software and things like that, just to again test the flexibility of our platform. But we could see camping and mountain biking and cycling and skiing and snowboarding and parenting, all of these sort of different topics out there that are very product intensive and to have a peer resource who really knows what they’re talking about would be invaluable to be able to communicate so many products in the market, we can’t all keep track of all of them, but each of us has an individual passion that maybe we know more about than all the other things.
So we thought, we’ll expand into 25 or 30 huddles, cover many, many markets and what we found is that we’re really enjoying green. There’s a huge opportunity there and inside of green are ten sub-categories. So green transportation, green parenting, green travel, green food, green lifestyle, staying away from products altogether and just talking about lifestyle changes that you can make, our software is very conducive to that. So there is a strong desire from us to continue to build inside of sustainability because there’s a lot of value that we can provide. I think we will continue to push there, but the grand vision that we founded on was to go to 25 to thirty 30 of all different markets and we’re in flux right sort of determining how best to use our very limited resources to provide the most value.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So how successful has the company been and how do you measure success in this sort of company?
DAN GILL: Right, well don’t ever let anyone tell you that building something from nothing is easy, because it is most assuredly not. It was March 2007 that my brother and I drove cross-country together and I had my laptop and we talked through our original plans, so it hasn’t been all that long. I would say it has been a success from a few metrics, but we have miles to go from a few others. It’s been a success in that we’ve built a fantastic team. We have six of us now, brilliant, brilliant wonderful people. We have a site that I think we can all be very, very proud of. We’ve been successful at engaging with investors and getting some interests in the company to move us forward. So we’ve been successful in a few areas.
Where we still have a ways to go, our traffic is certainly moving up into the right, every month on the sites, but there’s a lot of unrealized potential. We’re certainly not as vibrant a community as we know that we can be just yet. We’re really focusing intensely our resources there to build a community of the most passionate minds in sustainability in these different areas to really come together because we built elegant software to serve that need. We still think there’s a huge amount of unrealized potential, but I would say we’re very proud of the progress that we’ve made.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: It’s a really pretty site by the way.
DAN GILL: Thank you.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: It’s hard to tell that it’s just a six-person team site.
DAN GILL: Yeah. We’ll give full credit to Peter Goleta. He is one of my brother’s closest friends and he’s our Director of User Experience is his title because we had to print business cards. But he really is kind of the connoisseur of graphic design and development for us and worked almost for free for nine months for us, just on the side of his other job, and we’re very fortunate to be able to bring him on full-time. And he’s just got such a professional look, and yeah I think the site has really come a long way. We’re very designed, development heavy and we need to kind of expand the team beyond that right now which we’re working on getting some more folks involved.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What kind of people are you looking for?
DAN GILL: Really, we’re looking for marketing and I don’t even like to use that term because it’s kind of feet on the street. We need just more people out there. We don’t want to be strictly an online company. I’m mean we’ve started engaging with a lot of the non-profits and how we can best serve their membership by giving them this platform and giving them a voice that we can distribute out this information that they all share. Because that’s what we’ve really done is, we’re a very, as I said a very, technology heavy company and a very sophisticated site, but it doesn’t matter if we’re not putting in the great content and building the community there.
I think we just need more people out there engaging and more people spreading the word about this resource that’s available. So that’s kind of what we’re looking for. I’ve been contacting the different student groups; thankfully we’re in the Bay Area so there’s half a dozen great universities around. I’m engaging some of the student groups there and just looking for, for more folks that we can bring on board to add more hours to the day because we certainly are resource constrained.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yeah. Is there a way that you’re working with these non-profits to kind of share the technology and offer up the platform to other organizations? Or how does that work?
DAN GILL: Yeah somewhat. What we’re trying to do is figure out how we can align incentives right because we built this platform that’s great for aggregating all sorts of different information, and as I said there’s Wikis, so we have articles, hundreds of them that our users have collaborated on about how to maximize fuel efficiency in a hybrid car or greening your office or all of these different things that many people have come and contributed to. Which is the beauty of Wikis, a lot of people can contribute their knowledge into one central repository. And we’ve got hundreds of these articles now, and we’ve got thousands of products in our database, and we want to give people the voice to say, What? This ones got the green label, but it’s green washing! It’s not, I mean look at the ingredient list. This is not the real deal and this is! And really help the entire market differentiate kind of real and not real and also when products aren’t the answer at all. Because it’s certainly not, you can’t buy your way into sustainability, right? There are a lot of just life changes that you need to make and so we’re trying to, we have all these resources to, to aggregate that information and distribute it out through our partners.
And so that’s what we’re trying to go to some of these non-profits and say you have this massive membership with so much collective knowledge, if we can give you a means to help aggregate some of it and package it up and distribute it, then we’d really like to do that. Let us be sort of a central meeting place and we’d be more than happy to give you the other side of that information, whatever is that we aggregate, let’s distribute it together because ultimately that’s what important is the educational aspect and distributing that information as broadly as we can. So that’s kind of the current concept for how we’d like to work with some of these nonprofits out there, but it’s still early stages and like I said we just need to find the resources to engage with all of it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Sure, sure. Can you tell us a little bit about a Wiki?
DAN GILL: A Wiki.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I think of Wikipedia, but I don’t know if that’s exactly right.
DAN GILL: That’s exactly right. That is a big problem, I think. I will toss around a lot of words and assume that people know that. Maybe they don’t and I apologize. The reason we say Wiki. Do think of Wikipedia. It just means that many people who don’t know how to code web pages can work together on one article. And so, for us, we have a lot of stand alone articles, as I said. Someone can start an article about how to maximize fuel efficiency in a hybrid car and maybe they’ll write a numbered list, and someone else can come around and say, Hey! You forgot to talk about properly inflating your tires right. And they can immediately click edit, and the whole thing becomes editable and they can add in their two cents or maybe correct spelling mistakes just like Wikipedia.
So you could call them collaborative editable articles, but that’s just kind of a mouthful. So we stick with Wikis and our site is littered with them. We are full of every product in the system is collaboratively editable. There are Wiki articles on such a myriad of topics that are collaboratively editable. You can add your two cents. You can start your own Wikis. There are discussion forums for you to come in and ask questions or just meet people and socialize with other really like-minded, passionate people. So we try to provide a wide range of mediums for interactivity and for generation of this type of content.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And how do you get people to engage?
DAN GILL: It’s interesting. Some people do it because when I said that, starting off in sustainability and green was sort of interest meets opportunity. That’s true because we looked around a lot, and there weren’t a lot of sites doing what we’re trying to do, and providing a level of sophistication and tools that we’re providing. And so we were well received quickly by a lot of the blogosphere. People thought, wow, you guys put a lot of thought into this and a lot of sophistication and this is really cool. And so they wrote about it and say hey, there’s a green product review, product research we don’t know what to call it because it’s got all kinds of different things, but it’s cool and you should check it out. And I would say that was the first jump start for us and people wanted to contribute because it was fun. There’s a lot of things that you can do with the site.
Secondarily, we’ve engaged with a lot of green brands who are just trying to rise above the noise. Different manufacturers and vendors out there with really cool products that may not have the distribution that they need, so we’ve engaged with them. They send us samples and things like that and then we get the word out however we can through sweat, online, that you should come check out the site and we run contests and giveaways to just try and put these products in people’s hands and we never promise positive reviews. But certainly people who give away free products don’t always get positive reviews if their products aren’t good.
But that’s been another way that we’ve been able to kind of generate interest is bringing some of these interesting products out to the market which has been really fun for us to get to play with $80 LED bulbs and things like that is really fun. And solar power chargers and all sorts of cleaning products and waterless carwashes and the whole gamut of sustainable products. It’s really been fun, so just trying to put those in the hands of really passionate people. That’s given us a bit of a leg up as well.
But it’s hard. It really is, there are a lot of sites out there and that’s the beauty of the internet. And the beauty of the sophistication of tools that are out there now is that everyone can contribute and everyone can have a voice online. You mentioned to me you were not a blogger until relatively recently and you’ve been able to find the tools to let your voice be heard and also to distribute it. There are a lot of different ways and sites out there. Kind of separating yourself is difficult from a technology perspective. We do a lot of work to be recognized by the search engines. It’s called natural search optimization or search engine optimization however you’d like to call it. We do a lot of work around that to insure that the all mighty Google can find our pages and direct people there. As I said, it’s really all about giving the really passionate, knowledgeable people a platform and a voice and then distributing it really intelligently and letting everyone take advantage of it. So that’s a big part of our technology too is the distribution aspect.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That kind of runs into one of my questions: What makes Huddler.com unique from all of the other sort of related similar sites?
DAN GILL: Absolutely. If I were to put us in the spectrum of sites… we are a product-focused site, product review, product research-helping you make buying decisions right. And in that spectrum I would say, on one end you have big, huge comparison-shopping engines they’re called, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Yahoo shopping, that cover every single product that you can possibly imagine and their job is to show you every single product you can imagine, and say here’s five places where you can buy it and here’s the different prices, click on one and they get paid every time someone clicks on one of those things, and that’s called comparison shopping.
They don’t really have a lot of interest in education. It’s not about helping you find the right product or telling you how to install a product once you have it, or talking to real people who own it or anything like that. It’s very superficial. So at the other end of the spectrum is what I talked about very early on, and maybe I lost a few people with that, but discussion forums are as deep as it gets. I mean there are, for those markets out there that have discussion forums, anything you could ever want to know is buried somewhere in that forum somewhere. And it’s just really, really, really hard to find, so it’s very deep dive, and it’s one-dimensional. A lot of them are just discussion forums and so I could go into the specific features and shortcomings– I won’t, but there are many.
And so I think we put ourselves kind of in the middle, where we do huddles, so they’re specific in the same way that discussion forums are specific so we can really provide that depth. And we really are about education and depth, and consumer advocacy, but then we built the platform to be re-purposeable so that over time, we can be in a lot of different markets and that sort of is why I put us in between the big, huge, cover-all comparison shopping engines as well. So does that make sense?
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yeah, yeah.
DAN GILL: From a feature perspective, we’re differentiated in that we’re kind of in-between those and also in the integration that we have. Integration of discussion forums and Wikis and product reviews. We also do what’s called product profiling, which maybe isn’t the right word, we’re working on it, but we allow users to say, I own this and I want this and I used to have that. And I own this and I want this and anytime they see products and so right now, if you go to the Dr. Bronner’s Magic Liquid Soap on Green Home it will tell you people who use Dr. Bronner’s use Seventh Generation Paper Towels and they use Pure and Natural Body Wash and it’s a way of getting totally unbiased recommendations, because you just know, okay-well I have this one thing and all these other people do, well… what else do they have?
And it’s a way of getting just cool suggestions. And I want this… so does Amy, so what else does she want? And you can look at Amy’s profile and find out the whole breadth of things that you’re interested in. And read all of your reviews and all of your posts in the forums and what Wikis you’ve participated in and really learn a lot about the people behind the product reviews, and are they like me? And you get very personalized recommendations that way. And so I think that’s the other strength of doing huddles around specific interests, is that by virtue of being in the Green Home Huddle that at least you have some common tie with the people there. If you’ve chosen to go to that site and you’re likely and you should– you should trust those opinions I think, more so than a very broad kind of every man for himself-type site.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I see that the technology and the content of your site is green. I’m wondering how as a company are you green?
DAN GILL: Well, I think you’re in our office. Not everybody here can see. I don’t think there is a single new object in this office. Nothing. Not our microwave, not our desks, not our refrigerator, not our couch, not our table, literally…everything. The table that we’re sitting at is used. I mean we are a very Freecycle and reuse in terms of setting up the office. A lot of natural light in here, which was an intentional choice for us. So we do a lot of things that way. Being a technology company, you are a little bit of power hogs. We all have computers and monitors and things like that, but I would say as a company we’re pretty good in addition to.
As a result of that we work with Village Green Energy so buy renewable energy credits from them. But we are just an incredibly simple organization. I mean we’re small and we have this great resource that we can all use for product recommendations, so every cleaning product that we have in here is by recommendation on the site. We really kind of eat our own dog food in that sense. And I think we’ve all come a long way because we have Kristina or Stins on the site (S-t-i-n-s if you find her on Huddler.) She is our Green Community Lead and she’s really led the education. I don’t think the other five of us certainly weren’t dark green coming into it and have really come a long way and developed a lot of passion along the way. It’s certainly not an opportunistic-only thing. We all have interests, and I think now we’ve all learned a lot in the process and made a lot of changes, which I think is really exciting as well.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What do you think is the impact in terms of sustainability of Huddler.com on the user?
DAN GILL: Absolutely. I think we are in a really unique position to distribute a huge amount of information. Really valuable information and I think there are a lot of studies that suggest from every perspective, people (and the statistics say six to one), people prefer peer opinion and peer review over expert opinion and expert review. They like to know, oh well, this person is just like me and that’s what we’re all about. We don’t have experts on the site. We have you, and your friends, and people like you. And so built a very powerful platform to distribute that information.
And like I said, it’s everything from lifestyle changes that you can make and organizations that you should be engaging with, to what? These baby bottles are dangerous! And you need to learn about BPA because it’s dangerous and here are the risks associated with that and distributing all that type of information. In a huge amount of really important information that’s been generated and is continuing to be generated on the site, we can really help educate people and let a lot of voices be heard, which I think is really cool. So I do think with all of the marketing speak out there, there’s a huge amount of consumer education that has to happen, and I really like the concept of us teaching each other. Taking the knowledge that I have and combining it with the knowledge that you have and learning something in the process and teaching someone who has none of that knowledge.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So how are you reaching out to people who aren’t already looking for green products?
DAN GILL: Yeah. So through partnerships. We partner through Yahoo.com for example, and our Wiki content, select Wikis, we publish through them to get out to a much more mass audience. We’re in the middle of talks to partner with some print publications who really want to get involved and get some green content out there. So we work with all sorts of different people to take this information that we have in our little corner of the world and distribute it out.
Then the other aspect is, I said search engine optimization. So if someone does go searching and they start with “I want a green cleaner,” and maybe that’s as specific as they know how to get, then we provide them fifty of them, and reviews, ingredient lists to look out for, and all the resources that you would need to make intelligent choices. So a lot of distribution through search. So if people are just starting out and don’t really know where to go or what to do, then we can kind of bring them in and start the education process there. But yeah we really are into a distribution and dissemination of everything that we have.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What do you see as your biggest opportunities as a company?
DAN GILL: That’s really interesting. In terms of the one that gets me most excited, I still see green and sustainability. As I said we built the software platform… We could easily run a home theater focused huddle, right? And when we talk about, I mentioned recommendation-based buying. So the fact that I use Dr. Bronner’s and that guides me to paper towels and body wash and all these other things that other people use and get those recommendations, that concept is totally relevant in saying…I have this television. What speakers, and receiver, and universal remote, and cabling and all the accessories around it do people use? Or I’m a skier, so I have these skis, what boots and bindings and polls and gloves and hats?
All of these sort of recommendation-based peer–it’s called social commerce. So if I like this and you like this, then I’ll like other things that you like. All of that, the platform is built to work in all of those markets. That said, we see the biggest opportunity in sustainability, because as I said earlier, it’s just so hip to be green and that’s great and problematic all at the same time because it encourages a lot of posers. And I think there is a huge opportunity for us to be the central resource to educate people and help you differentiate and striate what your actual concerns are.
Are you concerned about social responsibility of the companies? The environmental impact of the companies? Are you concerned about the health effects that the ingredients can have on your body and your family? What are you most interested in? And being able to help you differentiate from all the noise out there. And so I just think it’s going to continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger and louder and louder and louder and louder and we’d love to be the place that helps you see through the noise. So that’s one that I think we’re going to be uniquely valuable because we started in, certainly not early, not to say that sustainability is a new concept because there are many, many people who have lived admirable lifestyles for years, for their entire lives, but right now it is going a lot more mainstream. And I think that’s an opportunity that everyone who cares, needs to capitalize on.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Can you buy products through your site?
DAN GILL: No, we thought we’d lose a lot of objectivity if you bought products through our site. Right? If we’re trying to sell you something, we’re a lot less likely to encourage you to say, don’t ever buy this it contains carcinogens or whatever the case may be. And so we want to be totally an objective third-party. Say whatever you want. Be honest with your opinion. So that said, you do need to close the loop if you’re going to research product options, looking at all the different options out there. It does help to close the loop at the end of it. You ought to be able to say where can I get it? So we partner. We do what’s called affiliate marketing. So the people who help provide us some of the product information and we work with all sorts of different partners we do point you to places where you can buy things, but we have not, just so much less motivation to actively get you to buy because our main motivation is to be a resource. Totally objective third-party. So yeah, we don’t sell directly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay. What hurdles have you run into and what have been some of the bigger challenges?
DAN GILL: Yeah. Hours in the day is the biggest.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Always.
DAN GILL: We are shorthanded in a lot of ways, so I think we’ve got big ideas and big plans and want to keep executing towards them and it just takes time. It really does, and all of us are really high-achieving, passionate people, and so patience is also not a strength of the group that we’ve put together. So we want more, better, faster for the site. So that’s challenging because when you’re talking about having exclusively an online presence right, it takes time, dry attention to that. It really just genuinely does. Whether it’s through search engines or whether it’s through blogs, or any number of different resources. It just takes time to build up a reputation and to build up ways to get people to learn about you. And particularly we’re not sitting on $10 million in venture capital. We’re not throwing up banner ads and buying print ads or anything. We still have yet to spend marketing dollars. It’s all word of mouth and it’s all people thinking the site is cool and wanting to tell other people about it, that’s given us the success we’ve had so far. So that’s a hurdle is separating yourself among the noise because there’s a lot of great sites out there. So just differentiation is a challenge, but I think we’re on the right track.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Can you tell us about something that you’ve done that was a mistake that you kind of learned something from?
DAN GILL: Big time. I would say we were told by fifty people in creating a website and creating an online community, release early and release often and that’s what you’re told. Put something out there from a software perspective and release. And release the software right. Put something out there, release early, release often, and we’re too much perfectionists to listen to that advice. We wouldn’t. We wanted to have a polished product ready to go and so I think ultimately it’s not a problem, as you noticed it’s a beautiful site and we are very, very, very proud of it, but I think we could have had a much more feature poor version and a much more directed version that could’ve been released faster and had the users determine our next steps more than us determine the next steps.
I would say from a software perspective that’s one thing. I won’t say that I regret not exclusively focusing on green. I mean if we had pointed all of our development resources to being a green-only site from day one, we would’ve built in some specific functionality. Maybe there would be carbon foot print calculations relative to the products that you add in your product profile or integration with other sites. And we really did build the platform to be re-purposeable, and that took a lot of development resources as well. I wouldn’t call that a mistake because I think it gives us a lot of flexibility in the long run and to do big things as a company. But it did slow us down in some ways. So I don’t regret that one as much because now I think we’re well positioned to do really interesting things. But that was another big challenge I think.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: How have you been funded, if you don’t mind me asking?
DAN GILL: Yeah. We bootstrapped for awhile. We did take some “friends and family investment,” as they call it, where you scrape together some money. My brother and I were both completely unpaid for a long time. Fourteen months. We worked for free. We didn’t accrue a salary or anything. We did it for free and we used the little bit of money we got together to get some other people on board who really believed in what we’re doing. And they’re very talented people who could’ve been paid more than what they were paid to do to come and be a part of this team, but it’s paid off. We’ve built something that people like.
We were able to secure some investment this year. Not a huge amount. As I said, you can look around there’s not a lot of glamour in the office. And as I said, we don’t have a big marketing budget or anything like that, but we did take on some investment to get us to the next set of milestones that we have. We took on some angel investment earlier this year from some really fantastic investors. We were very fortunate in the contacts that we were able to make and we have five different investors all of whom bring unique value to the table and unique experiences and yeah we’ve been very, very lucky.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s terrific. What keeps you inspired from day-to-day as you’re working on this business?
DAN GILL: That’s a really good question. I think it’s the potential of the platform. It’s realizing the vision that started in the car when we drove cross-country. That is really cool to start from nothing and now have something, and even though not everyday is easy-we’re certainly not on board a gravy train that’s just taken off. It’s a lot of hard work and there’s still so much left to be done. It’s cool to see that materialize into something and now to really have the belief that it can be big and be a really important resource, a really helpful resource to a lot of people.
Just so big in internet-speak is how many unique visitors a month do you have, and all of those things. And we tossed them around as metrics to kind of keep score. How am I doing relative to competitors and things like that, but to think about the idea we get to five million unique visitors a month, right? That means that there are five million out there using the resource that we created and learning something from it and being able to make better sustainable decisions as a result of this distribution platform that we created and those kinds of things. The real potential for impact is very exciting. And so we’ve come a long way, and there’s a lot of pride associated with that and then there’s a feeling of excitement. Okay, well we’ve done it so now we need to continue to execute and take it as far as we can and that’s very motivating. It’s not always like that. I mean there’s lots of down days and frustration and uncertainty and it’s hard. It’s very difficult being a tiny team.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: If you don’t advertise on the site, how do you make money?
DAN GILL: We do advertise on the site; I was saying we don’t advertise outside of the site to bring people in. We can’t do that, right?
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay.
DAN GILL: We make money by being an objective third party that people want to use. We make money through impression-based advertising. People do want to be in front of those eyeballs whether it is nonprofits advertising on the site or sustainable brands. We get Seventh Generation advertising on the site and brands like that, that really want to be involved. And then when I did talk about comparison-shopping engines earlier…sort of: Here’s a product, and here’s five places you can get it. Pick which one you want and they get paid for that. We do that as well. That’s what the affiliate marketing is. But it’s not our primary focus, right?
Those sites are designed to get you on-site and off-site as fast as humanly possible. Monetize, monetize, monetize, monetize, monetizing. At this stage especially, I think we’re better off having a better user experience than that, and being a community and being based around interactivity and participation and that’s where all of our development focus is right now. And so you’ll notice those comparison shopping ads are way tucked in the bottom corner and we only have one add per page relative to a lot of sites may have five to ten ads per page. We have one. It’s just not our focus right now. Our focus is on building as robust and active community as possible.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Has there been someone who served as kind of a coach or mentor to you while starting this business? Is there any piece of advice that you received along the way that was particularly valuable?
DAN GILL: We’ve been fortunate in that we have a lot of people that have taken an interest in what we’re doing. And I think Silicon Valley is somewhat uniquely valuable in that way, where there are just a lot of people who have started companies out here and are willing to share their experiences. And so that’s been invaluable. There are a few folks that we work with regularly that have just a lot of experience to pass on, but there’s a lot of them that all have different values. But yeah, we’ve been very lucky to have a lot of people be really willing to help.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What’s an example of something you’ve learned from your users?
DAN GILL: Wow. Okay, that is too many things to list. Because as I said, the whole purpose of the site is to provide a resource for and in different mediums of content. So there are discussion forums and Wikis and so people post news items and their own analysis of what happened. And we’ve got some users, there are some users on the site who know more about LED technology and bulbs than I would ever known in my entire life, and they’ll come in the forums and talk about it and ways to think about light sources so that you can compare apples to apples, LEDs to CFLs to incandescents based on lumens per hour over the lifetime of a bulb, and they do all the math to do that. And it’s really interesting and compelling information I think.
And other people know all about labeling systems. What does organic actually mean and who are the people that certify organic? And what are the different criteria that they use? And who is actually using stringent enough criteria? I mean demystifying that whole thing. And it’s users that come in and do that. Kristina, as well. Kristina, “Stins,” as I said on the site generates a huge amount of information. And as I said, she was just the most, the greenest of all of us to start with and so she’s been a huge resource for us as well. But if you’re on the site you can click Wiki tab, there’s a tab at the top that says Wiki and down further on the page there’s a A-Z, there’s a bar of all the alphabet and you can click on any of those letters and see there’s Wiki articles on a lot of different things and discussions throughout the site on a lot of different things. So I’ve been very fortunate. It’s been an education.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. Are there any new developments that you guys are working on that you want to discuss with us?
DAN GILL: Yeah. There are a couple of things that just came out. So the recommendation stuff is new for us. So being able to look at a product and say people who own this, own this. And I think that’s really neat to be able to get that type of really fast information because that’s valuable. If you don’t want to dig into to every single thing, to just be able to say, well, I love this one thing, so I’ll take recommendations from people who also love this thing. And that’s kind of a neat feature that just came out. And the other thing we’re really pushing on right now is engaging in and embracing more the manufacturers and brands out there who are trying to get their products to market and trying to engage with them so we build built badges for their sites that say “Green Home Approved” and then it’s a way of saying, hey, people like us out there, on this totally objective site. Go read what they’re saying about us.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Kind of like Yelp badges.
DAN GILL: Exactly like Yelp badges. Exactly like that. So getting the word out a little bit more and helping these brands have that objective third party, where they can say hey, people really like us and you should go read about us. And it’s not marketing speak. It’s just people. So we’re doing a lot of work with them and a lot more work with brands again too. We don’t test things internally. We don’t hold on to the products that we get. We give them to users as fast as we get them. Just pass them out, and so we are making a huge push to get more stuff and put it in the hands of people who really know and care.
So that’s something else we’re working on is engaging with all these manufacturers and brands to say hey, let’s put your product in the hands of people who are going to really spend some time with it and give you some honest feedback. Which is fun for the people who get to try out all these new cutting edge products, and it’s great for the brands who get their products in the hands of people who really know what they’re talking about and care. So we are doing a lot of work there.
And then the last thing we are doing a lot of work with is distribution and integration with content sites. So there are just a lot of blogs and content sites out there that may not be as focused on community as we are. We’re very focused on community and user generated content. And we’re thinking of really interesting ways and starting into the development of interesting ways to link to really tightly integrated-not just provide links over, but tightly integrate with some great content sites out there. There are some sites we really like a lot that we’d love to work with and we are pushing for that, the Green Options Folks are great and they run fantastic sites and have a great team. We talk to Triple Pundit a lot and EcoGeek and a lot of the folks that we really like out there. And so thinking of ways that we can maximize our community and help contribute content to them and help distribute their content out to the community as well. So a lot of integration and cooperation inside the green space.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Are there any final thoughts that you’d like to share with our audience?
DAN GILL: (laughter) I don’t know. If anyone is still listening, I’ve never been so flattered in my life. It is really nice to get to talk about it a little bit and hopefully spread the word about what we’re doing. I think it has been evident from the conversation, we’ve put a lot of work and a lot of passion into it and I think for the right reasons. We really are trying to be a great resource. So I encourage you to check out the site and I would also very much encourage you to e-mail me. I am at Dan@Huddler.com. If you have feedback or questions or anything. As I said, one of our biggest regrets is that we want to incorporate more user feedback all the time and make sure we’re developing something that people really know how to use and want to use. So that’s the big thing is that we are totally available and built around that, is that we want to build something that the people enjoy using. So you can contact me Dan@Huddler.com anytime that want and I will respond. So let us know if we can be doing better than we’re doing and if you have any ideas and if you’d like to participate and we’re available.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Thanks so much, Dan.
DAN GILL: Thank you.
November 7th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
[...] Listen to podcast and read full interview transcript here. [...]
December 1st, 2008 at 1:50 pm
[...] Click here to listen to the audio or read the full transcript of our interview. [...]