I‘ve been asked to present at the Future of Web Apps Summit which will be a 2-day conference in San Francisco September 13th and 14th. Also presenting will be Kevin Rose (Digg), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Evan Williams (Blogger & Odeo), Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress, Automattic), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Tantek Çelik (Technorati) Cal Henderson (Flickr),Tom Coates (Yahoo!) and about a bunch more. Each presenter will individually lead a whole session so there’s likely to be very little fluff and a lot of deep insights.

And, most realistically, attending the whole conference is currently only $295! Heck that means you could even fly to town and attend all on a personal budget. I find it insulting that some conferences charge enterance fees the price of a used car to attend meaning only those with deep spending accounts can attend. Carson Workshops make their events great by ensuring the most diverse audience is there. Their commitment to making a conference for everyone also explains how they get truly significant people to do 45 minutre presentations speaks for itself. Heck a couple of these people are heros of mine so I’m thrilled to be going myself.

Leave a comment if you are coming or having any thoughts on the conference. If you’d like to meet at or around the conference, just let me know.

We are looking for a highly-motivated, creative and passionate person to lead our marketing programs.

Your responsibilities will include designing, coordinating, executing, analyzing and improving all our marketing programs under a comprehensive and unified vision. Marketing programs will include: online and in-person community outreach, online and print advertising, event participation and sponsorship, SEM, SEO among many others. You will also be the point person with the press and with our PR firm, or running our own press campaigns.

Your experience should include 3-5 years in a senior web marketing position with an M.B.A. or equivalent experience. You should have experience managing agency relationship, implementing strategies, tracking effectiveness and managing budgets. You should have a deep knowledge of the web, social networking and the current industry atmosphere. You should know Adsense, Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Overture and similar technologies completely.

This is a fast-paced company that works very closely with each other. We are seeking an internet marketing star to lead our previously non-existing marketing program and be a key actor in bring our company to the next level of success. This is an on-site position with some travel though we cannot accept application for those wishing to work remotely.

Applicants should send a resume and cover letter to jobs AT dogster Dot com.

For more positions including an Online Ad Sales Associate can be found in our jobs page.

Big welcome woof and round of apaws to our newest software engineer, Jesse Proulx. Jesse’s a PHP, CSS and AJAX stud who was most recently working at Six Apart working with the LiveJournal team. In fact Jesse had worked with Brad Fitzpatrick, LiveJournal’s founder as part of the Danga Interactive team since he was the third employee in 2001, and came to San Francisco as part of the LJ aquisition by SixApart in 2005.

Jesse’s deep experience in building community web features for a thriving community are already being put to great use and we’re thrilled to have him as part of the team. He’s also the proud dad of two great dogs (Logan, and Rummel) and knows exactly why people love our sites and why we’re profoundly excited to make them so much better.

Dogster, Inc. team at lunch. Just missing John D. Williams

Malak Hamwi wrote a nice piece about Dogster, Catster and the state of social petworking for this week’s issue of Newsweek. You can read an online version at MSNBC. We spent about 30 minutes on the phone so I was quite pleased to see that she got at the essence of the passion that makes our communities so active.

Ultimately, the sites are another way for humans to connect. Owners, who communicate with one another mainly in the voices of their animals, usually wind up making human friends. “We discuss human topics,” says Susan Bailey of Buckinghamshire, England, whose cat is named Bruce. “But through the cats.”

Passion-centric web communities (for the sake of convenience, let’s call them PCWCs) are online spaces that focus entirely on one shared passion or topic. There are many of these communities thriving on the web today that span a wide variety of subjects. Some of these subjects include: cars, gaming, electronic gadgets, sports and, of course, our favorite, pets.

Here at Dogster and Catster we have had the opportunity to work with some of the most passionate people on the planet and nurture one of the web’s most thriving PCWCs. This work has led me to believe that there are four components that need to be adequately satiated for a passion-based community to thrive and sustain. They are Entertainment, Sociality, Information and Services.

Entertainment

PCWCs must be fundamentally entertaining for those who have a real interest in the topic. At Dogster and Catster we found that people just love looking at dog and cat pictures and this was the starting point for our whole existence. Dog photos are fun and relaxing. There is a good, positive feeling associated with it and many users have told us surfing our sites is like taking a breath of fresh air or having a nice little walk outside. Each PCWC must find a way to entertain its community at the simplest and most direct level. Each PCWC must find a way to make “digital Doritos” for its users. Nobody should be able to leave your site with only clicking once.

Sociality

Anyone who is passionate about something likes to talk about it and you need to enable your users to do this. Keep in mind, however, that there are many different levels at which people are comfortable communicating. At Dogster and Catster we have structured our socially engaging channels to accommodate these different levels of users. First, the profile and the public face for our members is that of their pet. This allows users to keep their personal profile private while at the same time allowing them to reflect their own personality and sensibilities through a real world entity that means a lot to them – their dog or cat. We have also built in different commitments of communication. First, there is the anonymous act of giving a dog or cat a bone or treat. This is just a nice way of saying that they like their page and pictures. For those who want to engage a little deeper there is private messaging as well as the ability to make pup pals (feline friends), join groups, post in forums and, coming soon, instant messaging. All of this is done through the avatar of your pet and only when you choose do you reveal other personal information to your new friends and acquaintances. Social engagement is critical for a sustainable and thriving community. The multiple levels of social engagement allow users to test the waters and become comfortable before progressing to the deeper levels of social engagement.

Information

If people are really going to get passionate about something there needs to be some depth and complexity to the topic. There might be gear one must have, skills one must learn, strategies one must implement, history one must internalize and so on. User-generated content or professionally published, content is a must have for a true passion-centric community. Whether a pet has recently joined your family or if you had pets for years, there are so many things to learn, discuss and discover. On Dogster some of our most active areas are the forums, where users generate thousands of pages of content while discussing doggie nutrition, training techniques, pet health, dog laws and much, much more. We also have professional blogger Joy Ward’s community blog and veterinarian Dr. Barchas’ popular weekly column, “Ask Dr. Barchas.” Allow users to dig into the details and learn/teach about the things they love.

Services

Adding community-relevant services is a no-brainer as long as they are not too difficult to implement. These services, if truly valuable, will be a great convenience to your community and may provide you with a revenue stream in the process. Dogster implemented a pet-friendly hotel & travel booking system. It is a plug & play solution that only took a few days to implement and provides a very convenient service for our users while bringing in a little bit of extra revenue. The important thing here is to make sure it is really a benefit to the community and not a way to squeeze a few bucks out of them. Throwing tons of affiliate program links at them is not the same as providing a valuable, convenient service.

By providing your community great products and tools in these four areas you will be well on your way to creating a thriving PCWC. Of course, the really important thing is that you keep community and the object of the community’s passion above all other concerns, even revenue, but that is a whole separate post.

For a related post check out Ted’s post on Object-centric Sociality.

I would love to hear any comments or critiques of this post.

Last March I led a panel at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference on building web-based companies on micro-budgets. I was really pleased with all the speakers and thought they shared a wealth of information about how they’ve been able to achieve success at launching their services.

You can download the
podcast from SXSW.

Here is the panel description:
Do it yourself web production is rivaling even the biggest internet players. Zero budgets or even nascent skills are no longer a barrier to launching successful web projects. Teams of two or three can accomplish what used to take large groups to produce. Learn how these bootstrappers used their abilities to turn good ideas into huge accomplishments without going into life-long debt or making a deal with the devil.

Moderator: Ted Rheingold Top Dog, Dogster Inc

Mike Hudack Co-Founder, blip.tv
Lynda Keeler Founder, Delight Network
Matt Mullenweg, Founder Automattic, Wordpress
Gina Trapani Editor, Lifehacker.com

Here’s a wrap-up entry I wrote after the panel concluded.

 

Dogster, Inc. attended Gnomedex, a Seattle-based gathering of future-focused web geeks and those that work with them.

Slides by Chris Messina & Tara Hunt.
Click to restart. See larger version.
Many aspects of Dogster’ Inc’s development strategy was succinctly stated in Chris Messina’s and Tara Hunt’s conversation starting panel “Think Small.” I was honored when they asked me to reflect for the attendees about how thinking small has made all the difference for Dogster Inc. The two of them have already both worked on many projects and we wish them the best of luck in their new endeavor Citizen Agency.

We’ve turned Dogster and Catster from a night and weekend side-project into a well growing company of 9. We’ve made lots of mistakes and uncovered amazing benefits. In fact ‘Thinking Small’ has served us so well we are now able to realistically ‘Think Big.’ At this point not only do we know there is so much more we can offer (we’ve felt that since day one ;) but we now have the proper foundation to support significant growth, and we have the experience and deep relationships such that we know we can do it sustainably. The best part about not shooting-the-moon and going from zero-to-huge in one step is that if at any point we determine we’ve maxed out certain growth we can down-trend that growth and still have the vibrant business and community that we built to that point.

Chris and Tara made a PDF and Keynote version of the presentation available yet thanks to their Creative Commons share and share alike licenses I converted it into a animated gif for easy web viewing. To watch the image again, just click on it.

Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, the points I’d like to reiterate and add are:

• Success is what you define it to be
• Don’t raise your expectation of success without recognizing you’re achievements
• Keep your success definition personal, avoid making it a comparison to others.
• Spend as little money as possible ;>
• Don’t go into debt unless you can live without the money forever.
• Let your users/customers be your marketing research team
• Let your users/customers be your beta testers
• Let your users/customers determine your feature road map
• Release quickly, fail quickly
• Make sure you have a business before you spend like it’s a business
• Hype it down while you build it up
• Build relationships from bottom up
• Serve your users/customers from the top down
• Share responsibility as widely as possible amongst team members
• Focus on what your customers say not what experts say
• Barter for services
• Learn what you don’t already know

Think Small! Go Big!