Interview With WellcomeMat Co-Founder Phil Thomas Di Giulio

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: