You all surely know of Flavors.me, and About.me, but have you ever wanted more depth to your “I love me” page? We were granted the great opportunity to get behind-the-scenes with one of Zerply’s co-founders, Christofer Karltorp, to learn what else is possible for a professional profile page. We hope you enjoy this peek at what’s to come from Zerply, please dive in. 

Co-Founder: Christofer Karltorp  

Startup: Zerply Inc.

Link to Startup:  

www.zerply.com

http://zerply.posterous.com/ 

@Zerply

Location: Mountain View, CA

Available Promotions:

 100 beta invites, click for instant access> http://goo.gl/IrvOD

We’d like to give our readers an insight to who you are. Please describe yourself, and your role at Zerply.

Co-founder, CEO - I do most things business related, such as talk to investors, advisors, possible partners. I handle most transactions and make sure that both the Mountain View team and the international team know what is going on. I go to meetups with other entrepreneurs and build our offline network. But since it’s a startup, we all end up doing what needs to be done the most of any given day.

What is Zerply, and what are the benefits of using it?

First of all I should probably explain what Zerply stands for, as it impacts our vision for what we want to accomplish. Zerply is derived from “serious play”, which we aim to keep at the core of what we build. If you love what you do it’s easy to be passionate about it. It also makes it feel less like work and more like play. Though you are still a professional, hence the term “serious play”. That said, our idea is to change the way professional networking is done online. To make it more accessible and fun and steer away from the traditional corporate feeling of business networks. Zerply’s first feature is the professional profile that we have let a number of beta testers try out already. The profile is tightly connected to the networking features that we have started rolling out recently, where our users can save contacts, endorse tags, find users that are similar to themselves and search specifically for users based on tags/skills/education/experience/location etc.

The benefits of using Zerply are: professional presentation, professional networking and (still in the making) simplified communication.

You can in a matter of minutes set up a public, professional profile by which other people easily can figure out who you are and what you are doing. When that is done you can start finding other people, endorse tags and skills and build your network.

With some other professional profile services available, what inspired and motivated you to create Zerply?

Our main goal has never been to only create a professional profile service, but instead tie that feature to a simple and accessible business network. Our motivation has come from several, extremely skilled, web designers who have figured out a way to present themselves professionally in style. One specific designer that we have always been inspired by is our fellow European, Tim Van Damme. We wanted to give similar options to people who don’t have the time or the skills to build their own presentation page, and though it would be a good idea to combine the profiles with a new type of business network. Remember that when we started building Zerply, there was no Flavors.me or About.me, but only the LinkedIn public profiles.

Your design is elegant and simple, how did you come up with the look and feel of Zerply?

I think you could say that our graphical identity is in “experimental mode”. You will probably see pretty big changes in the near future as we keep seeking our identity, especially now that we are adding a designer to our team - the talented Luke Beard (@lukesbeard). But simplicity is a high priority in all of our development. Taaniel makes sure our UI is as simple as possible, to the point that a feature may be put on hold if it’s not living up to the standard of simplicity :)

How has the development process been? Any major obstacles?

It has certainly been a fun development process. I think like most startups, things take longer than expected, and we have pushed our launch date forward a few times. We decided a while back to not release all the features we really wanted right away, but instead focus on the profiles as our minimum viable product. This was a pretty radical shift, as we had worked and planned for releasing all the features at once, and now put it on hold. In hindsight I’m glad we didn’t. It is only in the last month or so that we have taken steps to widen our product and move more towards the main vision of building a more accessible business network.

With all of the work that’s gone into your development and design, your team must be spectacular. Who is involved in the brilliant Zerply team?

The Mountain view team is currently composed of: Taaniel Jakobs, co-founder & CTO, Eliza Karltorp (my wife) office manager/writer, Ethan Spoenski, Zerply evangelist and (almost) professional cyclist and myself. Our lead developer, Josef Minarik, is in the Czech Republic and Justin Style and Dannie Tinglöf are in Sweden doing community management and PR.

We all know that there are many costs with building a startup, have you raised any fund? Also, for future Zerply needs, are you looking for possible funding?

We have raised about $100,000 in a small seed round from family and friends. We are looking to raise $500,000+ in an angel round.

What do you see in terms of Zerply’s future? Goals? Upgrades?

We will continue to expand the networking part and make it really cool and useful. To mention a couple of things we will be releasing a bunch of user generated themes and a communication platform.

What would you say your favorite startup was of 2010, besides Zerply, of course?

This is a tough one. After moving to Silicon Valley I see cool startups all the time :) One of the more useful ones of 2010 has been Quora though, so I guess I’ll pick that.

Do you have any advice for young startup entrepreneurs?

I had to take pretty bold steps before getting to where I’m at - selling my Swedish company, moving to Estonia for three months and then on to Silicon Valley, basically selling everything we had to make the move. The importance of taking risks is something I had heard over and over again from other entrepreneurs, and I’m sure most people have heard that at some point. What I would like to share in addition is that it rarely happens all at once, but that it comes in increments. When I first took a leap of faith and charged “full price” for a website development project (meaning I didn’t give away most of my time for free) it was a good confidence boost. I remember thinking that a big project like that would finance at least a month of side projects for Taaniel and I. So I kept going, doing stuff to bring in money to work on our newest side project - Zerply. After some bootstrapping we realized we could ask a few people to back us up, and after a while we ended up here. It was not a clear cut route, but I sort of knew where I wanted to go, and each step gave me more confidence to take the next one.

So my advice is to not take a huge, overwhelming step right away (since it will just freak you out), but rather to build up confidence through smaller things while having your vision clear in your mind. 

FROM STARTUPLIST

Thank you for the helpful information Christofer! If you’d like to try out your more meaningful professional page, sign up for Zerply. 

Feel free to connect with Christofer and StartupList to chat about this interview, anytime. Also, share this with your friends, and thank you for the support!