What is your day to day life like? A specific time slot for work?
I wake up and head to my desk where I have a coffee pot on auto-brew! I start off going through my email and scanning through tweets from my priority Twitter list. Once I climb back out of that rabbit hole, I can focus my energy on work tasks. I don't have specific time slots for work. However, I start early, fade a bit through mid day, and hit prime time at night when my energy seems to peak. My schedule doesn't change much on weekends. I like to take time for the gym, family, or leisure as needed. I like my work, so it's not really work to me. It's just "what I do". =)
Do you spend much of your day online?
Yes, actually most of my day is spent at my desk where I can be most productive. Time away is mostly for the gym, leisure, or typical errands. However, when I'm out, I'm always equipped with my iPhone and Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I can stay connected. Yes, I'm a confessed geek.
How long did you work for vBSEO for?
I was a part of the founding team, starting in June 2005 and lasted up until September 2009 when Juan finally began axing the founding team and going to war with his co-founder and sister, Ilia (whom I just so happen to be married). She'd make for a great interview, by the way. Now, she has some stories! =)
Did you enjoy your time at vBSEO?
I enjoyed the entreneurial journey, starting from absolutely nothing, and working towards building a sustainable company. We peaked at just under $800,000 per year in revenue which was quite an accomplishment for an entire team working remotely. We also were close to negotiating an acquisition. My favorite aspects were sharing creative ideas to improve vBSEO, working with customers, handling marketing related tasks, building the behind the scenes bizAdmin systems and anti-piracy tools.
The stuff that made working for vBSEO laborious and frustrating was two-fold. Firstly, I did not enjoy living in Puerto Rico after the initial "vacation-mode" subsided; and, secondly, working with Juan Muriente (our ~CEO) was endlessly frustrating, especially when it was my job to make him look good in our community and marketing stuff, yet know the behind the scenes happenings. The most positive outcome of me departing from vBSEO was the opportunity to leave Puerto Rico and move to Florida. I really enjoy living here in the Tampa region. That was a much needed life change.
What happened in the time up until the end of your time at vBSEO?
Whoa, now the questions are getting edgy! =) Here goes. The wheels started coming off the vBSEO machine. I presume Juan was disatisfied with his inability to get full, unopposed buy-in from the founding 3: himself, Ilia, and I. While we were never opposed to exploring new opportunities and ideas, we did see it as a team decision and not a dictatorship.
I personally feel that Juan has a tendency to get really excited about new ideas purely out of a love of creativity and challenge, but forgets that big investments require follow through and business models. I liked most of his ideas, as most had some merit. I just didn't like what I considered to be a haphazard approach to going about things.
After running into opposition from both Ilia and I, Juan started working on secret projects. He flew Oleg in from Belarus to work with him in a rented villa in the Dominican Republic for a month. It was quite an expense, but the goal was to massively focus on getting the next version of vBSEO out. He revealed to us later that he had been secretly working on a new project, something we had known about the initial concept of, called Claim-a-Sale. In fact, it was based on a concept I originated on how to track affiliate links based on the referring site (or URL), instead of an identifying URL with an ID in it to track the affiliate (the standard method).
Juan's bait and switch project in DR with Oleg was a sign of more distrust and secret moves to come. After that concept was abandoned, we discovered another secret project (called Tweetboard) when it was accidentally revealed by Mert (a vBSEO team member) during a screen sharing meeting we were having. Obviously, all these secret projects going on, without regard to Ilia as a co-owner and co-founder, or myself as a vital founding member was the beginning of the end of the team.
Juan even arranged to meet with me and offered to make me COO of the new 140ware company in exchange for helping him figure out ways to push Ilia out of her active duties. I told him I supported him moving on to new things, but that she founded vBSEO with him and they had to resolve their leadership struggles on their own. It was in September 2009 that he finally axed me. His method was to shut down all of my permissions and lock me out without actually informing me anything had happened, and refusing to state a reason why. However, it was apparently because he and Ilia had been having heated email exchanges and he suspected that she was consulting with me. He didn't like that we communicated about the issues in much the same way as he had arranged to do with me during his private meeting... the one where he made his desire clear to get her out of the company. It was hypocritical, of course, but that's how I ended up moving on. The hits just kept on coming, but that's probably the subject of a dedicated interview if you're interested in that debacle!
What is launch forum about? Is it something that you are passionate about?
Launch.forum is a new community software that is focused on being easy to use - for everyone, not just forum pros. We designed it to have marketing built in, and a new "Change it where you see it" design concept that avoids forcing users to navigate a complicated AdminCP system similar to vBulletin, and standard to most forum software apps of the vBulletin era.
It's my view that you shouldn't have to be a programmer to figure out how to change a logo or place an ad, and we set out to find a new way to get rid of that kind of unnecessary complexity. What we have today is just a starting point. I strongly believe that if we can successfully deploy the full LF vision, we will have a community software that people will really enjoy and will increase their chances of building a successful community... with far less effort, and far less complex technical skills or frustration required to get it done.
While I've run into a lot of hurdles personally these past few years and I do get frustrated with not getting Launch.forum out there in the wild, I'm definitely very passionate about it succeeding. There's so much more depth to LF to be explored if we can get it out there. I like using it! =)
How long has launch forum been around? Is it growing? Can anyone join?
I started the design specification for Launch.forum 2 weeks after getting the boot from vBSEO. We kicked off officially on dev in January 2010. So far, we revealed launchforum.com as our user support forum and as an initial showcase, but it is not available for others to install yet. We do have an instant signup completed for a hosted version of Launch.forum. That still has bugs to be resolved, but it will be the first release of LF, planned to be invitation-only to experienced people in the forum world to evaluate. If anyone is interested in being a part of that, please click "Like" on our Facebook page for Viral Age so you don't miss the announcement or follow me on Twitter at @joewardpr.
How is Viral Age going? It looks as though it is going to be big hit!
Viral Age Inc. is our company name. Launch.forum is our flagship product. While we're happy with the direction we're headed, we obviously wish we could get there much faster. We've had some early interest in LF and some positive feedback. For us, seeing that people are curious about what we're working on and are waiting to get hands on with it to evaluate it is really all we could ask for. However, we do believe that LF has the potential to become a big hit if we achieve our full vision. =)
How many people are working for Viral Age? Is it growing?
We have 6 team members, ranging from investor role to coder. We have not expanded the team, but we are seeking the resources to bring on one or more additional coders. That's what we need most right now, but we're bootstrapped and financial resources are extremely limited at this stage.
Do you run any forums beside launch forum?
I launched castingredos.com as a test site. It's not active, and I only occasionally add some new content, mostly movie stuff that I personally dig and want to save there. I also converted an old critique blog I had in Puerto Rico to Launch.forum and that runs actively although I no longer blog there.
Do you have any advice on admins wanting to start a forum?
Off the top of my head, my top 3 tips would be:
What are you thoughts on the future of forums and blogs? Do you think something else will surpass them?
- Pick a niche where your focus will be on something specific that is not already completely covered by others.
- Ensure, whatever software you use, that you have an attractive, clean, design and spend $50-$100 on a good logo so you look professional.
- Populate it with really interesting content and ideas and actively invite people to participate. Beyond those three tips, I'd say follow Patrick O'Keefe, read his books, and be as active at community building as Brandon Sheley, as I sometimes refer to as "the hardest working man in forums"! Seriously, Brandon keeps a constant flow of new content coming into his new forums and never lets them sit idle. That's a winning strategy in my book.
Part of the philosophy behind Launch.forum is that there is really not much of a fundamental difference between forums and blogs. Blogs are single or selected authors. Forums allow everyone to participate - with moderation. That's why Launch.forum's feature page was specifically designed to make the homepage be structured like a traditional blog (i.e. the mashable.com blog approach). Create great content and feature it there for maximum visibility of your best stuff.
I think whichever method you choose, be it forum, blog, or hybrid concept like Launch.forum, these sites will never be wiped out by big social networks. They are centers of authority on niche topics. People who have the passion to dedicate a chunk of their lives to collecting and sharing information on such topics want to do it on their own web presense and blogs and forums are the best place to do that.
We'll see variations like Tumblr or Posterous that have (and will continue to have) success, because they ascribe to the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) philosophy and it's very easy for non-tech users to get started sharing their ideas and have the site look good too. The next killer app in the space will fill the void somewhere between these types of micro blogging apps and traditional forums. We think stuff like xenForo has the potential to move into that space, and we've positioned Launch.forum to be there as well.
Do you think social networking is the future long term or short term?
Social networking has a long term future. It's not going anywhere. For as long as people value their relationships, you'll find them in the biggest social networks. At this point, it will be very difficult to push Facebook out of the #1 position. However, while social networking is here to stay, I could imagine a new social network capable of displacing the leadership of Facebook and Twitter. In fact, I know FB and Twitter realize it too, and that's why you see updates to their policies on what their APIs provide and limitations on what 3rd party apps are capable of extracting. They don't want to make it too easy for people to "migrate their relationships" to the next big social network!
Did you always know you wanted to work online, or do you have a normal 9-5 job like most people.
I knew by about grade 6 that I wanted to do something with computers. When I headed to university, my top 3 choices were conflicted between Engineering, Business, and Computer Science. I chose CS, but I still felt that inner Engineer and Biz guy whispering to me. If I could do it again, I think I would have gone the business route perhaps with speciality in information systems. I feel like one can become an effective programmer with much less education than what is provided in a 4 year degree. I also sometimes lament that I graduated in December 1999 and missed the bubble! Just 3 years earlier... oh, just 3 years early!
I don't have a 9-5. I have done some consulting during my time with Launch.forum, but it's been primarily only LF that I'm focused on.
When did you start working online, what was your first project?
My first webpage was in 1995. I created a homepage for my girlfriend who was enrolled in an introductory computer class and couldn't figure it out. I spent the Christmas holidays that year learning HTML and was fascinated. That summer I was hired as the local "Community Access Project" manager for my home town where I built an online business directory, and processed huge amounts of historical birth/death/baptism records into web page format. Every position or project I have held since has been related to Internet. I've been totally immersed my whole career.
Do you know how to program, what languages do you like to write in?
Yes, I started out as a programmer and transitioned into Systems Analysis, technical writing, and finally business and marketing, as the needs/desires arose. My favorite language is PHP. However, back in the day, I was in love with Perl! What geek couldn't fall in love with regex?!
I always remember your threads at vbseo, very nice copy in them, what was your role at vbseo?
I did a little bit of everything. If I had to give a formalized title, I would probably say Operations Manager - although I don't think calling labelling my role as "CEO" would be too far from the reality of who was really doing what there. Wink, wink.
I kept everything rolling. I designed several vBSEO features such as RefBacks and Virtual HTML Display, and probably a bunch of stuff that never made it in there!
I designed the entire BizAdmin systems that only staff had access to. It did... everything! Order fulfillment, sales/revenue tracking, CRM, etc. I also designed the SRA.Probe, the internal piracy tool that we used to track down and recover pirated vBSEO licenses up until my departure when it was no longer pursued.
I did all of the marketing copywriting for vBSEO announcements, etc, and ghostwritten stuff for Juan. Although vBSEO's complexity made it hard to have too much fun with it, I tried at times. It's hard to made fixing bugs in our Relevant Replacement feature sound sexy!
I coordinated all of the new vBSEO releases, designed our sales strategies and systems, and managed the affiliate program.
I know you've been working on launchforums, what other projects do you have lined up?
I have an awesome catalog of interesting projects. I email myself with subject line CONCEPT: {Title} whenever I have a new idea. However, I have not allowed myself to undertake any of them because I feel that it would steal focus from Launch.forum. It's definitely an exercise in self control, but I saw first hand how pursuing too many ideas can harm your flagship while at vBSEO.
What are you hobbies outside of the internet?
I love working out, fishing, reading, watching movies, playing poker tournaments, and I have this huge itch to start designing stuff for 3D printing. I think that's so cool. Tangent: I want a Makerbot!
Lately, I did a few adventure or mud runs, and I really enjoy those as well. I think that's something I'd like to do more often in the future. With me, I get bored of the typical very easily, so stuff that has a sense of adventure to it appeals to me more. For example, while in Canada during my most recent trip, I canoed and hiked through 2 different lakes to find a 3rd, hidden one in the deep woods that I've heard about since I was a child but could never get to. For me, that was a rush to throw my fishing line into that hidden lake, even though the monster fish I imagined in my dreams didn't bite!
Where do you see the future of the internet and online use?
It's pervasive. It's not going anywhere. I guess the biggest trends of the future are already underway. It's the mobile explosion; the connectedness of all electronic devices (cars, machines, home fixtures); data liberation (apps pulling data from all sources to add value); and the new era of greater collective consumer power (think Kickstarter, #Occupy, Wikileaks, Gov 2.0).
In addition, I'm so excited to see the apps that are coming. Our programming languages, frameworks, UI, and APIs are becoming so evolved that we're starting to see some really exciting apps, and there is so much more great stuff to come. I can't wait.
Do you have any phone apps that your working on, what do you think about the future of "apps"?
Apps will just continue their explosion right along with Mobile and the improvement of mobile devices, i.e. smartphones and tablets, and eventially "smart devices" of any sort. Their strength is in their clearly defined use: one app for one thing. It's KISS at its best. I'm not working on any apps at the moment, although I have some concepts stored in my Gmail. Obviously, Launch.forum has to have an app, but it's not a priority right now as the core software is still in development.
Are you addicted to tech toys, do you have a nexus 7 or any gadgets that are more for fun then anything?
I have an iPhone and my Galaxy Tab 10.1. I love my iPhone, but I use my tablet primarily for reading using my Kindle app. I wouldn't say I'm a gadget freak like others; however, there is a lot of stuff that I'm interested in getting in the near future: Jawbone Up fitness band, Makerbot, Twine, Swivl, and maybe even a Roomba. I'm still not sure those little vacuum bots really do the job!
Thanks for your time Joe and answering these questions for Admin Talk.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to share a little bit about myself and what we're working on with Launch.forum! =)
Interview with Joe Ward, co-founder of Launch.forum @joewardpr
Former vBSEO employee running Launch.forum now
