Kyle
When you scale down social networks to their core, you’ll quickly realize that they’ve been around a lot longer than Facebook. MMC groups on AOL, bulletin boards on Prodigy and even dial in BBS’ back in the 80’s would equate to what has evolved into the current social network. Albeit today’s social networks have many more features, users and points of entry.
While Facebook continues to grow, and currently tops over 1 billion users, siloed or vertical social networks are starting to pop up all over the place. You have your one big public network and than you have your “clubs”. So what if there is no network for your interest yet? You could opt to be entrepreneurial and create a startup for it, with a practical likeliness of failing. Or you can find a startup that lets you create your own mini social networks.
That platform is Barcelona startup Groupiest.
Groupiest allows users to create their own community of interest for free (read mini-social network). Using Groupiest users can share what their passionate about and build their own personal brand in their own network of like minded folks. Think Yahoo Groups or even Usenet on steroids.
We got a chance to talk with the founders of Groupiest. Check out the interview below:
What is Groupiest?
Groupiest is an online tool allowing users to create their own community of interest for free. Groupiest enables individual users or companies to share relevant content by developing a unique social network. The tool is aimed at those users that are willing to share their passion and monetize their knowledge by communicating through their own personal brand.
In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)
Groupiest is an online technology through which you can create your own website in a few minutes. You just have to select the topics that you are interested in and what information from all over the web from, then you can edit the content and just click to publish it on your website. You can then start discussion boards with members of your community/website and share your website on Facebook, Twitter etc. All this for free!
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Groupiest was born under the incubator company called Appstylus in 2010. As of 2012 it has become independent. It was founded by Guillem Cuberes, who is a 20 year old programming Geek! He has topped his class as a Computer Technician. He is a regular speaker at conferences and is a very motivated individual. Mr. Guillem is also a Systems Management Specialist and a winner in the Catskills programming contest. He has five years experience in Acebes Communications, guru Plaa3 in search engine optimization. He is an expert in technical team management and has extraordinary leadership skills as an entrepreneur.
Aakriti Gupta is the director of the company. She is currently pursuing her MBA from IESE Business School in Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining MBA school, Aakriti worked as an IT Auditor at Ernst and Young, Chicago and Dubai for four years. Ernst and Young is a leading Big 4 Accounting firm focused on providing auditing and consulting services to clients. During her tenure at the company, Ms. Aakriti worked closely with clients in the technology and manufacturing industries providing them with IT consulting services. She has mentored and managed a sizeable team of auditors from diverse cultures and backgrounds on her various projects. Additionally, originally being from India and having lived in UAE and the United States for most of her career, she has a vast knowledge of different environments and experience with international clients.
Previous to that, Ms. Aakriti acquired experience in her family business in Dubai in the field of construction of real estate. She was responsible for managing the financials of the company and understanding the basic skills required to develop a medium sized business.
Aakriti has received her BBA from Indiana University, Bloomington (USA) with a focus in Finance and Information Systems and has also completed a few courses from University of California, Berkeley (USA).
Where are you based?
Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. We also have business developers on the United States.
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
Booming! Even with the deteriorating economy, there has not been a noticeable effect on the startup scene in Barcelona. Barcelona has still continued to be the home to small businesses and almost 98% of the businesses in Barcelona are small and medium sized businesses. This is because of the ease of starting up a business and the government assistance that is provided for the same. Groupiest has already received several opportunities to present themselves to investor forums, participate in startup pitch competitions etc. and these openings are endless.
How did you come up with the idea for Groupiest?
At the beginning stages of the Internet when people began using the net for more than searches, it seemed as though a frameset was still a good idea, and the best we had were the forum based communities. Then came the blogs, first adopted by a privileged few and later on seemed to be popular amongst all. The two major market solutions, Blogger and WordPress, were positioned to reach stratospheric levels. People did use the blog for all its simplicity and were caught by the netizens very strongly.
At the peak of blogs, Facebook and Twitter arrived, the next generation of tools for publishing and sharing information. With social networks, exactly the same outcome happened as was with blogs: at first only several Geeks used it, then it became much more popular, and later on people used them for anything regardless of the developers’ intention. Finally, the current situation is somewhat different.
Regardless, all the above mentioned technological progress have not made some of the listed solutions deserted. There are still several users of forums, blogs, companies and associations continue to use WordPress as a general purpose content management system and Facebook continues to dominate the market by capturing a large number of users.
With this situation, the Internet is very active and open minded to new products and this is where Groupiest is making a difference. Eventually people use all the popular tools in their own way and for things completely different than that that was intended by the brain behind it all. Why not develop a product that is designed to do anything?
How did you come up with the name?
The name was originated with the idea of allowing the final user to develop a website that is segmented into Groups. The idea is to have all the content within groups instead of creating a huge website with everything.
What problem does Groupiest solve?
Groupiest has identified two key problems that it has identified a combined solution for:
First, online bloggers represent a huge target audience in the online world. The tool provides such users with a faster, easier and more integrated platform of ‘blogging’. In addition, there exists a need to provide utmost value add to users with thorough knowledge of a particular topic, but who do not have the desire, time or appropriate skills for writing. Such users can leverage the tool to monetize their knowledge, gain credibility through their personal domain and of course communicate with individuals that share similar passions. In such cases, the value is on the channel that the user has created as well as the selection of content. Groupiest is a tool to help in this selection of content and automate the publication, complementing the original content of the community. It is easily customizable according to the domain and user style without the need for programming knowledge.The tool is also fully integrated with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to distribute content.
Second, the platform assists in providing greater reach for SOHO owners that have developed their products and/or services but are not able to reach their target customers due to lack of knowledge on customer behaviors, interests and/or needs. Groupiest assists such companies to analyze customers’ social signals, interact with them and streamline their efforts to reach the appropriate target segment.
The market today does not provide a solution to meet such needs. For example, existing technologies do not allow users to use the created community as their own personal domain, i.e., the communities are integrated within the technology and the credibility is in the hands of the technology itself.
Groupiest focuses to bridge these gaps seen in the existing social networking tools and has developed a technology that improves the process of creating content based on existing content on the network. This process is known as “healing content” and accounts for 90% of new content generated daily on the network. Groupiest automatically collects and filters content for the user, thereby providing daily tips to the publishers or content curators to publish the contents. Once the specialized community is created by the user, he/she can use it as his/her own domain to share it on the web.
What’s your secret sauce?
We have an extremely young and energetic team, aged between 20-30 years, that are passionate about technology and love to explore and discover new ideas. Individuals that are not afraid to try new things and experiment.
Are you bootstrapped or funded?
Groupiest has recently received a loan and is actively looking for investors.
What is your goto market strategy?
Individuals:
The audience of Bloggers mentioned above is extremely difficult to target through traditional marketing means. To begin with, we will get in touch with bloggers through the following online sources:
– Google Blog search – search by topic
– Twitter search – find bloggers by what they tweet about
– Postrank Topics – search by topic
Groupiest has a unique and profitable six step marketing process to target our blogger segment. This process includes:
– Reach out to bloggers through existing database of contacts
– Follow bloggers on Twitter and Facebook
– Comment on blog posts
– Set-up Google Alerts and comment on articles posted by bloggers
– Attend blogger meet-ups and events in Barcelona to pitch the tool
– Set up a Bing Webmaster Tool account and verify it
Businesses:
The benefits that Groupiest provides to businesses is that of having a better interaction with their customers. Since such businesses are typically limited on human resources, using a tool like Groupiest can be extremely beneficial to them. It does not require numerous dedicated marketing efforts, technological expertise and is extremely easy. The owner is able to very efficiently create a community of his/her own, brand it by personalizing it to his/her own domain (just like a personal website) and start to develop traffic of users. In addition, they can utilize their customer behaviors, get feedback from them and remodel their product/service to their needs.
In the short run, Groupiest plans to reach out to these businesses through the following sources:
– Barcelona Activa – hold a conference and showcase a prototype of the product to the start-ups
– Reach out to small businesses who have their testimonials on some of the small business coaching websites such as Free Green Beans etc.
– Attend conferences such as VMWorld etc. that hold a meet-up for companies to transform their businesses
Source: http://www.vmwareemeablog.com/
– Be present on local media such as newspapers and technology magazines
In addition to the personal interaction Groupiest tends to have with such companies, it also intends to be present and promote the tool through online sources:
– Blog articles and comment on articles that suggest a need for a service that Groupiest provides
– Write a “how-to” article that addresses Groupiest’s niche on Wikihow.com or Answers.com
– Make a slideshow of Groupiest’s how-to video and upload to YouTube
Overall marketing strategy consists of:
– Product reviews
– SEO
– Google Adwords
– Affiliate Marketing
– Press releases
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
As a new CEO, I have seen how difficult it is to forecast planning and manover the team to adhere to it strictly. It has been imperative to not only set strict deadlines but also be flexible in terms of listening to your team to understand what is doable and be able to re-schedule whenever necessary. Sometimes it can get frustrating but I think that I have now been able to understand the importance of planning and re-planning – an ongoing process, especially when the company is in the beginning stages and the product is being developed and revised. In addition, I have learnt that a task is best communicated when it is written down and documented after a verbal discussion to reiterate the importance of the task. Per my experience, when this was not done previously, it was very often granted as unimportant and not accomplished.
Who are some of your mentors and business role models?
Unfortunately, my answer to this question is the usual cliche’d one. I have been brought up in the Middle East in a family of businessmen. My father has been running his own business for several years and my brother has also followed his footsteps. I have watched him during his ups and downs and have never really seen him worried or disgruntled with anyone. All of his reasoning behind work related things are practical and he always preaches to never look back at things from the past but instead tries to get the most out of them and apply his learning in future tasks. He is always very broad minded and likes to think big because he believes that only then you are able to eventually achieve the little things that will give you the feeling of accomplishment.
What’s next for Groupiest?
Groupiest is focusing on the following efforts:
– Continuous product development
– Global business development
– Seeking investment
– Looking for partners
– Focusing on marketing efforts to generate traffic and customers
Linkage:
Here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”
everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference is the biggest startup conference in the US
