Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Interview with Kelsie Greear, Cheese9
We recently ran into Kelsie Greear, the founder of Seattle-based Cheese9 (www.cheese9.com), an online community site focused on community. We caught up with Kelsie to hear more about his startup, as part of our ongoing interviews with local startups and companies.
What's Cheese9?
Kelsie Greear<: I guess, in the simplest sense, Cheese9 is a community generated content and comedy site. The intent was to develop and entertainment media property, that was both funny and interactive, and which invites users to engage. If you think about it as a kind of amusement part, the rides are a host of activities for users to participate in. We have community generated comic strips, which are like those games you used to play in grade school--we post a seed pane on the site, and users contribute subsequent chapters and vote on submissions for those chapters. The winner become the permanent pane, and they move on to the next chapter. Ideally, the community will create and vet all the content, and it will take on a life of its own. We also have a funny photo contest, where we'll post a picture, and use an editing tool which allows you to post funny text into those pictures. That works more or less the same, where the community creates entries and votes on them. We also have some games we've built, which are interactive, entertaining, and funny, and mostly give users the ability to personalize those games. For example, you can upload a buddy's face into the game, and perhaps put your buddy's picture on a guy in the game who you can throw around. Part of what makes this work, is it's very easy to share creations. That's the first thing people want to do when they create something funny--send it to other people.
Who is the site aimed at?
Kelsie Greear: It's kind of people like me. People in their twenties and thirties, who use the web not only for resource and information, but also for entertainment. Those are people like us who spend copious amounts of time on Icanhazcheezberger, the Break Media sites--people who want that kind of entertainment.
Where did the idea for the site come from?
Kelsie Greear: My partner, Jim Beaver and I, spent a lot of time initially to allow our platform to give people the ability to be creative. We wanted to give people the ability to easily be funny, because we enjoy comedic content. We thought if we gave the right tools, they'd be able to easily participate in creating that content.
What's your background, and how did you start the site?
Kelsie Greear: I was one of the original folks at eNom, which was acquired by Demand Media in 2006. I stuck around at Demand for a year and a half as Vice President of Business Operations, because my background is in operations, infrastructure, analytics, and business intelligence. I left almost two years ago, because I wanted to be involved more on the business, products, and technology side. I took a little bit of time off, experimented with business models and building up the company using an entirely virtual workforce. As part of that, I built a job board, but that wasn't as fun--I wanted to build an organization which created content I enjoyed, which spawned this idea. We've now been at this for a year and a half, although in the first six months we crashed and burned big time, and started over in 2009 to where we got to our beta release.
What was that initial stumble about?
Kelsie Greear: We had offshored the project, which was a nightmare. The desired outcome wasn't there, and it was hard to work off of different time zones. So, we brought everything on-shore, with dedicated consultants, which meant we could iterate as much as we wanted. We learned a lot, especially if you want the flexibility to change your mind, modify, and iterate your product, you've got to do it this way.
Let's talk a bit about the business. What's the business model here?
Kelsie Greear: The site is free, and the business model is a media model. Advertising is a big component of that. We're not concerned right now with monetization, but with marketing and creating good quality content. There's also the merchandising model, where if you create a strip, we can put it on a coffee cub, mugs, hats, and allow the user to buy it. We'll also be going mobile, and with some variations on games on the site, and there's revenue streams there.
What's next for the site?
Kelsie Greear: For the next month or two, we're focusing on infrastructure, building RSS feeds, integrating accounts, and building ways to use the games in the comic strips. We're also building new games, and new rides for the amusement park. We're making sure there are more things for our users to do when they're there on the site.
Thanks!