“On the Couch”: Interview with Paul Stamatiou – Co-Founder, Skribit.com

Posted by Ramanujam on Nov 10th, 2009 | 3 comments home title

Paul Stamatiou is an interesting personality who apart from being a popular blogger also started a company right out of college. Paul Stamatiou is more commonly known by his internet handle @Stammy. I am glad to publish this interview with Paul where he shares some interesting information about his startup life.

Paul Stamatiou- Co-founder, Skribit.com

1) Paul, tell us briefly about yourself and your startup Skribit.com.

I am a 23 year old alum of Georgia Tech, currently living in Atlanta. I am mostly known for my 4 year old tech blog, PaulStamatiou.com. Skribit came out of Atlanta Startup Weekend back in 2007, from a problem I had with coming up with original topics to write about on my blog. Two years later and I have been working on Skribit full-time for about a year. Skribit helps bloggers “cure writer’s block” by receiving suggestions about what to write about via our sidebar widget or suggestions tab. The Skribit website lets website owners manage those suggestions and lets readers follow suggestions they like and get notified of changes and when they are published.

2) Like most of the startup guys you do wear different hats. (Programmer, designer, marketer, user support). Which one do you like the most and how hard is it to change hats and act accordingly.

I definitely, definitely wear many hats. Changing between them is not much of an issue, except for when I am programming and “in the zone”, it’s hard to get back to it and in my train of thought so I generally block out a few hours of development, switch to replying to user support for a bit, then go back to developing (which goes hand-in-hand with designing/front-end work that I do). My favorite is probably developing and fine-tuning the user experience for various features of Skribit. Communicating with our users via email, Get Satisfaction, Twitter or whatever it may be is also rewarding but I feel like that will soon be a job in itself – keeping track of all the Google alerts for Skribit can be rather time consuming.

3) When you graduated out of college most of your classmates would have picked up high paying jobs at top notch companies. Going the startup route is definitely not an easy choice both financially or with regards to job security. Your thoughts and experiences?

I figured the best time to try out the startup life is right out of college while I’m used to living cheaply. It would be very hard to go from a high-paying job to doing a startup later on. However I am in a rather interesting situation as my blog pays my basic living expenses so I am not really going into much debt working on my startup like others doing a startup right out of college might. Several of my friends are working jobs with amazing pay – upwards of $100k – but whenever we meetup and chat, it is easy to see that they hate their job. They regularly stay in the office from 8am to 11pm doing work they dislike. I work many hours as well, but it’s in the comfort of my own apartment and I enjoy what I do. That being said, I fear that one day if/when I do work a regular office job, adjusting will be very hard for me as I’m so used to the being-my-own-boss and working from home lifestyle.

4) Social media has helped many startups to gain the exposure and the attention which they deserve. How well are you leveraging social media for your Startup? Any good learning?

Social media has helped Skribit a bit, but not as much as it will in the near future. We have been “laying low” until we are ready for a real launch, big marketing push and spreading the word. Even without actively spreading the word about Skribit just yet, we have seen people talk about Skribit on Twitter and their blogs. Social media makes is easy to find the people talking about us so we can go in and thank them, offer feedback, solve any issues they might have and so on. This will be put to the test very soon – we are tentatively planning on actively spreading the word about Skribit in the next month.

5) Going to the big blog conferences and startup events does help a lot, but how good is to spend money for registration,travel etc and more importantly the time while the startup is in bootstrap mode. Is it really worth the efforts?

I am kind of mixed about the rewards of attending big conferences. Chances are if you are online everyday, actively read all the big blogs and Twitter, you will know most of the things people talk about at the conference panels, sessions and speeches. And if not, most everything from that conference will be online shortly after for you to catch up on. You don’t need to go to such a big and expensive conference to learn. That being said, you do go to conferences to network with others in your space and build a relationship with them that might turn out to be beneficial to you both. A good friend of mine spent a few thousand dollars to attend a music technology conference out-of-state. But the sequence of events after that conference landed him an amazing interview on NPR for him and his startup. There are many other stories like this. You need to go out there and meet people; can’t do everything online!

6) Having a blog helps and that too being a popular blogger helps a lot! How has your blog helped you in your startup journey or otherwise?

My years of blogging have helped develop a loyal readership that values and trusts my thoughts on things. That has helped me build a story around Skribit that I have tried to embody on the Skribit about page. We’re trying to get the point across that Skribit is not just some startup from a bunch of no-names, but rather is founded from real bloggers that understand the space. While I have used my blog to discuss Skribit and document our growing pains and so on, I don’t really consider that marketing rather than giving people an inside look on how a startup operates. In short – I think Skribit in a good position to be backed by my blog and help get the first users trying it out.

7) What are your future plans with skribit?

Building up our userbase and managing a happy community!

8) Finally, has there been any big mistake in your journey and what did you learn from that? In order words have you ever felt you could have done things in a different way?

Honestly I can’t say that we have had any big mistakes lately. One thing that is up for discussion is how we have been holding off on promoting the product while we were actively developing it. Some prefer to market from the very beginning. We chose to wait a bit until we were happy with our product and know that people would not just try it out, dislike it and never come back again.

Hope you enjoyed the interview. If you have any questions or suggestions please do use the comments section.

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