Conversation With Skimbit Founder Alicia Navarro

I met Alicia Navarro when I posted my selections for the Mashable awards. Alicia is the founder of a social decision making tool called Skimbit out of London. I’ve enjoyed learning more about the tool via our email exchanges and I asked if she’d be willing to participate in an interview so that ya’all could learn more about her service. She agreed and our conversation transcript is below.

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Alicia: I’m of Spanish-Cuban descent, born and bred in Sydney, Australia, and now living in fabulous London (as is almost every other Aussie). I have worked in web and mobile application product management for many years, for big companies and start-ups, and finally swore to myself that the next company I would work for was my own! I had the idea for Skimbit years ago, before the whole web 2.0 craze, and it was funnily enough in a failed job interview with Google that I resolved to finally go for it!

Allen: What is Skimbit and where did you come up with the name?

Alicia: Skimbit is a social tool for making group or tricky decisions, like organising various aspects of a holiday or wedding, choosing a TV or car, or moving home etc.

It skims the best bits of sites you like (that’s where the name comes from!) and presents them in a way that makes it easy to compare and analyse. Your friends and family can then view your findings, give their feedback using a variety of mechanisms, and this feedback is then automatically aggregated and represented in a fun graphical way. This makes it easy to pick a winner! You then have a set of tools – like maps, checklists, notepads, etc – to help act on the decision.

Allen: How does the service work?

Alicia: When you find a site you like, you click the button we install into your browser, and the title, description, image and decision-making criteria are skimmed and added to your project page. Eventually you have one page that has all the results of your internet research in a way that enables you to sort/filter/compare based on decision making criteria like price, location, number of beds, etc. This is quite unique as far as we can tell.

You can then invite people to view your findings, and everyone can give feedback via ranking, rating, thumbs up/down or comments. We compile these results and show you a summary of results in a fun graphical way, ie. ranking is represented by a horse race, and the winning horse represents the option with the highest average rank.

Allen: Why is Skimbit different from other social shopping sites?

Alicia: We feel quite passionately about this… Skimbit was designed primarily as a useful tool for making internet research and collaborative decision-making easier, rather than as an outspoken community that will eventually be advertised to within an inch of their lives :) There are social aspects, but its not as in-your-face as other social sites. We believe there is a huge proportion of the population that don’t use social sites (other than Facebook of course!), don’t care what strangers think or do, don’t have the time or inclination to share their personal life with strangers, and just want to get about their life more effectively.

We forget sometimes working in this space that there are a lot of people out there that aren’t like us… and Skimbit is aimed at them. We do have a ‘public projects’ section, but we find most users like to do Private or Shared projects, and we are fine with that. We like to think of ourselves as just-social-enough!

Allen: Is Skimbit just for shopping?

Alicia: Not at all… here are some examples of how its used: Compiling lists of competitors, preparing bibliographic information for a school project, picking a cottage for the weekend, deciding which sofa to get for the living room, collecting ideas for themes or colours for a wedding… it’s a tool for collecting results of internet research, so the end result doesn’t have to be a purchase. In fact, you don’t even need to pick a winner… think of it a bit like social bookmarking where more than the URL is bookmarked.

Allen: I know you are located in the U.K. – where is the service accessible from?

Alicia: It’s a global site – www.skimbit.com. As it’s a social tool, its location independent. Use it wherever you are! We don’t sell anything on it, we don’t mind where you are from. We have users from Iran, Poland, Russia, Taiwan… everywhere really!

Allen: What’s the team like at Skimbit?

Alicia: There is little ol’ me that has done much of this on her lonesome for some time. I have had an amazing team of offshore developers and designers. And now I have a finance and marketing person in house. We are looking to grow further soon!

Allen: Funded or unfunded? Looking for funding?

Alicia: Up until now its been self-funded (painfully – someone donate me some new shoes please!) and we have been lucky enough to get a government-backed loan due to the innovative nature of our white-labelled product – Skim-in-a-box (www.skim-in-a-box.com) which we license to other portals and companies like wedding planners, concierge services, interior decorators etc. We have one amazing client already, Wedding TV, who have recently launched their version of the Skimbit service under the name Decision Manager at decisions.weddingtv.com. We are thrilled as it’s a world first to offer this type of social decision-making service as a white-label hosted solution.

And yes, we are embarking upon an investor roadshow in January/February to get Angel funding. Interested parties please do contact me to be included in the process.

Allen: Who are your competitors? How does this compare to another new startup: The Point?

Alicia: Our main competitors are sites like Kaboodle, Osoyou, and eSnips. We all have similar ‘skimming’ solutions. However, as far as I can tell, Skimbit is the only site that is a generic internet research and decision-making tool, that ‘skims’ everything you need from a site to be able to analyse it later, and that provides such a useful feature set for giving feedback, performing analysis, and seeing the results of that process. And we really believe that the fact we don’t overly push the social aspect of the site will appeal to loads of busy people. We think there is room in the market for more than a few players, this space is about to explode! We aspire to do a simple job effectively, without too much fuss, and give busy people a useful tool for their day to day internet research and decision making, and we know there is a massive market of people who are after such a service.

The Point seems to be about campaigning issues – quite different from what I can see.

Allen: What’s the business model look like?

Alicia: For our free Skimbit.com site, we have contextual ads based on the type of project you are creating. We can offer advertisers compelling advertorial-type exposure, which we anticipate will be hugely compelling. Our clickthrough rates are higher than average, because people using our site are specifically looking for something, and are more open to relevant ads shown on project pages.

We are also launching the Skim Spot in January, which is a sponsored project that our community is invited to give feedback on. The advertiser gets a community of people engaging with their brand, exploring the different options on their site, and exposure on our homepage. We are in talks with some big names to be the inaugural partner for this type of innovative advertising proposition.

And finally, we have Skim-in-a-box, from which we earn setup and license fees on a monthly basis. We also retain revenue earned through the embedded Google search on all site instances.

People first question always seems to be ‘What is your traffic like?’, but we are a young company and are building that up. What we DO have is very different and equally indicative of success: we have a delighted client in our first few weeks who is licensing our technology, we have interested press due to our unique focus on the less social members of the public, and we have a genuinely useful tool that can add value to your day to day life.

Allen: What is the greatest business lesson you have learned in your career?

Alicia: You can’t do it alone. Well, you can, but you go a little bit insane. Since I moved operations to London from Sydney, I have been surrounded by supportive and helpful parties, and am finally getting an inhouse team, and it makes such a difference. However, would I have changed anything I did? Nope… I’m pretty proud to have gotten as far as I have on my own, particularly as a single non-techie female working from home while working a full time job in Sydney. :)

Allen: Which new RSS feeds are you reading these days?

Alicia: I think Leisa Reichelt’s blog www.disambiguity.com is fab, and the fact she is another Aussie female in London has nothing to do with it! I love her view on technology and on usability.