A Conversation with Shawn Morton of Profilactic

Since our Web & Media meetup is tonight it only seemed right that our first conversation with a local startup be with a web startup. Shawn Morton of Aggregated Media, maker of social media aggregator Profilactic agreed to be that first conversation. Thanks Shawn for being a good sport.

In non-geek speak what does Profilactic do?
Profilactic brings everything that you post on over 130 social networks together in one place. We also do the same thing for all of your friends’ content.

Can you give provide a little background on how Profilactic came about? What was the genesis for it?
Over the past 3 years or so, I signed up for just about every new social media service on the web. Eventually, I found myself using a dozen or so services on a regular basis. I quickly became aware of how difficult it is to get your arms around everything you’re posting on the web. So in the Spring of 2006, I got 3 of my engineer friends to help me build out Profilactic.

Did you have a plan for growth/monetization early on or was it just “this is a cool idea so let’s build it and we’ll figure out the rest later”?
We definitely had a plan for monetization early on; however, we had a unique situation that made pursuing some of the ideas difficult. Three of us have day jobs at a large online media company. In order to pursue this outside project, we needed to make sure that we didn’t encroach on anything that our employer does.

That meant that serving ads was out. However, our approach to monetizing Profilactic was a little more grand than just serving advertising anyway. We felt that, given the proper scale, we could build a better ad engine for serving behaviorally targeted ads. If you consider that most of our users are the early adopters and influencers of the web (i.e. the group that every advertiser wants to reach), it isn’t hard to see the value of knowing *everything* that these people are contributing on the web. And because we’re an aggregator, once a user sets up their account, their content flows into the system forever.

From a startup’s perspective does the new wave of social media aggregators help you (because people are more aware of what they are perhaps) or does it not matter one way or the other since you’ve been in this arena for such a comparatively long time?
The recent growth in the number of aggregators has definitely helped us. First, it makes “social media aggregation” a “thing” now. People are starting to understand and investors are taking notice. Second, it has helped us recognize a slightly different monetization opportunity. Over the past few weeks, we have been approached by a handful of sites that are interested in licensing or co-branding our aggregation service. One of them is an established, large social network that has around 32 million members.

This is forcing us to reevaluate what our core offering is. Do we focus on growing Profilactic.com as a destination site or do we use it as a prototype and a tool for attracting clients who are interested in adding a best-of-breed aggregation service to their existing platform? We are actually leaning towards the latter based on all of the inquiries we are getting lately.

To put another way, in your opinion, is it better to launch early and get into the game even if things aren’t perfect, even if the feature set isn’t totally in place than wait?
As a product guy, I’m not a fan of launching something that isn’t where I think it should be. If I’m going to be promoting it, I want it to be something I am proud to be associated with (that doesn’t mean you can’t roll things out in stages and improve as you go along, tho). I think having a solid product that people truly find useful is better than just trying to generate hype with a splashy launch. That’s why we spent so much time improving our feature set and making sure we have a compelling product over the past 18 months. Now that word is finally getting out, we feel we have a competitive advantage over the competition.

I heard a rumor that you’re close to signing a deal to license Profilactic’s software. Why licensing instead of selling outright? Are your future properties (Revealistic and Aggreg8or) built on the same base code so the potential for growth and revenue streams is greater by retaining ownership than partnering/selling?
It is true that we are in talks to license Profilactic’s software to a large site that most people have heard of. In terms of licensing versus selling, that really wasn’t our choice. After researching the other social media aggregators our there, the company approached us and asked us to consider a licensing deal. That was definitely something we hadn’t considered before; however, since speaking with this first site, we have received a handful of other inquiries about licensing or co-branding or providing an API of our service.

Aggreg8or is essentially Profilactic. We felt that we would need a more mainstream name for the offering if we are going to offer licensing or co-branding to other sites. Not sure if we’ll stick with Aggreg8or, but the idea was to try and make the service more marketable.

How many people are involved with Aggregated Media? Are there any employees or is everyone involved an equal stakeholder at this point? Are all of Aggregated’s partners in Louisville? Have you accepted any funding? Are you looking for funding to grow?
There are currently 3 people involved in Aggregated Media: myself, Tom Osborne and Eric Roland. We are all partners in the LLC and have no employees at this point. Everyone is based in Louisville.

As far as funding, we have been offered funding; however, up to this point, we haven’t needed it. We’re pretty lean right now and have chosen to bootstrap it instead of taking on the burden of funding.

What can you tell me about Revealistic?
Revealistic is a really simple idea that I came up with a month or so ago. It was actually conceived as a joke after talking about Twitter with some friends. We were speculating about how far a web site might be able to get people to go in terms of sharing the most mundane details about themselves online.

After thinking about it a while, I decided that it could be interesting to do away with the boring, static “About Me” pages that everyone has on their blog. With that in mind, I came up with the idea of a distributed (i.e. you can embed it all over the web), social (i.e. your friends can contribute to it) widget for displaying interesting facts about yourself that you can embed on your blog or website. When your friends show up on your site, they have the option to add to it. That’s where I think it could really get interesting.

We’re still very early in the development and hope to have something launched in March.

The name Profilcatic, we have to address it. Obviously it’s something that gets people talking. Did you think it might potentially be a problem in terms of funding or even possibly turning off users? Or did you choose it because you knew people would respond to it one way or another? I know you said Aggreg8or is essentially a different name for Profilactic so it seems that you perhaps didn’t plan on the name being a problem/issue.

I posted about choosing the name on our blog. I think it is a pretty good summary, so I won’t try to outdo myself.

http://www.profilactic.com/blog/2006/10/name.html

As for the reaction, yes, it has turned off a few users. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but we built Profilactic to please ourselves first and foremost. Of course, we want other people to like it; however, we decided early on that we wouldn’t compromise on certain things. The name was one of them.

I think, in terms of getting attention, the name has helped us a lot. People have blogged about how much they love the name. Others have blogged about how much they hate the name. As long as people are blogging about us, we feel like we’re doing something right. The great thing is that, regardless of their reaction to our name, we have gotten almost entirely positive feedback on the features and functionality of the service.

Now that we are exploring our options for licensing and co-branding, I think we have to be a bit more flexible with what we call it. We recognize that some sites would be hesitant to put a “Powered by Profilactic” logo on their site.

I know this sounds somewhat at odds with what I said earlier about not compromising. However, we feel that Profilactic.com is something we did for ourselves. A co-brand or a licensing deal is something we’re doing for someone else. We need to flexible enough to put our egos aside and be able to meet the needs of the client.

Interestingly, one of the sites we’re talking about a co-brand for actually wants to use “Powered by Profilactic” because they felt their audience would appreciate the name.

As a web startup have do you feel that being outside the Valley has negatively impacted you?

I don’t know. I never really think too much about not being in the Valley. I feel like working on the Web makes location irrelevant. Plus, I have a lot of friends and colleagues in San Francisco, so I feel somewhat connected to that community as well.

The key is really getting the attention of the right people. We have been pretty lucky to get attention on sites like digg, TechCrunch, Mashable, CNET, etc. If you can get coverage on those sites, it doesn’t matter so much where you live.

If anything, being in Kentucky is seen as something that sets us apart. I don’t think people expect to hear about social media startups from Louisville.

Have you had any benefit as a startup being based in Louisville (eg networking through the entrepreneurial community here, etc).

I can’t say enough positive things about the Louisville startup community. I’ve been really impressed with how everyone is willing to pitch in to help each other succeed. I’ve gotten a lot of great advice and made a lot of good friends through the community of entrepreneurs we have here in Louisville.

Editor’s Note: Profilactic Version 3 is set to be released this week.