This interview is part of our Expert Advice series, where CEO's, CMO's and best selling authors share their expertise.
Iain MacDonald is CEO of Weedle.com, an online social utility focusing on promoting individual skills. Iain recently took a few minutes to speak with me about this unique project.
Connect with Iain on his Weedle profile.
1. What is Weedle.com?
Weedle is a website that enables you to connect with people who need your skill. You can create a free skill page where you can showcase any skill, expertise or talent that you have. Weedle enables you to easily promote your skill to your family, friends, social and professional contacts – so that they will be more likely to use you and to recommend you.Weedle is a social utility that helps you get found by people who need your skill.
2. What motivated you to start Weedle?
I needed a tree cutter to chop down some trees in my yard. I spent a lot of time asking my friends and contacts if they knew one – but they didn’t. Then I searched on-line and although I found some people who said they could help me, I found myself dealing with strangers and I was unsure about the person’s credibility, trustworthiness and value for money.
That’s when it struck me. Right now, there are millions of credible, trustworthy people out there with incredible skills and talent. At the same time, there are millions of people who need to find someone with these skills and talents, but currently, there is no large scale simple way of connecting people with skills to the people who need them.
This is the problem that Weedle is solving. Weedle is a fundamentally better way of connecting people with skills to the people who need them, within a trusted environment.
3. Who is Weedle for?
Weedle is for people who are looking to get found by people who need their skill and also, Weedle is for people who are looking to find someone who has the skills they need.
No matter who you are or what you can do, no matter what your qualifications or background, whether you are employed in a company or working for yourself - full time, part-time or otherwise, you can join Weedle and showcase your skills through text, video, presentations, photos and other rich media. People with almost every type of skill including Accountants, Lawyers, Doctors, Carpenters, Shoe Designers, Social Media Experts, Artists, Engineers, Architects, Nanny’s, Models, Physical Therapists and thousands more have already created Weedle skills pages and are getting found by people who need their skills – for free.
4. Why should they join? What benefit might be expected?
With Weedle you can create a Weedle skills page. On that page you can say who you are, what you do and then you can give examples of what you can do through things like video or presentations or pictures or audio or word documents.
- First of all, when someone searches for your skill on Google, they can find you. For example right now if you search “Digital Media Sales in San Francisco” or “Public Relations Expert in Palm Desert” or “Computer Lessons in Lansing” or “Tax Specialist San Francisco” a Weedle page comes back on Google number 1.
- The second benefit is that you can share your skills page (though e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc) to your family to your friends and to your contacts - so they know a lot more about what skills you have. This means they are much more likely to use you themselves and also, it means they are much more likely to recommend you to their friends, family and contacts.
- The third benefit is that people can search for you on Weedle and when they do, they see connections that they have with you, such as maybe you grew up together, you went to the same university, maybe you are from the same hometown or even better, maybe you have a friend in common and they can see that their mutual friend thinks you’re great.
5. What is your niche in the social networking world? Why should someone signup with your network?
Weedle integrates the social graph with the problem of searching for people with skills in order to find people with skills that you can trust.
6. Every network develops some unique terms and lingo and Weedle is no exception. Can you explain "tapping" and why it's good to "tap" and be "tapped"?
When searching for someone with a particular skill on Weedle, we’ll highlight if any of the search results contain people who are recommended by people whose opinions your respect – i.e. people you are “tapped into”. In real life we “tap into” our friends, family and contacts to ask them who they recommend when we are searching for skilled professionals. We came up with phrase about a month ago and included it as part of our early Beta to get feedback. Feedback from our user community has thrown up some much better ways of describing this aspect of Weedle. We’re excited about a replacement which we’ll be launching in the coming weeks which we believe is much more intuitive.
7. The majority of Twitter users have never tweeted and have no followers (55% and 53%, respectively). In comparison, how active are most Weedle members? What is the current user base? What growth do you project over the next 12-24 months?
We’ve been surprised by the level of activity on the platform to date, particularly as we have only recently launched. For example, we now have users from over 50 countries around the world and growing. We don’t disclose specific user numbers but so far, we’re ahead of plan. In terms of the future, we believe Weedle can create value for millions and millions of people all over the world.
8. What apps and networks do you currently integrate with? What plans are there in the future?
Currently, we’re integrating in one form or another with Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.
