At first glance, Huddler.com may seem to be just another social networking site, but I would contend that this is not the case. Huddler is a well thought-out, elegantly integrated “social commerce” community platform for user-generated content, reviews, discussion forums, Wikis , videos and more. I had a chance to sit down with Dan Gill, CEO and co-founder of the new site. Dan and his brother founded Huddler on a cross-country trip in March 2007 as an advanced “old school discussion forum” that empowers knowledgeable, passionate, maven-types to share ideas and communicate with one another and the online community. Their goal is to improve the user interface and make online content broadly available for distribution, “because my mom couldn’t use [a typical discussion forum] if her life depended on it.”
The platform was built flexible enough to engage any interest group, but Huddler has devoted most of its time and energy thus far to their Green Home Huddle, where users discuss sustainable products and lifestyle tips. Dan explains that this is where “opportunity meets interest” for the Huddler team. And with so many new products flooding the green space, Dan realized that building a space for those most knowledgeable about the topics to easily share their opinions and ideas would be an invaluable resource for people. Because “ultimately what’s important is the educational aspect and distributing that information as broadly as we can.” Dan cites that people prefer peer opinion and peer review over expert opinion and expert review six to one. “We don’t have experts on the site. We have you, and your friends, and people like you.”
Huddler is a product focused review site. Dan refers to related sites along a spectrum ranging from comparison shopping sites like shopping.com or Yahoo shopping, sites that make money for each purchase and guide users to the point of sale as fast as possible, on one end, to discussion forums where experts give opinions, but limited functionality leads to hard to find information, on the other end. Huddler is right in the middle – providing and organizing in depth consumer education on focused topics, but stopping short of allowing purchases on the site. Layer on top of that a set of capabilities that bestow users with profiles which display their Wikis edited, products reviewed, forum posts, etc, and which complements Facebook nicely.
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you that building something from nothing is easy, because it is most assuredly not,” Dan warned me. He and his brother bootstrapped the company at the start, not paying themselves for 14 months. Earlier this year they took on some angel investment from five different investors. One mistake Dan made in getting the company started was ignoring the advice he heard on so many occasions – to release early and release often. “We’re too much perfectionists to listen to that advice. We wouldn’t. We wanted to have a polished product ready to go.”
Like many start-ups, Dan has not spent a dollar on marketing – it’s all been by word of mouth to date. Huddler invests in search engine optimization to “insure that the all mighty Google can find our pages.” One way that Huddler engages users is through their Action Team (or A-Team) which puts exciting new green products “in the hands of really passionate people” and solicits reviews and commentary from them.
On the topic of usership statistics, Dan noted they get about 150,000 unique visitors a month, but they are nowhere near satisfied. Dan believes 5 million visitors per month is completely achievable in the coming years and is excited by that vision. That would mean there are “five million out there using the resource we created and learning something from it and being able to make better sustainable decisions as a result of this distribution platform that we created…The real potential for impact is very exciting.”
Click here to listen to the audio or read the full transcript of our interview.
