Andy Sorcini - Mr Babyman from Digg
social media, traffic, viral marketing, word of mouth
This interview is one I've been waiting to do for quite a while. This guy is one of the most financially unsuccessful internet guys I know. At the same time he drives absolutely monster traffic and has a huge amount of influence in the internet world. For millions of people he is an absolute rockstar. His name is Andy Scorcini and his handle is Mr Babyman - he's the number one poster to Digg, the social news site. He controls a huge amount of traffic volume and IMHO is effectively the leader of the informal network that has developed among Digg's top users that decide which stories get posted to the site. The number one question Andy and the others is always asked - do they get paid for what they do. We discussed this in detail in the interview.Full Interview »
Matt Moog was previously the CEO of CoolSavings and before that did presentations with Bill Gates at Microsoft. Matt talks about his time at CoolSavings (the original coupon site on the web), which included taking the company public and then back to being private. He also talks about how Viewpoints is creating a modern version of epinions, and which could become an amazing lead generation platform for advertisers, offering hot transfer leads from customers who are ready to buy. He's doing this while providing a lot of value to consumers. He's finding a way to generate leads which should generate a lot of loyalty from consumers.
The nerd level of David Weekly from PBwiki is rather high since he proudly informed me during the interview that he started programming at the age of five. I've been watching David from a distance for a couple of years. He hasn't made his fortune yet, but he will. He's from the same mold as the Google founders and is always involved in interesting projects in Silicon Valley. His current site is PBWiki, which is a managed wiki service. The MeetInnovators publishing process is run on a PBWiki. My family also used a PBWiki for planning our family holiday. PBWiki is even being used by some US presidential campaigns, although David won't tell us which ones.
Matt Hill is the CEO of Shopit.com. Shopit is like eBay for social networking sites. According to Matt, Shopit is now the fastest growing e-commerce application on Facebook. EBay has had a lot of fraud problems, and a lot of people don't like using it anymore. After interviewing Matt, I wrote about 
This interview is with Chris Young, who founded Klipmart, which he sold to DoubleClick. He recently started the Digital Broadcasting Group. His businesses have focused on online video, advertising, sponsorship, and promotion. Chris has worked on some really interesting things in the online world by incorporating video ads into web ads. His video advertising runs on sites like: MaximOnline.com, MTV, Heavy.com, IGN.com, GameSpy, Yahoo Games and MSN Entertainment.
This interview is with Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media, formally Break.com. Break Media started as bad-boys, a video entertainment site for guys. It has expanded to now include quite a few sites as well as an ad network selling inventory for many other sites, targeting men ages 18 to 34. Keith shares how Break Media started, how it has grown, and how it gets its users to come back. He also touches on why the company decided to start its own ad sales team along with how they sell their advertising.
This week’s interview is with Mike Filsaime. He’s another one of these viral guys. Except he’s different. Most viral business models don’t generate much revenue. And while Mike’s company is relatively small ($5M), he has very low acquisition costs due to the (mostly free) viral customer acquisition, so it’s very profitable. For anyone interested in viral marketing being used with lead generation or information product marketing, you should check out this interview.
Rob Jewell is the founder of the FreeiPod craze. Rob’s story is very insightful; he’s a determined entrepreneur.
This interview is with Khalid Shaikh of FlyUpload. This guy founded YouSendIt, a file transfer service. Aside from a very good viral model, one reason why they became famous early on is because Iraqi militants used their service to send out videos of kidnapped contractors. The YouSendIt concept has spawned many new business models on the Internet, including YouTube. Some key points of the interview: Learn about a virtually unknown business model that has twice the traffic of Facebook (considered to be a $2 billion dollar company). Find out how these sites are achieving 30% monthly growth. Hear the inside story of the economics of this business model.
