Following yesterday’s interview with Jordan and Abby from Haystack Media, I wanted to keep up the media and entertainment topic and release an interview with Nate Westheimer, who is the CEO and Founder of Bricabox, a next generation publishing platform. To see a live example of what they are building, check out the SXSWhere 2008 site.

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Please join me in welcoming, Nate Westheimer.

Please state your name, title, and years at current company/position:
I’m Nate Westheimer, and I’ve been the CEO and Founder of BricaBox, LLC for the last year and a half. Meanwhile, I’ve also served as a consultant for National Public Media.

What are you currently up to? If entrepreunering (my word), tell me about your startup.
Today, I’m days off of launching my baby, BricaBox.com. BricaBox is a new kind of web publishing platform, focused on the social content market. We aim to power thousands of consumer and publisher generated websites, where, like with YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, and Wikipedia, people come together with the intention of collaborating on a base of content.

Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
In a word, opportunity: Opportunity in the industry as a whole; opportunity in the web publishing market; opportunity in the social web space; opportunity in the semantic web. With so many opportunities floating around, it’s hard not to be in this business, doing what we’re doing. I really couldn’t imagine doing something else right now.

All startups should be addressing a problem in the market. What is that exact problem and how are you solving it?
The problem has been that tools to create social content sites have had a restrictively high barrier around them. We think there’s a ton of opportunity locked up when those tools are out of the hands of the masses.

Have you thought about your business model yet? I’m assuming so, so tell us a bit about it.
No – we hate business models. Just kidding… We’ve thought a lot about business models. Our model is to charge for premium features that make sense. This “make sense” part comes from our friend David Karp, who founded Tumblr and thinks a lot about “smart monetization.” Like him, we’re 100% against charging for things that have to do with creativity and personal expression. Therefore, an account is free, you can host your site on your own domain for free, you can run ads for free, you can host files for free, and you can skin the site with your own CSS for free. However, we’ll charge for excess storage, for complete white labeling (taking away the “BricaBar” at the top of the page), and for 100% advertising rights (our free accounts let you run advertising, but when you do, we monetize 50% of the page views).

If you’re looking at an ad-supported model, how are you going about it? Do you have in-house ad sales? Using a rep firm? What are the challenges that you’re facing with getting ad dollars?
While we’re still small, we’ll monetize the pages our users permit us to, using contextual ads served by Google. Meanwhile, we’ll forge relationships with brands who want to have an impact on the user generated content space, and look at partnerships with other media brands. In the future, we imagine we’ll be able to sell verticals of content on the platform: enough restaurant review sites, for example, will spawn a restaurant review ad channel.

If you’re selling a product/service/subscription, how is that coming along? What are the challenges? Are you using the freemium model?
We’ll start offering our premium accounts in the second quarter of this year, so the numbers are yet to come in. Nonetheless, the friends we have in the market tell us to expect 1% participation in the premium game.

As an entrepreneur, what are your thoughts on competition? How do you view competition?
We’re in the business of providing tools, and the fact of the matter is that the tools we provide are not provided by anyone else at the moment. That is to say: I’m not preoccupied by competition because anything we do is cutting edge and leading the space. I don’t mean to be arrogant, but that’s just what we’ve found. Our biggest competition is our own slowness.

If your competitor called you up to have coffee and discuss shop, what would you do? Would you go? What would you divulge?
I’ve been having a wonderful time meeting with our so-called competition (those folks the press wants to make our competition). Any time I talk to these folks, I’m very forthright about our vision for the technology. Certainly there are features I won’t discuss, but the overall vision is out there fore everyone, including our competition.

Is the current state of the economy playing to your favor? If so, why? If not, why? What is your forecast of the market throughout 2008 and do you see affects?
I think my business is rather market agnostic, mostly because we’re new and our product is new, which means no direct budgets are being cut. There may be some R&D budgets cut which negatively affects us, but for the most part, innovation will do well in whatever market. Meanwhile, I’m glad I’m not still in the securities market right now. This is not a fun market.

How much of your time is spent working? How much is spent with family? Have you found the entrepreneurial quality of life yet?
I’d say my quality of life is unfairly high. I spend a lot of time with my friends; but, I also spend as much time as possible with my business and folks interested in my business. This means a lot of my friends these days are in my industry, so it’s nearly impossible to separate personal from business. In the end, I’m lucky to be young and independent, because it’s this focus on the business and the industry which gives me an edge. Family will happen for me, but I can wait; business doesn’t wait.

DH: Nate, thank you for your time in answering these questions. I am sure there will be comments on the blog from some readers and appreciate you taking the time to answer them.

A new interview will be released M-F for the next 8 days… leading up to the launch of my book, Coloring Outside the Lines: Confessions of a Digital Native.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Internet & Web X.0, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.