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Andrew: Hey everyone its Andrew Warner, I am the founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious sub start. Every month a hundred and forty three million people come into contact with meebo, the company founded today by today’s guest, Interviewee. Those millions of people might go to meebo.com or they might use the chat box on another site like on mixergy.com I use them for the live interviews or they might use the meebo bar like the one an allthingsd.com, it’s right on the bottom of the website. I invited Sandy to mixergy to find out how she built the business, how she got all of that insane distribution, its not easy to get on allthingsd and what the value is of a small bar on a third party site. So I am just going to start off this way, Sandy first of all welcome to mixergy and thanks for doing the interview.
Interviewee: No problem, it’s good to be here.
Andrew: So a hundred and forty three million people, I had to double check it with you in the beginning of the interview because it’s an unfathomable number. Maybe you can take me back to one of the early traffic milestones and show me how you achieved that.
Interviewee: Sure. So little back story, meebo was founded in two thousand and five so we actually launched September of 2005. Back then it was kind of the new before web 20 so it was you know, a jacks and the dynamic web was very new, technologies were not particularly prevalent around the web and we wanted to solve a very simple problem which is how do I connect with my friends where I am. So I am at that point was a bigger market back then, it was constrained to the desktop and users were limited in how they could communicate online and so we thought about the problem and the way that hotmail brought emails to the web, we wanted to bring communication on line as well. And so back then we thought, okay, well, you know we launched it, no funding, let’s just see how it goes and everybody wanted to, we thought well you know to be on that internet site, on internet cafes, you are going to be travelling away from your computer that’s when you would use meebo. Turns out that there was actually a very fundamental need for people to communicate wherever they were, at work, online or they couldn’t install anything on the desktop and so a lot of things were moving to the web and I think our first big traffic milestone was something like ten thousand simultaneous users at that point and it was a big deal for us. We only had a couple of servers you know, we paid for with our own credit cards and my co founder Seth was racking up this really big builders sometimes and that was actually a really big indicator to us that there was a real need in the market and if people really wanted this type of functionality, that when we got sort of this sprinkling and inkling that something special was here.
Andrew: How did you get those ten thousand people all at once?
Interviewee: So we really focused early on the product and how to scale it so we knew off the back that in order for this experience to be actually genuine and feasible and real to the user it had to feel like desktop software. So it had to be fast, it had to be very instantaneous and obviously instant messages had to be instant, if you had a five minute delay then your IMs, it’s not going to work and so we initially seeded it with a couple blogger sites so dig blogged about us and we actually posted our own site, our own posting on dig which was only about a year old at that point and we made the mistake and I tell all the founders at this stage, don’t go to bed after you launch. We made the mistake of going to bed and then we woke up the next morning and we had something like seven hundred digs and the servers were falling over. We were trying to figure how to get this done but I think what happened was that we really seeded the idea in check market so one of the local users in the tech area who really wanted something like this but knew it was really hard to do was like, they were like wow this is the newest thing ever, I didn’t know it could be done and so they tried it and they sort of spread it word of mouth. So the first couple of years for me was growth, was the largest by word of mouth, because there was a real need and people when they discover me and then they told their friends and then their friends would tell their friends and so we got really deep penetration in certain markets like schools, high schools, things like that. And there is a funny anecdote, when we first launched, big traffic dips would occur and one day we were like you know, what’s going on? We had like a twenty thirty percent drop. It turns out it was the PSATs for high school students and so that was a big indicator that we were actually hitting the high schools pretty hard so and that was cool.
Andrew: Aright, you know what, can I tell you something, a lot of people when they launch your site probably just want to go back to bed because they are exhausted and they should be and they should stay in bed because hardly anyone comes to the website, to end up with that many people on the website it really, it means that there was a period there where people were looking for new ideas, wasn’t there where bloggers were excited to help promote new sites and to help discover new sites, kind of like high school kids for a long time were excited to find new bands and then talk about them before they hit big. So it sounds to me, tell me if I a wrong, you hit the bloggers at the time that they were excited about it, you hit dig at the time when you can still get attention for a company on dig before you had to do something outrageous like take a picture with a cat that was spinning on a record player.
Interviewee: Exactly. I think ideas don’t happen in vacuums and what we’ve always said sort of learned, a lot of founders, whatever idea you have, there are about twenty other people with the same idea but have different stands on it and so I think you know part of the success of meebo was to be honest a bit of luck, like good timing where we kind of hit the technology [purge] on the internet where people were expecting something interesting, expecting something new and at that point a lot of these were blogger sites where the blogger __ turn edge of the rampant take off, becoming sort of like the next journalism you know venue and we kind of hit up on that at the right time and if you actually read the blogs that were out there before meebo had launched they were like oh, you know this web IM thing, it’s kind of impossible, it’s too hard to do you can’t scale, the user experience would be terrible but then it turned out that when we actually did launch they are like oh, it’s awesome it was meant to be, anybody can do it, look I can do it too and so it was kind of like a good timing thing and I think people were looking for a more dynamic part of the web and it had been still at it for so long that they saw the kind of, intuitively saw the trends of like the email moving and productivity moving but everybody was just kind of waiting for that next thing I think we kind of rode that way.
Andrew: Let me anticipate some of the criticism that I am going to get for doing this interview. Some of the criticism I am going to get for leaving this part out there. People are going to email me and say, okay then it’s not going to work anymore, there was a time when blogs did well and when digs was accessible and that time is over and this interview is useless. What I am finding though is there is always some new opportunity that has a short, that the world has a short attention span for and then they move to something else, so maybe today might be social media, maybe a few months ago was social media and if you knew how to rock that then you would rock your business and before blogs were out there it might have been email and if you could rock getting people on your email list then you would be phenomenal and years and decades before that if you were the first company and the first entrepreneur to understand the power of television, you would do incredibly well and how many times did I read that lifesaver story about how, I think it was the founder of lifesaver who understood that if you had a product right by the cash register and you sold it for about as much change as people are going to get back, oohh they are going to buy from you. He was one of the early pioneers there; today you can’t squeeze the spot onto that. So the point isn’t to say that well, Interviewee did this, I am going to go copy exactly the whole idea here is useless needs to say I am going to be inspired by the direction that she took and maybe I am going to find something in my world today that I could jump on that is similar to that. I want to go back and dig in deeper into something that you said earlier, you pretty much said, we just launched it. How long did it take you to come out with that first version?
Interviewee: So again a little back story, meebo launched in September 2005 but if you look at actually at the domain registration of meebo.com it was actually done two and a half three years before that, so Seth Elaine and I had decided earlier on that we wanted to do something, start a bee, something consumery and so we kind of got together every weekend and kind of thought about ideas and we actually had two prior ideas called meebo, though very different ideas before we actually launched this meebo, so you know we had one idea and kind of baked it for six months, decided that we weren’t really passionate about it so we kind of killed it and did another one and each time learning from the mistakes that we did the first time so we actually learned a lot just by the process of working together like you do you make a code together, how do you come up with ideas, how do you work together as a team you know, how do you sort of use your skills together as a team and as one unit and so when we got this third idea what we called meebo, actually called it meebo 3 internally for a while, we sort of leveraged the code they said we had for the first two projects but we actually killed off some of the things that we thought were detractors so previous ideas included [downloads] offer. People don’t like to downloads offer, everything is limited to the web, how do we make it on to the web. Another thing is you know we wanted to eliminate the need for a lot of upfront capital because we were like well; I don’t really want to get all this process of getting to receive money and receive money and stuff like that, let’s just launch the idea and see if it actually works because if it doesn’t work the we can start over again. And so building the actual prototype was pretty fast, I’d about six months to actually get something working and we decided earlier on is that you know product people and a lot of people who create codes and products and have this thing where they really want to make it perfect, they want to add like ten actual features and it’s not quite ready yet I really want to wait until that extra feature is in and we had to be really discipline about saying okay, just launch with the basic features, get a lot of feedback to determine where we want to go next and then just push it out. So it actually not only took us about six months but it took us about three years to actually get to that point.
Andrew: So let’s go back even further and find out how the three of you met.
Interviewee: Sure so, I am the youngest in the three of us and I, when we first, Seth and I decided to do this thing together, Elaine had graduated early and I met her at school at Stanford so she was about two years ahead of me and her husband was childhood friends with Seth, who is our other co founder so that’s how we all kind of knew each other and in terms of sort of getting the team together, Seth obviously was this business guy, he knew how to talk and do this thing, I was more of the server site engineering so I know a lot of the back structure, how to set it up and Elaine is a very product oriented, so she has a great eye for usability, designing the front and figuring out what makes the user tick and so those three, three skills, worked really good together.
Andrew: What was your relationship before you got together on products? Was it friendship, did you guys go out for dinners, for drinks?
Interviewee: Yeah, it was kind of casual friends, Elaine and I you know, we were, she was a couple of years ahead of me so we didn’t take a lot of classes together, we kind of had some similar social groups and friends but I always knew she really liked the product things and you know, and she always knew I was a decoder and I actually met Seth through Elaine so actually first time over the phone because he was living in New York but I was like wow that guy has a lot of ideas which is pretty cool and then when we got together in person finally things clicked really well so we are still really good friends now.
Andrew: What kind of ideas did he have?
Interviewee: So I have to prep this by saying Seth really wanted to do things like entrepreneurial since he basically popped out of the womb so you know he had ideas in high school and in college and the first idea we actually had was online backup so if my computer got stolen, if I threw it in a fire or it fell out of a plane or something like that then my data would be backed up but you know when you work on your first start up you want it to be kind of fun and sexy and very consumerating and that wasn’t just all that tasty. So the we kind of moved on that second idea which was serving online collaborative file sharing so if I had a file or music or you know a document that I want to share with you, it was really kind of a hustle to have to email and email has size constraint and things like that and so we wanted to make a fun sort of application where I could use distract something on my desktop and it would just show up on yours. And that idea actually had IM in it had kind of working download sort of prototype of IM and that’s kind of how we took that prototype and we moved it into in incur, incarnation meebo.
Andrew: I see. How did you guys decide to work together? What was the, yeah how did you decide to work together?
Interviewee: Yeah, so like I said Seth is from the initiator, he is like I really want to do something adenoise and cheap like Stanford students I can hire to do this and Elaine is like well, I am here and I’d love to do that and she was like no well it’s Sandy who’s really used to sit backup oriented and the three of us can make something pretty cool and so that’s how we kind of got together and said well we should do that and you know and it kind of just organically grew from there.
Andrew: And that became the backup program that was meebo.
Interviewee: Yep and we actually get it working, that was a working prototype and we actually made like a little presentation of what it was about, had some icons stuff like that but again at the end we weren’t just all that passionate about that product so it just kind of died.
Andrew: And did you get users for it?
Interviewee: We had some friends try it out because we, it was an insulation thing and it kind of embedded, it was a little buggy and we kind of tried it ourselves but it didn’t actually get to the point where it was kind of launchable and we knew from that point on that we kind of hit this threshold we are like not really that super excited to work on this, I would rather go and play alternate freesby than work on this, that should tell you that, this is probably not the right idea.
Andrew: You know they say a lot, that you need to have a minimum viable product. I wonder if for unfunded entrepreneurs, it’s not so much about the minimum viable product is, the minimum it’s going to take to get excited to work on this when so much else going on when you have a fear of running out of money, when you have all these other issues, what do you think of that?
Interviewee: I think there is truth to that, I think in order for you to really feel like you are invested in the product, you have to be a user of the product. You have to start eating your own dog food and one of the things we realized from the first two projects is that if you’re not passionate about it, you’re not going to work on it day and night, you are not going to think about it, you’re not going to try to make it better and so when the meebo that we know today came around. We got really, really excited like to the point I just didn’t want to sleep I wanted to Elaine’s house and just code all day. Really wanted to eat, made you want to quit your job basically, we used to say we either do this full or we don’t do it at all. And so Elaine and I were, we should just do this, we should quit our jobs and just do this and so you know we actually quit our jobs and forgot to tell Seth until we were like oh yeah we quit but, because we were so excited about it and that’s kind of one of the things that I do tell entrepreneurs that there is a lot of them hedged on beds, oh I will do this job, maybe I will do it on the side but if you really want to go at it, you should just do it, you shouldn’t try to draft out a business plan or try to do this or try to do that, too much research, you should just build it and go. So that’s kind of one of the things that we try to tell other budding entrepreneurs.
Andrew: You said you launched September ’05 is when the version three of meebo, what we know today as meebo launched.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: I think it was thirty to sixty days afterwards that you got it funded, did you quit your job before or after you knew you that you were going to get funded?
Interviewee: So we quit our jobs in, I would say we gave notice in the beginning of August, say before we actually launched and then we, we were not actually planning on getting funding, we wanted to see how it would go and you know the advice we got from other entrepreneurs at that point, it’s kind of networked with was that if you don’t take funding, if you don’t have to take funding, don’t take it because you know obviously you are giving up part ownership, when you do take funding you slow down your productivity, there is sort of a hit in that. And so we launched it in, we quit __ at that point we actually had a working prototype
Andrew: Am sorry we just lost a connection for a moment there, you said you launched it when?
Interviewee: Launched in September but we actually quit in August, in August we actually had a working prototype, we were just kind of perfecting it until September and then we got some interests from VCs in the following weeks and so a funny story is that the nice thing about having Seth on team at that point is because he couldn’t really code and so he would go and meet with all the VCs and the angel investors and kind of meet them, see how they work and kind of vet the ideas with them thus shielding Elaine and I from all these meetings so we could continue to work on the product and perfect it and make it better so iterate on your feedback and so a funny story is that by the time it was time for us to meet the investors they were like, okay Seth, do Sandy and Elaine actually exist because we haven’t seen them, you’ve talked about them but have no indication that they actually exist. So when we actually met the investors it was kind of cool but we didn’t take a serious investment till December of that year so it was about you know, three months afterwards that we took seriously.
Andrew: I see. And how many users did you have before you went after funding, before Seth went out?
Interviewee: Lets see, no I don’t really remember, I think we had something like a hundred thousand simultaneous at that point which was pretty big, actually not so much, that’s a lot actually I think it should be ten or twenty thousand simultaneous but there was attraction and people were sure of it, we were adding servers on a weekly basis which is giving us a good sign.
Andrew: And the servers were coming off, at least you were paying for the servers off your credit cards?
Interviewee: So we did this thing called manage services where you kind of rent a server, you get root access, you can do whatever you want but you don’t have to set it up, you don’t have to pay for the power, you don’t have to pay for the management of it and so we would rent these servers on a monthly basis on Seth’s credit card and we kind of did that for actually a long time it added up to six months to a year until we actually moved to __ environ servers.
Andrew: Wow, how deep in debt, I was going to say you guys all get but I guess it’s how did in debt did you send Seth?
Interviewee: Yeah, it wasn’t that bad, I think it was maybe twenty thirty thousand at the end of it and we actually did go on a small angel round in the beginning just to pay for the servers so thus leaving a little of the credit card debt and the reason we actually took that was one space for servers was at the point we were still living off our savings and I was working out of Elaine’s apartment and the reason we took series A was that you know, Elaine and I were spending so much more time trying to fix the servers and keeping it up that we didn’t have time to innovate on it and to make it better and so in order to do that we needed help and in order to get help you have to hire people, in order to hire people you have to pay people and obviously we had no money and so that was sort of, stirred our decision to actually go with funding.
Andrew: I don’t know if I have asked you this yet but how many users did you have before you quit your job?
Interviewee: Zero, we hadn’t launched at all.
Andrew: So you just took a gamble without any users.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: Because you loved it so much even though two businesses didn’t work out or you didn’t work them because you weren’t passionate about it? You just knew.
Interviewee: It was a feeling, I think this was the first idea that we felt really excited about and the previous two were interesting but it didn’t solve a fundamental need that we as users had everyday, I am a big IMer like I use IM, sms and things like and so it was a problem that, it was a personal problem that I solved for myself and you know it really resonated with me and I think because it resonated with me I felt like it would resonated with other people and when I shared the idea with other people and other friends they were like wow, that’s a great idea, it should be really cool if you did that and I was like okay cool and so that, you know it came to a point where I was exhausted doing two jobs. I was like my full time job and this on the side thing and I was like okay well, I feel really passionate about meebo, I don’t want to do two jobs badly, I wanted to do one job really great and so to a certain point we had to make a decision and say go or no go and it was go 100 percent, not go 60 percent and we decided okay let’s just do it.
Andrew: Did you get any pressure from friends or family to stay with your job, you had a great job before?
Interviewee: Yeah, it was a great job, I loved it, I loved the people I loved the company but I knew it wasn’t the thing that I really wanted to do, like I tell the story a lot that I my first job out college was this place I was working at and I had just graduated college when the bubble had burst so pretty basically no tech jobs and everybody was disillusioned about the whole internet thing and I got to the job and I am a pretty sure person and I get there and there is this really tall cute walls and I am like this isn’t really what I had imagined when I graduated from college and so by then I had met Seth and we kind of thinking oh lets just do this sort of thing and I was actually ready to quit for like two years and my parents were really supportive and my friends were like you have nothing to lose why not do it and so I had some other friends who tried to start up this as well and felt it was really bad experience so I guess I was lucky in the sense that people around me were just like totally go for it, they were very supportive.
Andrew: Mark Ransom from __ in the audience on the meebo chat board actually he’s first of all he is saying that’s, he’s saying its ballsy for you to quit your job with zero users, I was going to clean it up but I figured lets let him have it, let’s say it the way that he said it. The second thing he’s asking, he is saying, what external feedback did you have when you launched to spur you on?
Interviewee: Sure, so we knew from initially that, one great piece of advice that we got was that even though you are building this product for yourself, you in the end are not going to be your end like the sixteen year old girl in Kansas is going to be way better user than you are because she is using it from a totally consumer point of view and so we specifically launched with a blog so we would tell the users everything about what we were doing, we were very transparent, very open with them, we wanted to make them feel as if they were part of the product process __ and launched with full access to email so Seth, Elaine and I would basically sit there all day and answer any email that came with blog reports and future requests so we launched very, very feature like, we had buddy list, some windows, you could sign in and you could sign out and that’s about it, you just talk and so within the next week or so we had so much through local email that came in that said we really love this feature I want motor cons, I want funny faces, I want, I think it was like, I want java support so within a week we had actually launched all those features and so we continually, basically for the first six months, just listen to the users and gave them what they wanted, which then made them feel as if, oh wow they are actually listening to me and this product is actually being built for me and so they felt like okay, if meebo was part of my life and part of my existence then I want to make that better and then they just spread that to their friends and then the word of mouth kind of continued so I think the user feedback super, super affected how we developed meebo and actually it still does today. Like I think a lot of our decisions that we make on, you know revenue features, social features on the bar itself are all driven by user feedback.
Andrew: Did the first, one of the things that people loved about meebo was that they could sign into all their IM apps using meebo, so you can do gtalk, you can do aol, you can do face book when that came out. Did that first version also allow interaction with other networks or was it just IM within meebo members?
Interviewee: So we had no meebo members at all in the first version, it was just access to the other protocols and IM back then was actually, I think like I said before a bigger market and people at first were like okay I just want access to the friends that I talk to and the only access they had was via these networks and so we didn’t feel like there was a need to go beyond that until we started to listen to the users and see the market trends and see the budding of social networks came about and thus serve the evolution of IM kind of changed and where before it was stuck to the desktop then we brought it out to the web and now we are bringing it way out of the web and to sort of anywhere you go on the web, we don’t wan to constrain the user to one destination site but kind of bring them out to wherever they are and thus the definition of IM has now changed to be sort of what social grass are you part of, how can we bring that experience to you wherever you are.
Andrew: Diana [Manning] in the audience is saying I can get on with my linix box with OSX with anything, she loves it.
Interviewee: Yep. That’s awesome.
Andrew: Alright, so you say the first version had no buddy list, actually it did have a buddy list but it was signed on to how many networks?
Interviewee: I think like five or four.
Andrew: Four or five networks, there was no account on meebo but you just bring in your accounts from those other networks. That’s all it was and you kept answering feedback from people and adding those features that they were looking for.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: How did you get all those users to come check out your blog and even care about what you were about to launch. Most people launch something and nobody cares. You were bound to launch something before reading your blog about what you are building.
Interviewee: So initially we, like I said we succeeded on dig and on giga home so I got a lot of that initial blog hit and so we knew that you know with people experiencing this sort of IM thing, we didn’t want to track on that experience and so we actually popped up a little window within the client site with the blog so it was like hello, welcome to meebo and here is what we are doing today. We do that almost daily and people are like okay, there is a story going on here, it’s almost like a television show because it was sort of a growing start up and they were part of it because the weren’t getting their feedback answered so we’d actually call out users within the blog. We’d be like oh you know, pretty girl123 said that she would love to see motor cons and so here they are, motor cons or you know coming next week and so it was their way to sort of make the experience more personalized and we learned a lot from that by, we really want to keep the user on track of what they wanted to do, we don’t want to detrack __ at all, so it’s the same philosophy that apply to them ,we do ads we do features maybe do the bar etcetera but then from day one was server conscious effort to make the information that we gave users part of the flow of their experience.
Andrew: And I see you still do that today. I logged in today just to make sure that I saw what the website was before the, do you do it, there is a little thing that popped up and I think it said new secret in motor cons if you touch these cute things that’s the motor con.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: You said that earlier on you had a lot of word of mouth. What did you do to encourage it and to spiral long vorality.
Interviewee: So back then again when Seth, Elaine and I, this is our first real start up and we didn’t, we weren’t all that experienced so like the viral close and things like that and so we wanted to make it very easy for the user to sort of tell their friends and the best way to do that earlier on is to have a really great product. So instead of, sort of you know ignoring certain thoughts or ignoring certain users we really wanted to make like, I keep saying this over again, make the user feel as if they are part of the product process and so we do things like, oh you know we would love it if you told your friends, give us feedback, if you tell your friends there we can add extra xyz features, this feature would make, it would be even better if all your friends were on it and so we didn’t want in any way trick the user into telling them about their friends you want to make them part so good they had to tell their friends so we had like great stories of, you know people in the army, or people in Iraq and tell us oh my God I can’t download anything on to this computer because it’s so limited but I can get access to meebo like when I talk to my son on your website. I was like oh that’s so awesome. So things like that and when we tell these stories to other users, we’d ask the user do you mind if we told, put your email on the blog and they are oh no, go for it and so that kind of sort of you know warm hearted, sort of very family oriented feeling that they felt like oh it’s the meebo family and you are all part of it was actually pretty resonating with the users.
Andrew: Do you have an example of something that they couldn’t use unless their friends were also on meebo?
Interviewee: So I would say like in a year, after about a year we added video chat to meebo actually and that was really easy to do but the thing is that we wanted to make their experience super easy so when you press a button your friend could just use meebo to do it and so what we wanted to do was sort of advertise meebo in a way but in very non like in your face you must use meebo kind of way, and so what we do is, a lot of these things we wanted the user to come back to meebo so we just send a link. So you want a video chat, if you’re already on meebo it would just pop out the video but if you’re not on meebo it would just send you a link and when you click on the link it would actually give you a guest version of meebo but you don’t have to log in but you could still use the functionality with your friend and thus you’re like wow, meebo has this thing, maybe I should get an account and then log in and do that. So it was a very non tricky but very sort of fun and open kind of way of doing it.
Andrew: Most sites want users to register not just so they can keep track of who’s using the site but so they can bring the user back. If I log in with my email address and password, you have my email address and you can keep bringing me right back to the site. You guys didn’t have it, I don’t think to this day I’ve ever got a meebo email, I might have, but I don’t think I have. I’ve had an account with you guys for a long time. How do you do that? How do you snap people back to the website?
Interviewee: So things have kind of shifted, in the past let’s say a couple of years before we focus a lot on the meebo IM client which sits on meebo.com and when we decided to not spam the user because a lot of times the philosophy for us was that you are exposed to the user once, maybe twice and you only have that one shot to really impress the user or give them an impression of what your site is like or what your product is like and we didn’t want to ruin that by spamming up this things because even though we had access to your buddy list, you know it’s a privilege that we have, it’s not a thing that we can take advantage of, it’s a privilege that the user has trusted you with and so we didn’t want to abuse that privilege and so as we have shifted over to the bar you know people now are using the meebo kind of philosophy within their content site then bring users back to their sites but we do it in a way that’s not tricky, that’s not deceptive, that’s actually very, I would say advantageous to both the user and the publisher and because of the whole shift and how you bring users back to your site as opposed to the spammy like the viral old school, like I am going to spam nine hundred of your friends and you come back to me and you would get something things like very cheap and you don’t want to do that , you want to be able to bring it back in a way that is useful and gives them value and so I think the reason why a lot of the success of meebo has grown given meebo’s sort of foray into the bar distributed space is the fact that we use users friends and their connections to then give them a really true outlet to bring content and users back to the site so if I share something with my friend, they are much more likely to click on that than they are if some spam a hundred impersonal email came to them. So that’s a philosophy that has actually translated really well.
Andrew: Meebo website actually could have when I logged in, could have had a button that was clear maybe one that would trick me into telling all my friends in my buddy list that I am using meebo and they should too and many sites would have done that. Many sites actually would get me to add my email address and password for Gmail address so that they could spam my friends but I notice you guys didn’t do that. Do you ever consider doing that? Was there ever a discussion which Seth said hey, let’s do this thing everyone is doing on face book, face book is big on it.
Interviewee: Definitely, I mean it came up because it was so popular I would say about a couple of years ago.
Andrew: Yep.
Interviewee: And it was a hard decision because we were getting a lot of pressure to do that and you know word of mouth can only get you so far. You can’t always do that, you have to do some sort of marketing, get you site out there and I think the shift in our thinking really happened when we, it kind of coincided with our understanding of the iron space itself so IM is a very one on one communication and because it’s a one on one communication there is a lot of trust that goes on in that pipeline. But IM is a market that has kind of declined because it’s moved; it’s evolved from desktop to the web, from one single station website to wherever you are on the site. Social networks, content site, blogs, to mixergy and allthingsd and CNN and things like that. You want to be able to connect with your friends or talk with them wherever you are and so the whole not spamming users I think really evolved from the fact that we kind of saw that trend happening and we saw that we didn’t have to do that because you are going to waste that effort, that one impression that you want to get. And so the better way to do that is to integrate that experience into something that they would naturally bring their friends into. So if I am reading an article, if I am reading like a celebrity blog site, I am going to want to tell my friends, right, I am not going to want to spam them just because I want users, I am going to want to share that content with those sites and that’s naturally, it’s a lot more in flow, inline sort of naturally existing with the cregg experience to then bring your friends and communicate with them and then serve more of a soft sort of hello, I am on this site you should come here too, kind of thing
Andrew: Alright, that’s a meebo bar; I want to talk about what that is and then talk about how you guys were able to spread that in a moment. Let me just fill in some information here. First of all, I hear a lot of traffic behind you, where are you? Are you on the highway right now?
Interviewee: Oh, I am actually in the conference room, there is a glass door so you might her the cars behind __.
Andrew: Okay, you’re in, what city are you in?
Interviewee: Mountain view, California.
Andrew: Oh, alright. Second question is setback, so far all we see is hit, hit, growth, growth, success, success, it couldn’t possibly be like that. Can you tell us about a big setback that you guys had?
Interviewee: Let’s see, so I think you know people see the success of the firm and they are like wow, you got it right the first time and in truth that’s not the first time it’s actually like our fifth time doing this. Like I said there was that evolution of IM and from day one we knew that people wanted some sort of IM thing in their sites, they were like oh my god you watch meebo, I want that on my site, well okay I have no idea what you are talking about, like what do you mean? So we literary actually called them up and said what do you want and they are like, they couldn’t really verbalize it but they were giving us the indication they wanted some sort of social IM talky thing on their site. Like I have a blog, I want to talk to my users, I want my users to talk among themselves and so we tried different versions of that, we had like a flash widget, you know the meebo me thing but again it was a one way thing where the end user had to be on meebo.com which was a restriction. And then we kind of moved on to more chat room functionality where there was a flash widget which would stay on a content site and people would chat about you know whatevers and we had like you know, of lot of cable sites had put that on their music artists, the problem there was that, it’s great for engagement but a lot of these sites then get advertising from page view __ and so if a user sticks on that page for forty five minutes, they are not going to get any money from the ads they are trying to do in the following pages and so we were like okay, that’s not right either. And so when we shifted to the bar you know the bar is like the forth or fifth try at distributing social thing, we discovered that it actually hit upon all four audiences perfectly. It gave meebo great revenue and engagement times and distribution. It solved the user need because the user want social, they want to engage with their friends, they want to talk, it solved the advertiser need and so we gave him the outlet to put advertising on these sites and it distributed advertising platform and it also solved the publisher need of giving them a sort of persistent bar experience with that social functionality but without restricting the users to one page, because they can flip from page to page, the meebo bar just persists and the advertising persists and so it’s very seemless experience for all four of us, which is like yes, finally we hit the thing and so that’s what happened. The setback actually was, there many setbacks, we actually launched three, four things that weren’t successful, that didn’t work, it didn’t actually get us where we wanted to go and so finally after like you know two, two and a half years of trying this is the thing actually worked.
Andrew: Two and a half years of trying till you got the bar.
Interviewee: Yep.
Andrew: Wow, I should have asked this earlier, JB in the audience you are right to ask it. What does the name meebo mean? We are wondering because there are so many annorations.
Interviewee: Yeah, so in the beginning we kept calling it the project like this Sunday thing and so we needed a name for it and so we literary were out in a restaurant and just wrote down like hundreds and hundreds of names on a napkin, went back to the internet and started typing each one to see which ones were taken and we knew we wanted something non sensicle because if we had picked like you know, sexybackuponline.com and when we change the idea, that’s not going to stick right, and so Elaine really like the letter m and we wanted something two syllable, really easy to pronounce, really easy to spell and if you did a Google search I think in two thousand like you know two or whatever, meebo was some sort of acronym for a biological experiment with mice, and now obviously four five years later it’s changed significantly but there are actually is no inherent meaning in meebo it’s just kind of a fun thing to say so.
Andrew: I see, so let’s talk about actually, one more thing before __ talk about …
Interviewee: A round we’ve taken three rounds already and you know I don’t have the numbers exactly but something like, I would say thirty some million dollars of funding.
Andrew: Oh, wow. Sorry I meant thirty seven point five. I guess that’s it, thirty seven point five. I missed that. Part of that is to cash out the founders, the people who used their credit cards, the people who need to sleep well at night so that they can go and take risks during the day, isn’t it?
Interviewee: Well each funding situation was actually spurred by the need to grow not to pay for our salaries actually. The founders for a while were the lowest paid employees in the company but the first series A was driven by the fact that we needed to hire people and we had no money to do that. We needed to pay for these people’s lives, after that __, after that series B was to then grow the product and grow the user base and hire more people and so initially you know I think we were really great with [sacoya] which was our series A investor who said don’t worry about revenue for the first few years, worry about creating a really great product because without a great product and great user base, you are not going to have any user base to make any revenue off of and so the first two funding rounds were specifically built specifically actually taken to then see the product process. I think the third round of funding was then to help us grow our sales and marketing team to then create revenue and actually create a sustainable business and so within the life cycle of meebo, each funding decision was actually made to spur the company into the next cycle of growth and not to like to pay for, you know. Elaine, Seth and I still do meebo full time, still a hundred percent; we sleep and eat this company.
Interviewee: No.
Andrew: But you guys didn’t take any money off the table?
Interviewee: I think that that’s only something that we talk about publically but if you want to talk to the other people you are welcome to.
Andrew: Okay. Alright. I just kind of assumed that based on the research that I did, but you are saying that you’re not willing to say one way or the other right now?
Interviewee: It’s a thing that we just have a blanket policy on, so, yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Alright. Let’s look at the Meebo bar and a couple of different websites.
Interviewee: Sure.
Andrew: You said that people came to you because they wanted a way to chat, I’m looking at it from on a happy to see you from Justin TV where I’m broadcasting this interview. On Justin TV they often will have an ad on the left side of the screen. Usually, I think, it’s a car. You guys split the revenue there?
Interviewee: Yup, it’s fifty-fifty and one of the reasons why publishers really like the bar is the fact that you do get revenue off of it.
Andrew: Okay. And on other sites I’ve noticed that there is no advertizing, do they pay for that? What’s the deal for that?
Interviewee: So, a lot of the advertizing that goes on the bottom bar of the site is targeted or it’s targeted by the site. So, if it’s a music site it will get music ads. So if we know that the demographic of the site won’t want the car ad, the car ad just won’t show. You would rather not show ads than show ads that are inappropriate for the site.
Andrew: I see. Okay. But is there an option to not show ads?
Interviewee: So, there is an option to not show ads. There is also a self serve option so that non publisher like a single person who has a blog can then put a bar on their site and they don’t get ads either. So, right now there’s room for an ad, but a lot of times we’re still building the inventory and so we are learning how to actually create a really good ad experience; so right now the sort of… The ads based right there is not always being shown with an ad.
Andrew: I see. I could have sworn that I heard that said in an interview somewhere that you guys were charging for the bar or that there was some kind of fee for it, but I guess not. You are saying that it’s just revenues __.
Interviewee: Yup, exactly.
Andrew: Alright. I’m looking now at All Things D. All Things D uses it as a share page, as a share feature and on the bottom left there’s a button that says, ‘Share this page’, and if I click it, I can share this page on Twitter I think, on Facebook and a bunch of different websites.
Interviewee: Yup.
Andrew: How effective has that been? How much of a draw is that? It’s seems like it’s a bigger part of the bar than even the chat is today.
Interviewee: Right, so the bar itself can be used for many purposes and we are trying to create more of an overall social experience rather than say it’s a one-share thing, or it’s a one IM thing, and you can share content and you can IM as well. The share function is not limited to the button at the bottom of the bar, you can actually… Publishers have the option of… You can auto scan the page. And then find share-able content like videos and images and soon as you click on that, it will actually overlay with the little drag-to-share, and that drag-to-share has been really successful. So in terms of the sharing rate, I think we’ve seen something like 7% double checking number 7% share rates on these content sites. We’ve actually given them more engagement because there’s more things to engage with so we’ve seen fifteen to fifty percent bumps in traffic just by putting the share bar… the Meebo bar on there. And the thing about the drag-to-share functionality is that a lot of people see the buttons and they kind of ignore them and if you look at techy sites , I think technical users are really used to those things but non technical users aren’t going to be looking for these share buttons. They are going to be doing things that they normally do like drag, and click and to interact in a very non-technical way. And the drag-to-share thing was one thing that we found was really self resonating those users who kind of use the web in a normal kind of non-technical way.
Andrew: I see that by the way, on All Things D, if I mouse over the Steve Jobs’ video I get a little overlay on it that says drag to share it. And users are understanding what they need to do? That they need to, I guess, click it and then? You tell them where to drag it? Yeah, I can see that.
Interviewee: Yup.
Andrew: When you say 7% what does that mean? 7% of people are using the bar? 7% are sharing?
Interviewee: So, 7% are … I have to double check that number, so 7% are actually finishing the share, so they grab the content and actually share it out and the content gets distributed somewhere on the site or somewhere in the World Wide Web, somewhere.
Andrew: So, 7% of the people who drag it end up doing something with it and that something is usually a share experience?
Interviewee: I believe that 7% of those who interact with the bar, who actually engage in the site somehow. So, __ an active user.
Andrew: Oh really! So, 7% of the people who are engaged with this webpage are going to share it, using the bar?
Interviewee: You know, I would double check the numbers but something like that, yeah.
Andrew: Wow! Alright. Here’s another thing that it does. It lets All Things D highlight certain pieces of content like the News features in there. And on the bottom, I can see that, I can click over and see a bunch of reviews on the site. I can see their Twitter stream, I can see their Facebook fan page within the site and of course I can on the far right, I can chat. I noticed the chat isn’t chatting with other people on the website, it’s chatting with other people universally in my network, right? There’s still no way to say who else from my network is now on this website, I want to talk to them about it.
Interviewee: So we can actually do that, there are two sort of inclinations on the bar, so for contents like All Things D, she doesn’t… The site itself does not have a network of users that log in to All things D to read the content, they are just sort of everyday users that go there and they might have their other social graphs like Facebook or MySpace or Google, etcetera. But on other sites like Justin TV or Café Mom for example, they have log-in users and so we actually do power their social network. We take their social graph and turn that into an IM network so as soon as you log into Café Mom, you have access on to every other user on Café Mom and you can talk to them and chat, and things like that and share, and so there are kind of two inclinations of that sharing functionality.
Andrew: I see, wow! And do you know what percentage of people engage in that, in chat of any kind?
Interviewee: You know, I don’t have that number exactly but it’s much higher on those sites we actually do have registered users.
Andrew: Okay. Let’s see. Someone on the audience, Matthew [Clarsen], on the Meebo chat board is saying, “Sandy said earlier that adding video chat support was simple and quick. Does Meebo leverage Open Source to implement features as fast as possible or are developers just super bright?”
[Both Speak]
Interviewee: Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. We really love Open Source. I think I have to re-encourage my developers to contribute to Open Source. We do leverage a lot of Open Source to our development. In early days we discovered that you don’t want to re-invent the wheel, because the wheel is invented many times and there’s a lot of talent out there that’s already done a really great job with technologies so we try to __ as much as Open Source__. The video chat functionality was not build by Meebo, we’ve hired Top Box to do that, so we understand when we are good at things and when we are not very good at things and we partner with people who are very good because other things that we just don’t do.
Andrew: You also mentioned user experience. How do you iterate on user experience? What do you do? Do you bring people in? Do you watch them online?
Interviewee: So, we do a lot of things. We are very analytics driven so we do a lot of data that says ‘Where do people click? Where do people not click? What is their behavior online? What do they do? What they don’t do.’ And then you sort of mix that in with things like live interviews, we bring people into the office that are from local High Schools or from… We’ve actually made usability trips around the country just to see what do people do in Colorado, or in Maryland or wherever. And then you actually do a lot of asking, you say, “Okay, what do you like?” And then you try to trains like that into that into all the other data that you get, and we do have a lot things like AB testing so we design a feature maybe two, three ways. You give each way of the feature to some of the percentage of your user base and then whichever one responds better and you then iterate on that and then maybe make another three versions out of that iteration, so you continually iterate to make the product work better. But a lot of it is purely user driven just because I guess, you could probably build the product for yourself but at the end of the day the end user is always right.
Andrew: When you bring people in and ask them questions, how do you lead them through that process?
Interviewee: So, we are lucky that Elaine has a really big usability background so she does a lot of scientific methods in that usability study. We try not to influence them in any way, we give them a sort of new __ or click-able items or whatever. And then we kind of lead them through the experience and ask them, “Okay, how did you feel?”, “Did you notice this thing at the end?”, “Do you like this product?” or “Do you like this feature?”, “If you were to improve this feature what would you do?” So, just ask honest opinions and don’t give them one way or another any indication that they are doing it right or wrong, because there is no right or wrong, it’s just what they think.
Andrew: Wow! I’m so fascinated by that. I could do a whole interview just on that; just on the way you get feedback from users, just on listening labs. In fact, I have done a full interview on listening labs. It’s so fascinating to see what people engage in, what you think they are going to do and how they end up doing something completely opposite. How I think you said earlier, there are people who just click around a website and I’ve noticed that too in myself after doing an interview on usability that I really do, I just click on everything, or I move my mouse all the time. Even if I’m reading, my mouse is going up and down. Usability trips, what are those? How do they work?
Interviewee: Yup.
So, we’ve ran a couple but Elaine is actually the better person to talk to about that. What we usually do is we go out with the video camera and at that point we were trying to figure out I think it was, whether or not, how we should do mobile or something like that. And so, we would just go out, bring out a couple of devices and some questions and then we really ask people what they do. And then we do tape them, they would try to be as candid as possible. And again, you don’t want to influence them, you just want to say, “Well, what do you think about this?” And a lot of times you don’t want to ask a direct question, like, “Ok, which one would you like to see?” It’s more like, “Given these set of choices, where would you most likely click?” So, it’s …
Interviewee: …wait for it to get more truth out of them in the sort of the natural way that they would interface with something rather than sort of say okay you eliminated these three options which ones do you like because maybe these three options aren’t right and we were just not thinking about the fourth or fifth option, so it was actually really cool.
Andrew: Do you have example of something shocking that you discovered either through that or through ab testing?
Interviewee: Yeah, actually one of the early days in meebo we were designing the IM window, we had a send button and we were thinking about trying to minimize the window itself by getting rid of the send button and because all the icons had send buttons and we just weren’t sure whether people would like it or not and so we asked a bunch of users, okay would you want to see the send button disappear and something like that and they would __ no, no you can’t get rid of it and so we actually put testing in to see how many people hit the send button to send an IM versus hit ‘enter’ and it was like point one percent hit the send button and everybody else hit ‘enter’ and so we decided that’s enough data that we needed to just get rid of the send button so from that day on we had no send button in the IM window. But that was something that we would not have done if we had not put the data in there to actually test it.
Andrew: Did users complain when you got rid of the send button?
Interviewee: Some of them did but you know not as much as we thought because we had data to back it up and when they heard the data they were like, oh, I guess that’s true and so they just kind of went with it so it was kind of neat.
Andrew: Are you guys profitable?
Interviewee: Not yet, but hopefully, relatively soon. We’ve revved up our revenue engine about a year ago and so we are learning how to kind of create that revenue engine, hopefully you know soon enough we’ll be profitable.
Andrew: Why are you still supporting this chat box that I have on mixergy and that other people have on their sites? TMZ has it on their website, you don’t charge TMZ, it’s free, you let them brand it with their logo, you don’t really have much going back to you, right, there is a button that says click for meebo but that’s it. It just doesn’t even say just use the meebo logo, why do you still support it?
Interviewee: I think we still have a lot of people using it and you know one of the things we said was that we really listen to the user and they are still a large majority of users who really like that functionality and as I said as things evolve, you want to evolve with it and so we understand that there is a need for that kind of chat room functionality and the way we have done it so far is solve that need but we understand that it’s going to change and so you can imagine in the future putting that chat room in the bar, right, so that could persistent over page so that you don’t have to be stuck on one page and chat with your friends and so until we give an alternative sort of new version of that functionality we are not going to take it away unless there is you know, unless no one is using it and so even though it does cost us some effort in trying to keep it up, we do want certainly to make our users happy, so we keep it around.
Andrew: You know I love this chat box because it doesn’t require people to log in, it doesn’t require them to give you their email address or password or anything, they just give themselves a name and they go, if they don’t want to give themselves a name and some people sometimes don’t, they get assigned a name and a number, guest12 whatever. Let me suggest this since I have you here. Got to check out tiny chats chat box, when you log into tiny chat you can actually, you don’t even need to log in, just like with meebo but you can also log in with twitter or face book and I think when you log in with twitter and a lot of people do because they just kind of just assume that they need to and a tweet goes out that says, I am chatting on this page with this many people, come in. I did that once for one video and people just kept flooding in and flooding in, it was an avalanche. What do you think of that? From your corporate philosophy, how does that stand?
Interviewee: So we’ve actually done a lot of experiments with that when we initially launched the chat functionality and we understood that if you could get a lot of people in one space there has got to be some way to get value at that and so we actually tried advertising in the room, we tried to create more of an application feature in the room so you could actually video chat with people, you could play games with people in the room, you could create you own app, we tried develop a platform around that room thing but again that wasn’t really, it didn’t solve those four needs, for meebo, the user, the publisher and the advertiser and so we kind of thought that you know, we could do that, but there is a better way that we feel more passionate about and we think it is a better solution for all those four audiences in the bar than there is by simply sort of itirating on the chat room functionality and so we kind of parked that for a little while and then concentrated on the bar itself and the realized that the bar could be a better way to then facilitate that kind of action once we get there so when we do get the chat rooms and then we pull that into the bar, that kind of experience we would focus a lot more on but right now it’s kind of pushed in the back room a little bit.
Andrew: I see. Alright, well, I will just say this, it might not really be part of you culture but I want, when I am in a chat room, whether it’s on my site or somebody else’s site, I want as many people in there as possible because it’s kind of awkward when you are in a room and there is hardly anyone there and the people who are there want more of their friends to come in anyway, so there is some kind of almost automatic trigger that brings in their friends would be great. I once was in a video chat with a social media a guy was in there going come on everyone chat with me which was me and I think one other person probably working in this company, it was so freaking sad, I stood there for a while, for as long as I could because I didn’t want to leave the guy hanging but I eventually had to come into an interview, really sad. If you could solve that, I think you could find a solution that a lot of us would feel good about.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: Finally, what’s coming up in the future?
Interviewee: So right now we are really focusing on the bar and trying to get that everywhere across the web and our goal is to be able to just sort of create the best engaging social experience for all the sites out there and can become that layer in which people can connect with their friends, bring their friends into these sites and then the sites themselves can be able to share their content out and bring users back in, so it’s kind of like this really cool cycle that comes back and forth. Our goal right now is to get on as many sites as we can and then create that portal to as many social networks in social grass as possible. There is this whole new thing called the social graph optimization where before it was about getting your site on top of Google. Now it’s about how do you bring your friends into a site in the most engaging possible way and kind of be able to spread that content out and then bring that content back in and then create the sort of like really cool social ecosystem and that’s a really, really lofty goal but something that we are actually striving for and it’s really exciting. So that’s kind of our goal right now and also just to become profitable and a sustainable business, so it’s always a good thing.
Andrew: You know I am sorry, you just reminded me of a question that I promised the audience I would ask that I didn’t get to ask you yet. How are you getting on all these different sites? Your bizdev is phenomenal.
Interviewee: So it’s a two way thing. We are actually right now on about a hundred and sixty five live premium sites through [bd] and then about five thousand sites through the self serve functionality, where you can just kind of get it yourself. And one of the things like I said, we learn previously __, how to create a good BD team to then go and figure out what the needs of these publisher are.
Andrew: I am sorry we lost a connection for a moment there…
Interviewee: A good BD team to figure out what the needs of the publishers are and so you know props to them, props to the product team for really listening to the publisher and listening to the user to create the best product so that the BD team can be armed with the correct sort of things on how we can increase your engagement, we can increase your share rates, we can give you revenue on ads, because our ads on, our bar itself get like a one percent engagement rate and people spend like almost a minute in the ad which is unheard of on the internet. And so all of those things are sort of a team effort on many learnings from the past few years how to create the best experience.
Andrew: Aright. Well thank you for doing this interview. It’s great to meet you. How can people follow up with you? How can they talk to you after this interview?
Interviewee: Just feel free to email me. It’s sandy@meeboinc.com. We are also hiring so I got to get that plugged in. So we are looking for engineers and go to our job site and take a look but, yeah.
Andrew: What’s the website, I want to help you out.
Interviewee: jobs@meebo.com. Very easy.
Andrew: jobs.meebo.com, alright and you’re jen@meeboinc.com.
Interviewee: sandy@meeboinc.com.
Andrew: Oh, sorry. Right. Thank you Interviewee, sandy@meeboinc.com. Thank you guys for watching, this was a phenomenal interview. I am really glad that you were able to do this with me, thank you.
Interviewee: It was fun.
Andrew: Bye.
Interviewee: Bye.
