WellcomeMat Archive

This morning I met with Phil Thomas Di Giulio, WellcomeMat co-founder. We met at a Starbucks which I’ve been using as an interview location for nearly two years. If Starbucks was a recession metric, the economy is clearly booming.

WellcomeMat is a video marketplace which allows you to hire help to create a video for you. Real estate is their most popular section. They also focus on local business videos.

There’s a production job board where you can post want ads for help with creating videos. Production help replies with quotes and you can view their ratings and rankings. WellcomeMat has a points system which helps to bubble the best quality talent to the top.

I asked about why a company would choose WellcomeMat over YouTube for video hosting. Phil explained that more of the consumer-focused video hosting sites are removing commercial content. He also explained that their video player has a variety of features that are not found with most consumer-focused video hosting services. They offer a chapter feature which allows you to jump to a specific portion of a video (e.g. Kitchen, Bath, etc.). I sure hope other video hosts add this feature.

WellcomeMat is bootstrapped and has offices in Brooklyn and Boulder, Colorado. There are 5 team members spread across both offices. They use Limelight for the video hosting. We spoke about their business plan which will be a subscription and freemium model. I stressed to Phil not to offer too much for free that users have no reason to upgrade to a paid subscription.

Then there’s MatMan which if you’ve been to any NYC tech events you have certainly interacted with him. He’s a space traveler that has a large video screen on his chest showing off the videos created using the WellcomeMat marketplace. While it’s partly a gimmick, it certainly gets your attention.

I tried to capture a video interview with Phil but the batteries died. Instead here’s Phil’s demo from the NextWeb meetup earlier this year:

At the Web 2 NY meeting last night, WellcomeMat demo’ed their application. WellcomeMat is a video marketplace which allows you to hire help to create a video for you. The video can be for a wedding, used car listing or home/rental listing. The home sales and apartment rentals market is their most popular.

The app seems interesting – they have been live since 2004 (still in Beta???) and apparently have coverage nearly nationwide. So no matter where you are in the U.S., you can find someone to shoot a video for you at a reasonable price.

I don’t know about you but how do you explain the name of the company to a person you are speaking with? “It’s WellcomeMat, you know with two L’s” ???

Here’s co-founder Phil Thomas Di Giulio’s demo of WellcomeMat: