Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews »»

Posted Oct 30, 2006
eHub Interviews Squirl

Thanks to John McGrath and Steve de Brun of Squirl for this email interview.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Squirl: Squirl is a website where people can post collections of their treasured things - we have customized templates for 35 different categories of collectibles - and organize and share these collections with others. It is both a cataloging tool and a social platform.

We have a growing and enthusiastic community and an amazing diversity of collections:

- edouble’s Comic collection
- Ray’s massive collection of autographed Sports Illustrated Magazines
- Shawn’s Vintage Action Figure Collection
- dogbowl’s pre-1980 Nintendo Toys
- Enchanted_Ways’ Fairy Cards
- John’s collection of 45s
- PackRat’s Occupied Japan collection
- Rainysnana’s Custom Clothes for My Size Barbie

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Squirl: We founded Squirl in January of 2006. John was given a collection of 3,000 vintage 45rpm records and couldn’t find a place to catalog them online. We realized it was an opportunity—there was probably other pent-up demand for such a product. We started working together on the idea immediately, and expanded it to encompass other things that can be collected, like books, stamps, coins, action figures, autographs, antiques, sports cards, toys and more.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Squirl: We’re full-time on Squirl. We’ve both turned down contracts and job offers to focus on it.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Squirl: (John McGrath speaking): After a brief career in journalism I started building web sites in 1996. I’ve worked as a developer for Columbia University, Starmedia Networks, Vignette, Dow Jones, and most recently the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. I do the programming.

(Steve de Brun speaking): I cut my teeth working with Nathan Shedroff http://www.nathan.com at vivid studios in the early 1990s, and moved on to work for News Corporation, then a slew of startups (including Guru.com, Pickspal.com and Veoh.com). I work on the UI.

With just two people (plus a lot of help from our significant others) we’re both filling in all sorts of gaps. Which we really enjoy, getting to experience every aspect of a small business.

This isn’t our first collaboration. In 1993 we rode our bicycles from Los Angeles, CA to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina ( over 7,000 miles) to raise money for development groups. Building websites requires an equal amount of determination, but less resistance to tropical parasites ;)

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Squirl: Use your intuition, be a perfectionist (but then let go), respond to your users as fast as you can, improve the product in fast, incremental ways, use the product you created. Make it work, and fast.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Squirl: We use Ruby on Rails, Lighttpd, MySQL, Subversion. Both of us work on Macs, and since we live in different cities, we use iChat all day to IM and videoconference. We also use Basecamp, Trac, Google Analytics and some homemade tools for prototyping and visualization.

John here: We like this stack, but I chose Rails mostly just for the fun of learning something new. I’ve grown to love Ruby and Rails, but it could have just as easily—or at least almost as easily— been done in Java. We’re agnostic about tools—there are lots of good ones, what matters more is how well you use them.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

Squirl: We’ve been live about a month. People are requesting…

Additional collecting categories, the ability to bookmark cool collections and people, transactions (buy/sell/trade), multiple images per item in a collection.

All of which we’re working on.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Squirl: Our users are all over the world. Collecting can be very niche (example: political buttons from the 1930’s), and the Internet has greatly enhanced peoples’ ability to find other people who share obscure passions, regardless of location. We have a lot of users from the Midwest, Europe, and Latin America, which we’re proud of—we’ve definitely reached beyond the San Francisco—New York Web 2.0 axis.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

Squirl: We launched with great cataloging, which we’re working to continually improve. A great community is forming right now around that service, and over the next six months we’ll be adding features to facilitate that. The third leg of the stool is commerce, which we will offer down the road—possibly by integrating with other services, possibly by building our own, or perhaps both. In the long run we’ll be offering more premium services and developing new revenue streams, like services to institutional collectors.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Squirl: Getting the word out to a worldwide community of users. The Internet makes this easier, but it still takes time and costs money.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Squirl: Days that last for 36 hours instead of 24. Maybe we should move to Norway in the summer.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Squirl: Currently, we have a “freemium” model. We have a very generous free product that suits the majority of our users, and a premium service called Squirl Plus, which gives almost no limits for a modest annual fee. We also make (a small amount of) money from advertising. In the future, we will have other premium services that people will want to pay for.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Squirl: We are a month old, so numbers are modest in the scheme of things, but growing rapidly. We have had tens of thousands of unique visitors and hundreds of thousands of page views. Check Alexa :-)

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Squirl: That we’ve built something that people use and enjoy. And that we harnessed our collective liberal arts intelligence to get this thing off the ground. John is technically an engineer and Steve is technically a designer. But we wouldn’t have gotten to this point unless we were able to think more holistically about this product, what people need, and how to communicate with them. It also helps that our wives and girlfriends have generously lent a hand to get the word out.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Squirl: We are in our mid-thirties, and we have worked with the Internet as it grew from a crude medium to something that is a bit less crude. Future generations will see the web as an indispensable life tool, and an extension of their identity, and they probably won’t think about it that much—it’ll be taken for granted. It also won’t be exclusively mediated by a desktop computer.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Squirl: The New York Times, Slashdot, World Changing, boing boing, techcrunch, treehugger, neatorama, gigaOM, John Batelle’s SearchBlog, Solution Watch, eHub, kottke.org, Design Observer, numerous collecting sites, Scripting News.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Squirl: Steve: 8ish; John: I sleep during the day.

Thanks to John McGrath and Steve de Brun of Squirl for this email interview.

Visit Squirl
Originally added to eHub on Sep 21, 06

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan