Product Wiki’s Erik Kalviainen- A Startup Story

del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit Ask Google Netscape Simpy Socializer StumbleUpon Technorati Windows Live Wists Yahoo!

During my tenure as the director of business development for Shopzilla, I served as the single external conduit for the company to the Internet community at large for partnership opportunities. Nearly 75% of the phone calls, emails and other forms of inquiries I received were from Internet entrepreneurs seeking out partnerships with Shopzilla to monetize their shopping relevant content. Of all the entrepreneurs who reached out to me, there were really only a few that I felt warranted thorough due diligence and ultimately, my internal support, based on the companies business model, consumer value proposition, and overall company prospects. Product Wiki, with Erik Kalviainen at the helm, struck me as one of those companies.

You see, Shopzilla was not seeking out partnerships with companies that had “potential.” Rather, my marching orders were to solicit prospective partnerships that delivered value to the company, day 1. I always felt that this was a dangerous, short sided attitude since Shopzilla had never really “cracked the nut” of consumer shopping habits online. Sure, we might have been kicking out a whole lot of cash, but did we really know what online shoppers wanted? My guess was that someday, somewhere a new form of shopping platform would be created and when that day came about, I wanted to be sure that Shopzilla was the company helping to fuel its growth. Our management team disagreed.

That’s where Product Wiki came into play: A company building a shopping application, for the consumer, by the consumers. Applying the Wiki concept to the product shopping category was a virtual “no brainer” in my book. It played into all of the Internet drivers at the time, SEO and SEM and was positioned well to benefit from the new Web 2.0 drivers, including user generated content and social networking. In my mind, Product Wiki had at least a better chance than many others, to become the next big thing in shopping. I served as Product Wiki’s internal Shopzilla advocate, hoping that I could convince Shopzilla’s management team to work with Erik and his team. They balked. Erik partnered with Shopping.com, we parted ways, that is, until I sent out my mass email regarding my entrepreneurial mission.

After receiving Erik’s overwhelmingly positive response about my plans to embark on a full time search for my next entrepreneurial opportunity, I thought it would be a good idea to have Erik tell his story of entrepreneurship to my small readership, to hopefully serve as a point of both inspiration and a good old fashioned reality check. Erik has delivered and below is Erik’s story of his own entrepreneurial adventure with Product Wiki.

“Hi Steven,

Sorry for the late, reply. We’ve been busier this last week than I expected.

Other than the iPhone release, it’s kind of a slow Friday here, so I thought I’d share my story with you in the spirit of your entrepreneurial quest.

I would say my path of entrepreneurship is more of a story of inevitability than of an internal burning desire “to be my own boss”. The decision to start ProductWiki (along with my wife, and brother-in-law) was as much motivated by the passionate belief in the need for the service, as much as it was because of any particular personality traits we possess. Mind you, I’m a very self-directed person, and don’t particularly like being “managed”. Both of these factors were instrumental in making the decision to give up a Silicon Valley engineer’s salary, moving back to Canada and starving for a while tackling the ProductWiki project head-on.

We started ProductWiki officially in June of 2005 and launched by November of the same year. Soon after we began our work, we began to hear the buzz around the concept of “Web 2.0” (this was before TechCrunch was popular after all). Little did we realize that our journey of creating the wiki version of Consumer Reports would coincide with a huge movement that would ultimately lead to hundreds (if not thousands) of fledgling Internet startups peppering the Internet landscape? While we were inspired by the spirit of the then-small(er) Wikipedia and del.icio.us, we didn’t realize that we were at the beginning of what would become Bubble 2.0.

In the early days, other more experienced entrepreneurs would give us advice to expect that our technology, operations, and philosophy would drastically change over the lifetime of the business, and I remember stubbornly thinking that we wouldn’t. I believed that we were the exception. I was wrong.

When I think back to earlier periods in our story, I can’t help but feel like I want to go back and tell my past-self everything I’ve learned along the way to avoid making the inevitable mistakes and skip to the “good stuff”. I then realize that it was those very mistakes that provided me with the insight to recognize the good stuff in the first place.

ProductWiki has changed a lot since those early days, but our essential vision has remained the same. While the unexpected competition and absurdity that came with Web 2.0 has changed the game, our resolve remains as strong as ever. Many of the superficial, copycat, and just plain silly businesses will fail, but out of their ashes will remain those few companies that possess the right combination of innovation, vision, patience, and hard work. With the barriers-to-entry all but removed for Web-based businesses, those are the qualities that will determine success.

And good coffee.

-Erik”

July 1st, 2007