Thomas Marban, creator of popurls.com is an internet astronaut. I’ve been a big fan of popurls and honestly I’m quite jealous it wasn’t my idea. The site is a successful example of how powerful doing something simple, but innovative can be. I check the site more than 50 times a day and I must not be the only one… As of 9/26/08 popurls cracked the 2 million pageviews mark. Pretty awesome traffic for a 1 page site!

Thomas is a great first internet astronaut to profile for this blog as he is a perfect example of what can be accomplished with some hard work and creativity over a short period of time. He created an innovative, useful tool and bootstrapped it himself. His total cash investment was minimal and the return has been and will continue to be great.

Who are you? What is your background?

I’m a serial entrepreneur, based in austria where I co-founded my first company at the age of 19. I have a versatile background ranging from design to technology to marketing but i’m far off from calling myself an expert in any of those fields. I just try to creatively mix and match the obvious of many worlds.

What inspired popurls?

I came up with the idea for one simple reason which was to keep my traditional feed reader (mostly vertical industry news) clean from short-term headlines that you find on sites like digg or reddit but still have a dashboard to catch up with the latest web zeitgeist. In other words, if your feed-reader is a well-tended lake then popurls is the torrential river.

What were you working on full-time when you started popurls?

I was running an enterprise software company (celum.com) with a school mate for almost ten years. It was self-funded and we grew it to a considerable market share and more than 30 employees when I decided to sell my share in fall 2007 to move from the business to a consumer focused industry.

How much would you say it cost you to launch popurls?
The only real expenses were trademark registrations and a small fee for hosting; other than that the only investment was my personal work time. The cost structure is about the same today, though i’m operating a small server farm now.

Can you give us any general number on the income generated by the site?

The current dollar<>euro exchange rate is a drawback for me as I’m operating from europe but i’d say that revenues cover a decent middle-class lifestyle.

What development language do you use? PHP, ASP, Etc.

php, but just for historic reasons - i would probably use python or perl if i’d start from scratch.

What are a couple of the new startups / websites that you’re excited about right now?

I have no specific startup that makes me really excited; it’s more about the fact that many ideas that started ten years ago have matured into viable businesses or tangible use cases and devices that are ready for real-world use today. It’s just the same with the ubiquity of APIs and the respective availability of relevant data.

How much time did you spend coming up with the name and brand for popurls? Why the butterfly?

I’ve spent a lot of time developing the brand, its consistency and public perception. Although popurls encapsulates a lot of web 2.0 sites, my objective was to be the anti-web2.0 brand, in fact you won’t find all those infamous visual elements or phrases in the user interface. also, given that my resources are limited figuring out what directions and topics you ain’t gonna pursuit is of high importance and in turn an advantage at the same time.
The logo is no innuendo - to enforce the disillusion: the butterfly was my first attempt in working with the path tool in adobe illustrator at the time i wrote the first popurls version. By virtue of its disarming shape I reused it as the logo.

Did you build it yourself?

Yes, it’s all a one-man labour of love - from design to a multi-server backend.

Was it built using a platform or CMS?

I used a few industry-standard components but that’s about it, the rest it built it from scratch.

How long did it take from idea to having something online?

Only a few days, but the solution back than was way simpler compared to how popurls works today.

When did you realize you really had something?

I think it was the first half year after launch when direct traffic grew to almost 50,000 views per day and remained stable without the dependence from other sites or search engines.

When did you decide to go full time with popurls and the popurls network?

That’s closely tied to the reason i mentioned above; about a year ago.

What new projects are you working on?

popurls is still my endeavour that gets 100% attention. I’ve launched a site called readbag.com a few months ago that got 10,000 users just through word of mouth but it was mainly built to solve a small problem and gain some experience with google’s app engine.

What were the biggest mistakes you made with popurls?

It’s a very technical one but I think solely supporting login standards like openid is still not the best way - the majority of users just don’t care if they have to create new proprietary accounts once more to use a service.

What were the smartest / best things you did?

Stick with the single page concept for all the years and not overdo it with features that users wouldn’t expect from the popurls brand, such as building vertical sub-sites for each and every topic or offering personalization in terms of the included content.

What words of advice / wisdom would you have for other internet entrepreneurs?

If I’d start all over today on the web, I’d rather try to solve a problem that was not caused by the internet itself.

 
 
Thanks Thomas. Good luck with your future launches.