Startup Spark

Interview with an Entrepreneur: Part 2 with Clarence Wooten of CollectiveX

by steve on August 23rd, 2007

This week, we are interviewing Clarence Wooten from CollectiveX. Clarence is a serial entrepreneur with many successes under his belt. His latest venture, CollectiveX, is timed perfectly for the social networking wave hitting the Internet. In Part 2 of a 2 part interview, we discuss their living the Web 2.0 life, HR in the new web world and raising money in today’s startup landscape.

Since your business model seems really aligned with the Web 2.0 style of site (where free is so prevalent.) Could you elaborate a little more on your approach to revenue creation?
Revenue is very important for any company. Providing a lot of value for FREE is equally as important for any Web 2.0 company. Our business model enables us to do both – which as been key to our success thus far.

CollectiveX offers three options for Groupsites.
1.) FREE Groupsites - Ad supported and include everything groups need to share, networking and communicate - professionally or socially, in pubic or in private.
2.) Premium “a la carte” Upgrades - Enable FREE Groupsites to enhance security, storage, permission controls and branding. Additionally, groups can remove and control advertising within their Groupsite for an incremental fee.

3.) Enterprise Accounts - For organizations seeking to organize and manage unlimited Groupsites across their entire organization from a single account or mega groups seeking dedicated support for their user-base.  Includes all premium features for each Groupsite, a dedicated account rep, simplified billing, and expanded file storage.

How many employees do you have at CollectiveX now? Is it important that they all share your entrepreneurial spirit and drive? How do you find that in new hires and keep that entrepreneurial energy alive?
We have approximately 8 employees. So we’ve had to do a lot with a small team. Consequently, it is very important that each member of the team has a very strong passion for our mission and doesn’t mind working long hours to ensure our success. As a company, we’ve had to kiss a few frogs before we found 8 studs – we’re looking for studs, do you know any??? ;-)

What are the most important elements for a successful startup company?
I can answer this question with in 4 words:
Passion, Focus, Persistence & Luck

You received funding from various Venture Firms. Can you give us a bit of detail on the process of finding funding, and what importance you put in picking the right funding partner?
In addition to the four elements of success that I mentioned, funding is also critical. However, it is important to build a model that enables you to build a real business (especially if you are not based in Silicon Valley). Venture funding should be used for growth — not complete survival. This isn’t easy to do with a web company today. Consequently, you have to attract quality angel investors to sustain your venture until it achieves critical milestones. If you focus on executing, opportunities to pull down venture funding will come your way. We are just getting to a point where raising a venture round makes sense – it will be used for growth, not survival. As of now, we’ve bootstrapped the company with funding from myself and a few angel investors who believe in our vision.

What approach to marketing plays a significant role in promoting and attracting traffic to CollectiveX?
CollectiveX has grown to 7,000 Groupsites on our platform almost exclusively through viral and word-of-mouth growth. We provide a lot of FREE value to groups. We’re a much better alternative to services like Yahoo groups… and we offer social and professional networking. I’d like to leverage PR to get the success stories of our groups out there… I think that hearing more stories about the diverse ways in which groups use Groupsites… would attract significantly more traffic to CollectiveX.

If you want people to remember one thing when they think about CollectiveX, what is it?
Hmmm… remember the word Groupsite. At CollectiveX, we think of Groupsites as the Web 2.0 equalivent to websites. I think that says it all ;-) lol.

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POSTED IN: Entrepreneur Interviews, Web 2.0