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 Each year, MIT Media Review picks the 35 top innovators under the age of 35. This year they selected Joshua Schacter, founder of the bookmark tagging and sharing service Del.icio.us, as the 2006 Innovator of the Year.
This honor comes as of no surprise to us. Since the day we met Joshua he’s shown a profound understanding of human usage of the Internet and the technologies required to make that happen.
 Many have asked why we, Dogster, Inc., raised money recently when we are already profitable. One answer is that the funding enables us to grow at a much quicker pace than organic revenues would. Now we can hire faster, add more servers and capacity, take advantage of our early market position and even begin to get our name out there with a marketing strategy. Yet, an equal compelling reason is that with this round we have added some brilliant, talented, successful minds to our team in our Angel syndicate.
What an honor for Joshua and I cannot tell you how honored we are to have an MIT “Innovator of the Year” as an investor on our team.
Furthermore, we’d like to congratulate Joshua on Del.icio.us’ upcoming third birthday and surpassing 1,000,000 registered site members. Wowie Zowie!
Photo by Thomas Hawk
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Two months ago, John discussed what we perceive to be the four core components of passion-centric web communities: entertainment, sociality, services, and information. While preparing for my Future of Web Applications talk, I compiled a list of other commonalities that thriving communities often exhibit.
- » Site design, copy and user interface that not only reflects the community member’s passion, but actually amplifies it.
- » Clearly stated ground rules that are community-generated and community-approved.
- » Trusted community moderation. A community is a garden and that needs to be tended with sincerity and consistency.
- » Safety and privacy policies are taken very, very (did I say “very”?) seriously.
- » Extensive opt-in/opt-out settings so members have ability to engage and interact with the community in a manner with which they are comfortable.
- » Depth of subject.
- » Excellent customer support and deep community involvement in new feature determination.
- » The entity organizing the community is it’s guardian and caretaker not exploiter.
- » Employees of the community are members too.
Are there other commonalities you see in popular passion-centric communities?
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 All I have to say is if you can spend a couple years working on a business that is very popular with customers (or as we call them members), and if you can keep up the popularity while making it a profitable business, and then you find an amazing group of investors to help you add knowledge and fuel to your endeavor, you’ll find you get quite a bit of industry recognition.
The press has been overwhelming. Here’s a run down:
Thanks also to everyone who has taken the time to write, call, visit, report, take pictures and hear the Dogster and Catster story!
We really do want to thank our investors for understanding why this truly is about the dog and cat lovers out there and giving us the opportunity to offer this huge community so much more. All we can say is: keep an eye on us! We’ve been working on an awesome list of features and services for years, and now we can make those happen!
I also want to acknowledge the people out there that have been critical of Dogster and/or the investors. The critiques have covered the full spectrum - from experienced, wise skepticism to self-described haters. This comes with the territory of course. Although, it is commonly said that I started this as a joke (I may have even made this quip myself in the past), in truth it was started out of a love for pets and the fact that there was no one place online to share them. Moreover, from a business perspective, my co-founders and I very clearly remember the lessons learnt from the boom and burn days of the roaring ’90s. That is why Dogster has always been, from day 1, about creating a real community and building a sustainable business with real revenues and real earnings. Servicing a wonderful community and building a viable, long-term business are the cornerstones of Dogster, Inc. I should also point out that profitability does not mean a company has the resources to do everything it can as fast as its customers want. We knew, however that we had built a solid foundation that was ready for much more than our existing growth patterns would allow us. By taking an investment now we’ll be able to significantly increase our momentum and expand our team to include some of the best and brightest investors in the industry to help us reach those new heights.
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UPDATED: Please welcome Russell Brent, our new Office Manager.
 We need a highly-organized, professionally-minded administrator to help us keep our office running smoothly. Responsibilities include maintaining financial accounts, human resources supprt, general reception duties, managing our store fulfillment, staff support, member support and the like. This is an entry-level position, but you’ll learn a ton, have a good chance for promotion and get to work in a fun, exciting office.
Please see the full job desciption if you are interested and feel free to pass it on. This would be an excellent opportunity for a talented person looking to prove their capabilities. If you got talent and skills, can learning on-the-fly, can handle any problem and work well with everyone, then we have a really great opportunity for you to show your stuff.
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Last week I gave a 45 minute presentation on the State, Future and Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities at the excellent Future of Web Applications Summit. The reviews of my talk we’re quite good.
People have been asking for a copy of my presentation. I’ve released the entire slide set under a Creative Commons non-commercial share alike licensense. You can view them:
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks prepared a bunch of audio files, took great notes and gives links to many of the sites I refer to.
Cameron Olthuis ‘floated’ some great notes he took in PostBubble which appears to be some wisdom-of-the-crowds site to forecast new trends in web dev.
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 3 full years ago, back when Dogster was nothing but a grey-screen proof-of-concept, my girlfriend at the time (she’s now my wife ;) rolled up her sleeves and helped out where she saw I was hurting the most. Molly was smart enough to know not to commit fulltime to the petsanity (and possibly risk our love ;) but was always there when problems felt too big to break into pieces or too many to even know where to start.
Since launch, under the nom de plume Molly Golightly, she selected our Dog and Cat of the Week, the ultimate honorific the sites can bestow. It may sound like an ultimate joy, but the responsibilities of sniffing the most worthy among thousands is no easy task. Somehow she always managed to find deserving pets from different corners of the site each week. Winners were consistently praised and the only reoccurring complaint I ever heard was “why doesn’t she pick my furbulous sweetie?”
After almost three years of picking winners, Molly is handing over responsibilities to a top secret cabal of canine and feline judges who report directly to HQ via a one-of-a-kind paw-friendly internet terminal. On behalf of Dogster, Catster, and all 218 chosen Dog and Cat of the Week winners, thanks Molly, we’re purrrrfectly grateful.
Why not take a walk down memory lane? We made a stroll of all the Dog of the Week winners and all the Cat of the Week winners. And, for the first time ever Molly feels it’s okay to let it be known who her dog is. Meet Molly’s dog Sassy, who sadly passed away not long after the above photo was taken, but is still romping around on the site and in our hearts.
If you want to follow Molly around the internet, if you like fashion you can sniff Molly’s new site at MollyBloom.com or get the overall picture at MollyGolightly.com.
Thanks Molly, I could not have done it without you. I know I was wrong when I first said “no honey, this will be easy to make and I’ve got all the code written already” but I’m so glad you knew to let me go for it anyway.
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 Ellen may be the newest member of the Dogster team but she is no stranger to us. John, Greg and I all worked with Ellen at Preview Travel and Travelocity way back in the Dot Com Boom days. In fact, borrowing time on Ellen’s computer was how I managed to build my very first website which subsequently led to her hiring me at Preview Travel in the fall of ‘96.
Ellen was an integral part of growing Preview’s online business. She designed and built the UI for AOL’s first and the world’s second web-based airline ticket purchasing sites. By late 1997 Preview Travel was taking in $1 million a month in travel bookings and in fall of 1999 Preview Travel, then a public company, was acquired by Sabre’s Travelocity (although technically a merger, to all but the finance whizzes it was an acquisition).
Ellen stayed with Travelocity until the two companies were fully integrated and then started her own design firm, cake & media, and relocated to Paris and New York. In fact, before the dog days of Dogster, my web development company, One Match Fire, partnered with cake & media on a few e-commerce projects including stores for William Stuart Antiques and Coastal Goods.
 Needless to say our tails were wagging when Ellen decided to move back to San Francisco and we were barking mad when she finally succumbed to our begging and pleading to accept the position of Creative Director at Dogster, Inc. Ellen’s arrival marks the first time Dogster and Catster have had a full-time graphic designer. Our members are already enjoying graphical improvements we had put off for so long, and will benefit from having a purely graphical mind leading new feature UI and the site redesign they so badly deserve. Thanks to o2 design collective and Thinkcorps for getting our design to where it is today, but hold on to your collars everyone as it’s a new dawn over here and it’s not a minute too soon.
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 I wanted to share here first some very big news. Earlier this month Dogster, Inc., the makers of Dogster.com and Catster.com closed a $1 million Angel investment. After running our communities for two and a half years, and being profitable since last July, we finally decided the time was right to add some outside resources to our momentum.
For our members and community, we will be able to offer more features sooner. We’ll still be the same passionate, supportive group, there will just be more of us offering more great services. In fact, video is now out of beta and instant messaging will soon be a free feature for everyone!
The Angel investors are made up of respected industry veterans and successful entrepreneurs who have already become hands-on advisors helping us to manage our business and servers. They all wanted to be a part of Dogster, Inc. because they see how hard we strive to make people happy and how seriously we take our business.
Tail thumps and kitty head butts all around!
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 The NY Times Magazine published a solid article on the email-magazine service Flavorpill (login required) and their five year transition from a newsletter written on a kitchen table to a company with $3.5 million in annual revenues. If you are starting your own web-enabled advertising-funded business you should read it. They have been a role-model of ours for some time now.
Facts to not miss: Flavorpill has only 355,000 members; they have always had in-house ad sales; they grew without institutional funding; their annual revenue per user appears to be around $10!
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About 3 days after putting Dogster live in January, 2004, I thought letting people share videos would be superb but I knew I could never surmount the inherent formatting, hosting, serving and bandwidth issues. Perhaps a year later, a new dog community site appeared which had support for window media videos. I was envious but was still not even close to commiting to supporting video. I’ve been racking my brain to recall the site name but simply can’t anymore.
Then, the tech world caught up with us. Starting in March of this year, we found ourselves being courted by a slew of companies vying to be our video partner. They were ready to handle all the original problems (encoding, hosting, publishing, bandwidth). We literally got to choose from an amazing set of features and support. For us, Video Egg was the pick of the litter. Video Egg has no interest in building its own community; they want to be the video plumbing for communities. Using Video Egg, members can literally drag and drop videos from their harddrive onto our webpage and within minutes the video appears on their pet page. The best part is that the Video Egg app pre-encodes movies on the member’s desktop greatly reducing the filesize and thus the time needed to upload the file. Members can also make movies from their webcam within our webpages, send movies from phones, edit movies on their desktop, and of course can embed uploaded movies in any other webpage they want.
We’re also moving boldly into the present by making our entire video uploading tools ajaxian. Users users can add tags, add comments, and upload a second video while the first one is still uploading.
The geek in me really appreciates all this but the pet lover in everyone is going to melt when you start watching these videos. They are not going to save the world, but they are sweet and addictive and funny and so much of what Dogster and Catster are all about.
Five hundred videos are already posted. When we get to 5,000 videos, we’re going to launch a dedicated viewing area complete with ratings, favorites, tagging and the works. Watch out America’s Funniest Home Videos, we’re hoping to be challenging you for the superlative before the year is over!
See all dogs that have uploaded videos.
See all cats that have uploaded videos.
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