Spacehoot is a social networking platform for small business promotion.
Start-Ups.Co conducted a very interesting interview with Mr. ‘Mark Melton‘; CEO at the Nigeria (Abuja) – based start-up company “Spacehoot”.
“Spacehoot“ is a social networking platform for business promotion.
Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Melton’ regarding his start-up company ”Spacehoot”;
1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Spacehoot” is all about?
Spacehoot is a social networking platform for small business promotion. Spacehoot helps small businesses, solo professionals and freelancers to create, showcase and promote their portfolios/achievements in a friendly, organized and professional environment. This promotion is done in a social setting, thus creating an unobtrusive environment for social marketing.
2. When has “Spacehoot” been founded? And what stage is “Spacehoot” currently at?
Spacehoot was founded in December 2012. It has since been under development and various stages of testing.
As at September 15, 2013, Spacehoot has been open to the public. Minor iterations may be effected as necessary, but the web application is fully functional, hosted and launched. More people are signing on daily.
3. What is “Spacehoot”‘s business model and how does it work?
Spacehoot intends to operate via advertisement. As the user base continues to grow, space will be created for advertisers to promote “hoots”, projects (their own portfolio) and other content types that other non-advertising users can also create for free.
Spacehoot does not plan to use any affiliate or third party advertisers, and that has the potential to clutter the user interface, which has been deliberately designed to be clean and non-cluttered.
4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?
For most of it, Spacehoot is a one man’s effort. The idea was incubated and brought to fruition by Mark Melton.
Mark is a .Net programmer, web developer and designer. The whole application and initial marketing was carried out by Mark. However, at this point, he is exploring partnership, outsourcing or ceding a portion of his stakes in Spacehoot for an experienced web 2.0 marketer or marketing company.
5. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace? In other words what’s unique about you and what’s new about what you make?
Our uniqueness is in the simplicity of our application. While it offers many of the features of a fully fledged business networking site, it has made it extremely easy and non-intimidating for non-savvy small business owners.
The core of our application is in helping small businesses create and showcase their achievements. While this is not a new idea, it has however been somewhat restricted to the sphere of designers and photographers who have for years used the web as e-portfolios.
By showcasing achievement, Spacehoot hopes to help small businesses use social media to market in a completely different way. Instead of text-based marketing messages, users can showcase tangible achievements!
6. What is your growth like? And what milestones has “Spacehoot” achieved so far?
Spacehoot is a toddler. Born barely three days ago. At this point, our achievements are measured in our marketing campaigns. While this needs a huge push, however, we have releases several press releases that are slowly bringing in new users. Also, we are beginning to get mentions in blog posts.
Also, Spacehoot currently ranks at #527,586 most visited site according to Alexa, which is very impressive for a new startup.
7. Who are your competitors? And what is “Spacehoot”‘s competitive advantage over them?
Pretty every social website is our competitor. However, we consider LinkedIn as our primary competitor.
LinkedIn, while mature and feature-rich, is very intimidating and unintuitive. Many features on a site can render it unusable. We intend to remain nibble, so as to be able to respond quickly to emerging trends, and to create some of those trends ourselves. We intend to remain so easy to use that a first time user will immediately understand every feature on our site without needed help, which in turn will get them hooked.
8. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?
We still face obstacles, and there are many we have not yet overcome.
However, our major obstacle has been in the area of marketing communication, and applying universal naming and explanations to the user interface items.
We overcame this by appealing to, and getting inputs from a large number of testers from across the globe. We particularly placed emphasis on testers from USA, UK, Germany, India, Nigeria and Australia to enable us get as broad inputs as possible.
9. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
Our targets are small businesses that sell tangible goods and services. These make up the largest number of small business in the growing world. However, in the current social marketing paradigm, they are effectively excluded.
How so? Because the current marketing practice, inbound marketing, is mostly about content! It says “generate as much useful content as possible, and then we (the search engines and social sites) can send you more traffic! But how can a door seller generate sufficient content that will be good enough for a audience base? So at Spacehoot, we say “put up a picture of one of your doors, white a description of it, and we will make all your followers see it in their streams”
10. Why are you going to succeed?
Because a large number of small businesses are disillusioned about the usefulness of social media in their marketing campaigns and efforts!
As soon as they discover how easy it is to create and showcase their products/services at Spacehoot, they will keep coming back. Plus, anyone can contact users of Spacehoot via Spacehoot, and we will send an email with the complete message to the creator of a project. Who wouldn’t like that?
11. If “Spacehoot” succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
Online shopping. We will allow our users buy and sell among themselves. This can be achieved by partnering with online payment service providers.
We also intend to offer analytic tools that will allow users to monitor their social performance. Not only on Spacehoot, but on other social networks they belong as well. The technology is known to use.
12. Why did you choose this idea and concept to build “Spacehoot” based on?
First, because we sold microfinance software ourselves. And the current paradigm of inbound marketing did little for us. So what we asked was “if there was a social platform where we can simply create our products (on Spacehoot we use Project or Portfolio for this) then we would not have to worry about writing articles and all that. Who would read articles from a microfinance software vendor? So we decided to build something for others who do not have any useful cause to create large, useless (from operations point of view) cache of content to to get two prospects to come to their sites!
13. What have you learned so far from launching your idea?
We have learnt that all those good features cannot appeal to any user unless we communicated it in such a way that a potential user will see value in it.
We implemented some of the best technologies available in matching users to projects or other users (for networking and promotion), we have a way for users to broadcast messages to their followers (quite different from what other social networks offer). But who cares what is under the hoods, until we can communicate it to them in such a way that will help them see the inherent and potential value in these features?
14. Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
Localization. We will need to have Spacehoot speak Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Italian and Zulu. We see that as a problem we may face soon. Other than the little problem of having a good advertising machine that will not clutter our interface, that is the primary problem we foresee, and this problem is challenging to us in the sense that it is difficult to translate a user interface while maintaining a consistent look and feel.
15. What’s the benefit for the customer/user?
She is in India, she can reach out to people in Canada and showcase her exquisite, pink Indian scarfs. Then a large order can be placed because the buyer in Canada actually saw a picture of the scarf samples, read what other users said about the scarfs, saw the social interactions of the scarf seller, obtained enough intelligence about the buyer to convince her to place the order. It is this power of social media we want to place in the hands of the small business woman.
16. How did customers / users find out about you?
They are still finding out about us. Primary, at this point, we depend on using social media to reach out to our potential users. But there is a catch.
Many of our potential users are not exactly on Twitter or Google+, so are using small business forums, question and answer forums to reach out to our users.
17. Who are your current customers / users? Who are your target customers / users?
Our current users are small businesses and freelancers who are discovering us from our press releases and some of the forums we participate in.
Our feature users will be small businesses, freelancers and solo professionals who have something to showcase and sell, and desire a simple medium with a large user base to show it to.
18. Where do new customers / users come from and what makes new customers/users try you?
New users are either referred by other users, or who find our site via search. Also, because our site is open and SEO friendly, user may find other users they know via search, and they may follow and sign up.
Our customers small businesses already looking for sites to help them promote their businesses. So with the right message, they sign up.
19. What do your customers / users say about your product and/or service?
One of our users said “Awesome, now I know mobile users can see my product pictures”
Another said “Can I promote the cultural day event at my school too?” (That is currently being tested and will be due in a couple of weeks)
Another said “It feels just like Facebook! This is where I will put up my products!”
Another said “Can I download it on my phone like Twitter?”
20. How are you going to scale?
Scaling is an area we have thoroughly planned. Our scaling challenges will come from acquiring or renting more computing resources and localizing Spacehoot to several languages.
The first problem can be settled by additional investment. The later by outsourcing interpretation of our interface to professional translation services.
21. What’s the biggest missing feature? The one thing customers/users keep asking for?
So far there is no very big missing feature. However, more users are asking for a standalone mobile version. This we intend to provide in the next five months.
As we continue to document the user agents (type of mobile devices that access the Spacehoot), we will provide standalone versions for those platforms.
22. Are you going to internationalize? And if yes how are you planning to expand your start-up’s operations accordingly?
We intend to internationalize. For our product, this has to do with translating the user interface to the languages we intend to target and register domains that target our international users. Other than that, Spacehoot will operate from a centralized location. This is because our services do not require the physical presence of Spacehoot (as a business) in any particular locale.
23. How big do you think you can get? Why? And how you are planning to achieve your goals?
We target 1 billion user in five (5) years. The reason why we target such a large user base is: being a social paltform, Spacehoot will offer best value to the users when there is a large number of users to network with, showcase products to, and promote events to.
To achieve this, we will promote Spacehoot in all major forums, groups and events where small businesses converge.
24. Are you looking to hire a new workforce? And if yes, what job vacancies do you currently offer and where can potential applicants contact you at?
We are not looking to hire at this moment. We intend to outsource some of the tasks at Spacehoot. These tasks include 1. User interface design. and 2. PR related functions.
We have a contact form at Spacehoot. And as soon as we are ready to outsource any function, or hire, we will advertise it to our users.
25. Are you looking for partnership opportunities or funding from Venture Capitals (VC) or other funding sources? Or your business is self-sustainable? And if the first option applies where can potential partners / investors contact you at?
In the long, our business is not self-sustainable. The social media scene is a fierce battle ground. To succeed, there is a need for sufficient funds to give it a good early push and make it tip.
While we have not yet initiated any moves to seek VC funding, it is an option we hope to explore as soon as we can.
We have however started looking for partnership opportunities, especially in the area of marketing and PR.
26. What advice do you have for fresh entrepreneurs?
Don’t leave marketers out at the start! Make sure you have enough communicators to point out to you how to structure and internet application to appeal to the potential end user.
For instance, at Spacehoot, we used “project” to refer to a “portfolio” item. People have askes us “Are you marketing project management?”
27. Finally, do you have any other comments that you would like to add?
Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.Yes. We are appealing for partnership, especially in the area of marketing communications. If you desire to partner with us, kindly use the contact form at our site to, well, contact us. The url for our contact form is our url/contact.
