Startup of the Day - Tweba

The company of the day is Tweba based in UK. Tweba is a free social marketplace where people can buy and sell for free in a truly social way. You will find below an interview with Paul Rawlings of Tweba. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!

Website: www.tweba.com.

Interview with Paul Rawlings of Tweba

Who are you?

My name is Paul Rawlings and I am a Microsoft Software Developer from Liverpool, UK.

How do you feel being the most promising ‘company of the day’ per Microsoft?

Being Company of the day is awesome and a great thing. When I created Tweba, I wanted to create a service that would be useful to everyone and gets noticed. Being noticed by Microsoft is a great thing to have and has reassured me that Tweba is gonna be really cool.

What did you do before creating your company?

Before Tweba.com, I have been responsible for various other services, such as Twe2 which is Free SMS on Twitter for the rest of the world. Twe2 got a good reaction and in a short period of time has sent well over 1,000,000 free SMS messages. I also created vooices.us which is a voice control technology for screens and websites where a developer can create a voice map and then control things like websites through JavaScript, Flash or Silverlight by actually dialing the content on the screen.

How did you get the idea? What s the genesis?

My idea came from my wife. My wife is an avid seller and was getting annoyed with the ever changing terms & conditions, prices and operations of other auction/listing sites. I decided to look into the auction process, how it could be improved and came up with Tweba, the Social Marketplace. We simplified everything, took it to basics and so Tweba was born.

What do you sell? What is your company’s mission?

Tweba is a free social marketplace where people can buy and sell for free in a truly social way. Our mission is to become the coolest place to buy and sell on the internet without having to charge the buyers or sellers and form of listing fee.

What is your market?

The market is anyone who wants to sell something online.

Any clients? References? Partners? You want to quote?

Not at the moment, but we are fast approaching 50,000 listed items within under a week of being live.

Funding history? VCs? BA?

None.

Growth? Internationalization?

We are available globally.

How many employees do you have? How many developers?

It’s just me.

Are you hiring? If yes, what? Where?

Hopefully one day.

Which platform are you building on? Why?

Tweba is built upon Microsoft ASP.Net 2.0 and is backed by SQL2008. I went for this as obviously I have skills within this area but Visual Studio also allows us to get products like Tweba.com out to the market very quickly. Visual Studio and the Microsoft set of tools also allow us to quickly adapt to user request and changes which definitely suit the current fast paced environments and help us deliver features and functionality in very small time frames.

Do you have any Software IP? Is there something that you’re the only one to do on the market?

No.

Who’s your role model?

In business I base my role models off people like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and other like minded entrepreneurs who have a vision, are focused and then have the ability to deliver that vision.

Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/internet areas?

There is a massive rush around Social Applications that are based upon communication technologies such as Twitter. I think social media and socially aware applications is where is will be.

Looking for funding? If yes, how much?

We haven’t really considered funding as Tweba has been quite a fast market product. As always funding would be nice as it would enable Tweba to take more of a global stage and become the social marketplace we know it can be. Know anyone or anyone interested?

What about the BizSpark Program? What do you think? Are you going to join? Why?

BizSpark is ace and has been very helpful. Having access to the Microsoft set of tools obviously has been invaluable to getting our products to market in both Twe2 and Tweba.

Any advice to young Software entrepreneurs?

The only bit of advice I would say is to keep at it. Twe2 and Tweba have been about my 10th idea so if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

Anything else you’d like to say?

It really is great being selected as Startup of the Day and I really do appreciate it. I hope people love Tweba as much as I have loved creating it. We are constantly open to new ideas and love feedback, even if its not always positive. Please keep it coming and happy tweebing.