My Visit to Scrapblog

I haven't blogged for the past few days, mostly because I've been in the affluent Miami suburb of Coral Gables, a tropical-smelling, Caribbean-influenced place. I was there to work with a company and team I really enjoyed at Scrapblog, who is preparing to launch at DEMO about a month from now.

If you don't know the rules of Chris Shipley's DEMO, where 60-70 companies launch new products and technology twice annually, then you may not realize that the nondisclosure rules are tight prior to the event.  Each company get precisely six minutes to present in front of 500-700 product enthusiasts. So I can't tell you much about the new version, but the name "Scrapblog" kind of gives it away. You can see a more primitive version of it here.

The new version is going to be a lot better. But more than that I like the team and the feel. Carlos Garcia, CEO and founder, is co-founder of Nobox, a successful Puerto Rican interactive advertising agency. At a time when ad dollars are moving to insertion in dead trees to placements on sites, he's in fat city economically, or at least I surmise from our dinner conversations.

At precisely the moment in life when most people are settling in, Carlos is getting out.  He's dipped into his own pockets, as well as those of his partners and is starting a Web 2.0 social media company. He is not doing this because he sees a market opportunity, so much as he just feels this is something he has to do.

Well, for the same reason, I've been hearing since Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolscheim told me they had developed workstations, when Sun Microsystems was my first startup--because they couldn't find the tools they wanted to work with so they developed their own and now they want to share them with friends.

In all my years of working with startups, this has been the best reason I've heard and nearly all the success stories I've touched upon over the years have had that component.

In this case, Carlos and his wife Margarita wanted to make scrapbooks of their first-born Lorenzo, now 2, and they wanted to share them online with friends and family. So did the friends and family.

I can't tell you exactly what happened there, without stepping on the NDA, but what I love is the way, Omar Ramos, his soft-spoken lead developer told me they had improved the photo framing feature. "My wife (Lydia) was in the other room shouting because it didn't work right.  So I had to fix it to make her happy." It seems the caption balloons got improved in the same way after Margarita expressed the same frustrations with resizing them.

It was just a small project, but this company is playing in so many of the yards where I feel passion: photo-sharing, blogging, social media and startups. Geography prevents that I work with them day-to-day as I like to work with DEMO companies I coach, but I am certainly hoping these guys to well at the conference.

[Note--Photo added after I found it in the wrong folder.]

Comments

[Carlos Garcia]

Shel,

It was an immense pleasure to spend two days (over 20 hours) working and sharing ideas with you. Thank you for the engaging conversations and all the great advice. Your candid approach helped demystify some of the challenges ahead.

[Fabio García-Matienzo]

I encountered "Scrapblog" by shear accident, with its beta version and am very impressed with it. Its is amicable tool with added excitement. Family photography is my hobby and sharing my products was limited personal contact, until now. Hereon with Scrapblog the universe is open and fun. I look foward to their success. FGM

[Jeremiah]

I enjoyed making my first Scrapblog --I may make one for other tech events as well. Captions are fun, heh.

http://jeremiah_owyang.scrapblog.com/lunch20/