By: John Pletz May 30, 2011
Matt Moog has a knack for organizing people. In the past five years, he's gotten more than 200,000 people to write about everything from coffee makers to car insurance on Viewpoints.com, which is about to become the Internet's biggest product-review site.
What's more impressive, perhaps, is how he got nearly 3,000 to sign up for BuiltinChicago.org in just nine months. Attracting 13,500 visitors a month, the blog/bulletin board is the gathering point for the city's notoriously fractured tech community.
“It's Facebook for the local digerati,” says Matt McCall, a venture capitalist and early member of BuiltinChicago who has known Mr. Moog for more than a decade and is an investor in Viewpoints.
Of course, Mr. Moog, 41, has social-networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter that others didn't have when they tried—and failed—to bring tech-minded folks together. But the key is Mr. Moog himself, says Mr. McCall: “He's also one of the most experienced guys in the U.S. in building communities.”
Mr. Moog constructed BuiltinChicago last summer after hosting tech executives and entrepreneurs one evening in Viewpoints' offices in River North. The talk quickly turned to how hard it was to find talent and raise money with everyone scattered. “It took me an hour or two to start the site,” he says.
At first, he invited pals to log on, but only a few did. So Mr. Moog opened up the site to anyone who registered. He knew the first couple hundred people who signed up. He doesn't know 80% to 90% of the people signing up now. “That's the whole point,” he says.
BuiltinChicago.org is
' Facebook for
the local digerati.'
Mr. Moog's organizing skills predate his arrival on the Chicago tech scene. The son of Robert Moog, of synthesizer fame, he grew up on the East Coast and studied political science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Mr. Moog got his start in technology by selling Microsoft Corp.'s software in the early 90s, talking himself into a job on the team that launched MSN.
He joined CoolSavings Inc., a Chicago-based online-coupon company, in 1996. Five years later, at age 31, he became CEO of the publicly traded dot-com, which was losing money. He cut the staff by two-thirds and quadrupled revenue to $80 million before selling the company, now called Q Interactive, to Landmark Media Enterprises LLC of Norfolk, Va.
Mr. Moog already had ideas for his next business: marrying Internet search and social media, through consumer reviews, in a way that also would appeal to advertisers. Landmark passed on it, and he put it in a drawer. After nearly a year, “I woke up and said to my wife, ‘I'm doing it.' It was driving me crazy,” Mr. Moog says.
He launched Viewpoints in 2006, raising $5 million from investors. Today, he says, the company has 45 employees, annual revenue of about $10 million and is profitable. Although the business keeps him plenty busy, he still finds time to play digital cruise director at BuiltinChicago, weighing in with his own blog posts and culling the best stuff from members each day to share with everyone.
© 2011 by Crain Communications Inc.
By: John Pletz May 30, 2011
Read more: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20110528/ISSUE01/305289977/matt-moog-builds-a-digital-water-cooler-for-chicago-techies#ixzz1NxZjkNy7
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