Profile: PBwiki, easy as a peanut butter sandwich
An interview with Ramit Sethi, Co-founder and VP Community Marketing
Overview
Founded: 2005
Location: San Mateo, CA (branch office Nashua, NH)
Current Employees: 11
VC: Mohr, Davidow Ventures, a VentureLoop client
Money Raised: $2.1 million
Give us a basic background on PBWiki.
PBWiki’s
goal is to lead the world’s collaboration market. The name "PBwiki"
comes from the idea that making a PBwiki is as easy as making a peanut
butter sandwich. The product was initially programmed by David Weekly,
the PBwiki CEO, at a SuperHappyDevHouse event in less than 24 hours.
Within 48 hours of launching PBwiki, we had over 1,000 wikis. Now we’re
currently hosting over 400,000 business and education communities,
which is more than any other wiki site.
Why would someone use your website, and what is the cost?
Project
management for business and classrooms for educators are our biggest
applications right now. A company can quickly set up a wiki that
allows them to post updates, share documents, create calendars, and
control user access. The basic application is free, and we have
affordable subscriptions for more robust and customizable features.
The reason so many companies utilize our wiki is the easy and rapid
deployment of a simple, secure collaboration website. You don’t have
to wait for your overworked IT department. And we build the software to
be used, not to be shoved down the throat of poor end users. We use our
own product for all of our internal collaboration.
Is this product mainly for startups, or does it have the horsepower to meet the needs of larger companies too?
That’s
a good question. We never intended to serve only Silicon Valley. In
fact, when we look at our usage data, we have more customers from the
Midwest and East coast than the West coast. And one-third of Fortune
500 companies use PBwiki for internal collaboration. Many of these
larger companies find products like Microsoft Sharepoint too
complicated and inflexible. They just want something that works. Some
of those typical use cases include intranets, extranets, and document
repositories.
You mentioned a subscription version of the product. Is that your main or only revenue model?
We’re
currently doing very well utilizing a subscription model to compliment
the free version of our product. We actually set new revenue records
most months. We’re of course open to other revenue models in the
future. But subscriptions are working well.
What is it like to work for PBWiki?
The
culture is very informal. You can tell that from our name and logo down
to the emails we send. (Try it! Send us an email if you’re interested
in working here.) Everyone here is hungry and wants to make big changes
right now. It’s pretty amazing to realize how many people PBwiki
touches. We get hundreds of emails from users around the world telling
us how they use PBwiki and how they wish we’d just help them do this
ooooone other thing.
In terms of our work life, we have the
typical free lunches and
massages. But the real fun is that you can make big, ambitious changes
and get them in front of millions
of users the very same week. We’re a SAAS company so we deploy often,
and changes affect lots of users. To put things in perspective, last
week our blog (http://blog.pbwiki.com) has photos of a recent
spicy-food-eating contest we had in the office.
What is your hottest job opening right now?
We’re hiring in engineering, sales and support, but a web engineer would probably be our most critical need at the moment.
Web engineer
What makes us tick? We love building useful tools
for the web. We develop new features on Monday, and deploy it to hundreds of
thousands of real users by Friday. What makes you tick? We want you to be energetic,
full of ideas, know what a wiki is, and enjoy working with a small team of
brilliant people. You should thoroughly understand web technologies. You know
how to prototype things and quickly make them real with XHTML, Javascript/AJAX,
CSS, and/or PHP.