What is Scoutzie?
Scoutzie is a members-only network of professional designers.

What’s your traction been like thus far?
It’s been very good. September has been the best month to date, and we are excited about the future!

What do you know now that you wish you would have known when you started Scoutzie?
I wish I would have built revenue generating stream from day one. Although amazing users are a great motivator, revenue that can pay the bills and sustain your company can also come in very handy; and besides, when you have good revenue, that certainly helps to spend more time on building more great features for your users.

What’s a hypothesis that you’ve had that has failed? And how did you respond?
When we redesigned Scoutzie about six months ago, we went with an interface that crossed between a traditional website and a mobile app. It was cool, it was new, but turned out, it was not as straight-forward to understand as we wanted it to be.

You see, we use so many websites every day that after a while we build expectations / patterns that we want to see on the web. When a website breaks those patters, users might not have enough patience or interest to continue. Long story short, being a design company, we took our own design too far, and our analytics quickly told us so.

No worries though, we have just updated the site to be more like traditional website again, and at the same time, we have a good mobile-online view that you get to see, should you be say, on iPhone. So far, the feedback has been really good.

What’s your favorite startup in Seattle? (Besides your own!)
Amazon. I am really stoke to see how every year they are reinventing themselves, while keeping the core in tact. For a massive corporation, they are incredibly agile and fast. I love it.

What’s your favorite thing about being a startup in Seattle?
The Summer, isn’t that what everyone loves in Seattle? But seriously, starting a company in Seattle was awesome because people really friendly and supportive and the prices were low and the weather was good. In the summer, it was exceptionally hard to focus because I wanted to be outside by the ocean all the time, but in the winter, when it rains cats and dogs all the time, that’s such a great time work – 100% focus, as there’s really not much else to do.

What’s your favorite thing about being an entrepreneur?
I get to wake up every morning, get out of bed and do the job that I love, and occasionally, I get to prove a lot of people wrong.

What does the success look like for Scoutzie?
Enriching our user’s lives, one project at a time.

What’s your favorite local sports team?
Sounders