Joe Cook is the Co-founder and CEO of HowRandom, Co-founder & CEO of Veribu, Investor in Jason Damato (artist @ Universal Motown), a Pepperdine Alum, and a Hilton Head Island, South Carolina Native.
What are you working on right now?
HowRandom is an online chat site that anonymously pairs college students together in a secure environment. Offering college system email verification, HowRandom helps students from different schools to connect and exchange ideas. All chat information is private between the two participants, with college or university name being the only identifying characteristic. We’re working on a feature now that will give verified users profiles and reduce the level on anonymity to a certain degree.
Veribu is a social web-based communication platform that allows users to engage in video chats, phone calls, and text messages without any software downloads. Users also have the ability to record and send voice and video messages, collaborate with contacts in private chats, and tag their contacts in groups messages.
3 trends that excite you?
I like the SaaS industry. Social web-based communications is our core focus.
How do you bring ideas to life?
Brainstorm , exchange ideas back and forth, draw up wireframes, write lots of code, release a beta version, get feedback, make changes, launch the product/service. A painting, a song, and a website are never truly finished. It’s best to launch at 80% and test the market. Otherwise you’ll spend a year trying to get it to 100% and you run the risk of getting beat to market.
What inspires you?
We truly love what we do. The only way to do great work is to love what you do and do it all the time.
What is one mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?
We’ve made lots of usability mistakes. We learned to test things with lots of people before releasing them. For example, cross browser appearance is a lot harder to tackle than it used to be.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
The idea itself isn’t very important. How you implement your vision is everything.
What is one tool that helps you bring ideas to life?
We love lynda.com. Their videos educate us on software and code that we aren’t very familiar with.
Connect
Website – How Random
How Random on Twitter
How Random on Facebook
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.