Interview with Wolf Becvar from HotGloo

I had an informal interview with Wolf Becvar from HotGloo. We talked for quite a long while about his project, especially covering the organizing and business side of the project, since that was what he focused on in their company. Hannes, whom I unfortunately didn't get to interview, was the technical brains behind HotGloo.

Well, the business and practical side of the project suited me better than well, since Wolf had some very good advice to give as I told him I wanted to start my own company someday. He said that definetely the best way to start a company was as a side project that could be grown into something big eventually. He also emphasized the meaning of marketing, pricing, understanding the competition and so forth – so that it's not all about the product. There are many great products out there with wonderful technical people behind them that nobody knows about, since there is no-one to do the marketing. That's why he (and I) believed that HotGloo had good potential to succeed – he had the business and organizing side under control and Hannes knew about the tehcnical stuff.

Wolf told me that HotGloo had started off as Hannes's master thesis, and that Wolf had met him in Hamburg. Hannes had gotten the idea to the project because he had felt that wireframing web projects was something that needed developing. The main problem was different operating systems and lack of collaboration. So he wanted to develop an application that would make collaboration easier and more fluent. In August 2009, Hannes and Wolf launched a beta version of HotGloo and after good feedback and 12 000 registered users they desided to found a company and launch the actual product. HotGloo was launched in February 2010.

Wolf felt that the future of their company looked quite bright since they already had some 550 paying customers and they were getting quite a lot of publicity and customer feedback was very positive. When I asked him what separates HotGloo from other wireframe applications, he answered that it was the ”look and feel” of their application. Number one is the ”feel” - the usability, easy-to-use, as fast as any software. Second is the ”look” - easy-to-approach, professional, intuitive. According to him, no other service provider has as good ”look and feel”. Not being any expert in wireframe applications, at least I was convinced.