HootSuite / Ryan Holmes

Ryan Holmes, Founder of HootSuite talks about pursuing VC funding and the joys of iterating your product

 

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Ryan was not able to give us any codes for the HootSuite iPhone application, BUT he has promised to give me some codes to give away on their next iPhone app update. I guess they only get 100 codes per update to give away. Follow @web20show on Twitter for updates on this.

I spoke with Ryan Holmes (@invoker), the Founder and CEO of HootSuite to talk about their Social Media Dashboard HootSuite, rebranding from BrightKit and pursuing VC funding and when it makes sense to take it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with HootSuite, HootSuite is an awesome Twitter. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more through Ping.fm.

On February 5th, 2009 BrightKit became HootSuite thanks to a gracious name suggestion @mattnathan (thanks for the great name!). Ryan and I talked in detail about why renaming to HootSuite made sense and what steps they took to make it happen.

We talked about how they iterated to get to the full on Social Media Dashboard that HootSuite aims to be. Originally it was just Twitter in their Radar, but soon after they pulled in Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm to use as sources for your social content.

In the “Twitter client” space and the Social Media Dashboard space, there is a lot of demand for features and the competition is strong. Ryan helps us to understand what they are doing different to differentiate themselves from the competition regardless of the platform, web, mobile, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.

Ryan and I talked quite a bit in this episode about their recent Series A round of Financing of $1.9 Million dollars back in January 2010. In today’s startup world it’s sort of a “no no” to take funding, but for them they really needed that financial backing to take HootSuite to the next level and the places they want to take it.