fabulis

During the ramp up to the fabulis launch we’ll be spotlighting Q&As with the fabulis team. Up first is Jason Goldberg, founder and CEO.

What motivated you to start fabulis?

fabulis is the 3rd company I’ve started. The first company was in the recruiting space and the second was in the social news space. With both of those companies I was passionate about the product but I didn’t have the complete passion that goes with building something that was specifically built for me. That’s what fabulis is all about. This one is for my me and my friends. Being gay isn’t everything that defines us, but it is a very important part of who we are.  fabulis will be our site. This was my main motivation. I want to build a website that me and my friends and other people like us rely on many times a day, everyday … not just for online interactions but as much so to help us with our offline real-world lives and pursuit of happiness.

How did you get the idea for fabulis?

In 2009 after selling socialmedian to XING, I was working for them in Hamburg, Germany, where I had a great job working on product development at Europe’s leading online business network. It was the first time I’d worked overseas and from a work perspective I was very content over there and really enjoying the experience. Great people there at XING. I really learned a lot from them and we accomplished a lot together in a short period of time.

On a personal level though, during this time my German boyfriend was (ironically) living in NYC while I was in Hamburg. We had a long distance relationship and every two-to-three weeks or so we’d see each other, often times in various European cities, which was one of the great luxuries of working in Europe.  However, we really struggled to find the fabulous places to go to in these cities. We needed information on the hot hotels, bars, restaurants, etc. What I found was that while this information is regularly needed by gay travelers, mainstream websites like Trip Advisor or Urban Spoon or Yelp or Fodor’s are great for finding out what the masses deem worthy but they’re pretty bad at really getting at the most fabulous things to do.

Me and my friends and my friends’ friends have differing ideas on what makes a restaurant great than the typical Trip Advisor user. We don’t always value the same things as the mother of four from Wisconsin or the straight senior citizen couple spending their twilight years in Florida.  That hotel they rate highly? We think it’s boring. That “hot restaurant” in Fodors is dim to us. We don’t want the mainstream viewpoint. We want the gay-male take. We want to know the trends before they are trends. We want to make the trends.  By the time it’s in the guide book, it’s passe.  And, we want more than just the guide to the gay places. We want the gay take on where to go, what to do, and who to meet when we’re there.

I had one great realization. Gay men come in all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, etc. But there is one common denominator. It’s a desire to celebrate life.

There aren’t places to get relevant travel information when you’re gay?

There are books you can get. There are some good restaurant series. But by the time books are written and published the trend is already over. We need a real time web environment. And, it needs to be social.  Gay men are inherently social. Gay men also often get this information from friends and friends of friends. And we’re always looking to meet up with friends of friends. A number of times over the past couple of years I did not realize until I’d left a destination that there were friends of friends visiting also at the same time. We need a better way to meet friends of friends who are in the same place at the same time. I think fabulis can help with that, and in doing so we can make this big gay world a whole lot smaller.

So when did you decide to actually pull the trigger and start company #3?

Over the summer I thought about how to piece it all together. fabulis needed to be a new way to enable gay men and their friends to easily find out where to go, what to do, and who to meet. I started talking to dozens of gay men and everyone kept asking me to please build the site. At that point it became my focus. I finished my commitment to XING, left amicably, and started building the site.

Who became involved?

I reunited the socialmedian team, mainly Nishith and Deepa Shah in Pune, India and together we’ve assembled a 12 person development team there. I recruited the Brussels-based design team Duoh! and recently brought on Bradford Shellhammer as Creative Director in NYC. I spent a couple of weeks with the development team in Pune back in November and December and we worked on the initial ideas of fabulis. I also educated the Indian team on the gay market. That was fun for all parties. We developed the persona of our target user. We’re now in our third development milestone. We are very head’s down on product features. Live code is up and running internally for both the website and the iPhone app and we’ll have our actual product out in the market in the hands of real users really soon

How has fabulis been funded?

The initial finances I provided. We’ve also had a lot of interest from socialmedian investors as well as others. We’ve since then now raised money from several sources and we will share the details of our first seed round in the next few days.

What is it with gay men and trends?

Gay men are always on the forefront of trends. We’re tastemakers. Look at Lady Gaga and how she effectively targeted the gay market first, a bellwether for mainstream crossover success. Gay men come first and the mainstream follows. How do you harness that? By enabling gay men to come together and spot trends. When The New Yorker wrote that Tipsy Parson is the hot new restaurant, they were four months late. Where are the hotspots now? And we’re not just talking about places, but also uncovering an artist or a product before the mainstream does. We all want to be known as influencers. We’ll provide foodies the chance to recommend restaurants. Frequent travelers can log their hotel reviews. Audiophiles can help you find the next Lady Gaga. fabulis provides the forum to do this.

But don’t we already have Facebook for that?

Facebook is a great place to share with people you know. It is a lousy place to discover what you should be doing and who are the people you should be meeting. This is the gap we want to address. The social graph on Facebook consists of your friends. One of the aha’s among gay men is that the social graph is larger. It includes friends of friends. It includes strangers who are at the same bar. On fabulis you’ll be able to find out who is going to South Beach this weekend, or who is planning to be in Mykonos this summer, or just who is going to which local bar tonight. And sometimes knowing which strangers are going is more important than knowing which of your friends is going! We intend to be the ultimate resource to know who is going somewhere before you even decide to go. You can find out who is watching what TV show. You can make decisions based on your friends, friends of friends, and other people in your city (or the city you’re visiting). You can check in with an iPhone at a bar, see who else is there, and get a message from someone across the room instantly.

What are your first-year goals?

We want to create the service that gay men around the world use to help them celebrate life. We want to develop and foster an emotional attachment between the fabulis service and our users. We want every gay man, everywhere in the world, to say “I am fabulis” because they feel like they were part of building the site. fabulis is being made for them. Our top priority right now is to get something out there in front of our users and gather their input and feedback as to how to make it better. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse Repeat. Make it fabulis.

One year from now, we will be successful if we have developed a service that our users feel like they designed and built with us, and that we had succeeded in building something designed by them, for them, meeting their needs.