What started out as a class project at Cal for Professor Brewer soon turned into reality the summer following graduation. Arthur Klepchukov, one of the seven original projectmates, decided he’d take the project a little further with the help of his good friend, Jerry Cheung.
Arthur and I had met a few times at ST@B mixers, and then I briefly saw him again at the DropBox party two weeks ago, so last week, I decided to interview him regarding his pet project, Outspokes.
Arthur, since you were one of the original team members, how did you guys think of the initial idea and what were some features the team thought of but threw out or modified and built into the final product? What were some of Professor Brewer’s reactions and feedback?
The initial idea was inspired by the freelance web design experience of the original team members on the project. We wanted to create a better way to get feedback on your web site. So, when you have something to show to your client or boss, they can visit the site and easily make comments, right in our widget at the bottom of each page. We thought this was much easier than writing long, ambiguous emails or trying to do a call or meeting.
Our original vision included a separate tool to get feedback on images (like mockups or wireframes) but we dropped that because of time constraints.
At the end of the semester, Professor Brewer encouraged us to add a way to actually edit things on a web page. This became our current designs feature and Brewer was impressed that we got it done in the last 2 weeks.
We became a company this summer because I had Jerry and Sean, great friends who believed in the vision, to help me as soon as I graduated. They idea clicked as soon as I showed them a demo.
Introduce the team! When did Jerry, Sean, and Nikki join in and what were everyone’s contributions? (Sean told me a while back that he was working on a startup with you, but he never told me any details.)
Jerry’s our rockstar engineer (I’m an engineer too but a ninja, not a rockstar). He’s been involved part-time since early summer and came on full-time in mid-September after quitting his job at Coupa.com, just in time for TechCrunch50!
Sean’s done everything from business development to interaction design to dealing with our lawyers to perfecting our deck. He graduated when I did (this May) and came on full-time in early July. Sean’s been great but is unfortunately reducing his involvement because he’s in a different place financially than the rest of us.
I couldn’t have turned a class project into a company without Jerry and Sean.
Nikki just joined as our marketing intern and she’s currently trying to drum up some press for us in other blogs.
And I’ve been here the longest, doing a lot of coding & design as well as anything else that absolutely needs to get done.
Awesome! I see Outspokes as a valuable widget if I’m designing a brand new website with bugs, navigation issues, organizational inefficiencies, but once I’ve finished my last iteration and reached a final design that everyone is satisfied with, I no longer see the need for Outspokes. Because Outspokes charges a monthly fee, do you guys plan to keep the same clients or do you see this as more of a one-time product that people pay for only when they need it?
Great question. Like you noticed, most changes happen when creating a new site (or radically redesigning an old one). So who regularly builds new sites and redesigns old ones? Freelancers and consulting firms, which is exactly why we’re targeting them. We think there are directions our technology can go to help people throughout the entire lifecycle of a web site but right now we’re staying focused on who we know we can help month after month: people building great web sites for others.
The hardest part of every startup is to develop its user base. I understand that Outspokes has presented at SF New Tech and demo’d at TC50 this year. Were you guys able to get any funding and what was the general feedback from the public? How else do you plan to market Outspokes?
We were thrilled to be in the TechCrunch50 DemoPit and on stage at SF New Tech! I’ve never pitched that much in my life. We actually weren’t looking for funding then but we found our first paying customer at TC50 and got some great feedback on where to go next. We learned it definitely wasn’t a product for everyone but Outspokes clicked with people who worked on web sites for others like freelancers and web consulting agencies.
We’re experimenting with a bunch of social media marketing at the moment: Twitter, a Facebook page, and blog posts like this one. Word-of-mouth is more genuine than ads and fits our bootstrapping budget.
So what do you envision for the future of Outspokes, and where would you like to see Outspokes five years from now? Any last comments?
In the immediate future, we’d love to be part of Y Combinator for their Winter 2010 season. We applied and have an interview scheduled, so wish us luck!
Long term, I’d love to wake up one morning knowing that our tool plays an essential role in our customers’ success. I want our tool to be so helpful in their daily workflow that “Outspokes” will be the first word that comes to mind when they start building a new web site. We want to create something so useful that our customers forget how horrible web development collaboration was before Outspokes existed.
Readers, I’m sure you’ll also love to wake up one morning and realize…OUTSPOKES IS GIVING AWAY FREE PREMIUM ACCOUNTS! Outspokes just tweeted a few minutes ago, now it’s your turn to retweet! Here are the details:
Outspokes Tweet-a-palooza: Free Premium Accounts!
Get a $10/mo premium Outspokes account for free through January 2010!Outspokes is a great new collaboration tool for anyone involved in creating or managing a web site. Whether you’re a freelancer with an outspoken client, a consulting firm dealing with design by committee, or just a remote team all producing the next great web application, Outspokes can help you communicate faster and more clearly.
Just follow @Outspokes and tweet the following:
Excited to get my free premium @Outspokes account, thanks to this tweet!
RT to get yours: http://bit.ly/3RSgrPThen we’ll message you to confirm your account and get you on the premium plan!
What happens in January? If you love us, please stay on our paid premium plan. Otherwise, we’d be happy to provide you with our current free plan.