A few weeks ago, while I had 10 tabs opened, 5 different passwords entered and several bookmarked sites scattered about, I thought to myself there has to be a simpler way to manage all my favorite sites. Then, I was introduced to MyWebRoom.com, the answer to my web-browsing dilemma.
What it’s all about
A new platform from our friends over at Rooms Inc., MyWebRoom is essentially your own little customized online bedroom. All your favorite music, news, entertainment, travel, sports and social media sites, creatively stored in objects around your virtual room, so you can click and browse everything in one tab. I don’t know about you, but a one-tab browsing experience is just about the best thing I could’ve ever discovered.
The future for Rooms looks bright, with innovative ideas to transform how e-commerce and advertising industries will interact with consumers. Every object in the room will turn into a platform, therefore creating a marketspace for interior designers and artists to create and sell their work. Rooms is also planning to partner with major retailers and render their “furniture catalogs” in the online rooms. This will allow people to “vision” how the furniture will look, then be able to purchase it with a couple of clicks.
Rooms will be able to provide huge data analysis for brands so they can profit from effective online sales. The master plan is to redesign the way the web pages look, making them more visual, eventually turning it into a “cloud desktop” and a new browsing experience.
The Experience
Users customize their room by choosing one of the many layouts and designs the site offers. Once you’ve got the design you want, you can start by adding and storing your favorite sites and files in your new online room. For example, click on the T.V. and add your favorite movie and show sites. MyWebRoom has a list of popular site suggestions for you to choose from, but you can also add your own by entering the site’s URL.
Other objects in the room include: a bird cage for all your tweeting (very clever), music box to store all your favorite music sites, nightstand to write in your blog or online journal, boxes to upload all your important documents, and if you’re feeling adventurous, the chair in your room will spin and introduce you to a brand new website everyday.
Check out a list of all the objects in your room:
- Newspaper – For your favorite news sites
- T.V. – For your viewing pleasure
- Bird Cage – For all your tweets
- Social Painting – Check out what your friends are doing on your social media sites
- Shopping bag – Store your fav shopping sites
- Music Box – For all your music enjoyment
- Sports – Follow your fave teams
- Bookstand – For magazines you read
- Chair – discover new sites every day
- Computer – Search the web using Google, Bing, etc.
- Window – Check out what’s going on around you such as local news and events
- Wall Shelf – Store your info sites like Wiki, Ask, etc.
- Dresser – Create outfits and get style recommendations
- Night Stand – Write in your blog and online journals
- Notebook – Organize your to-do lists and note-taking sites
- Phone – Keep up with your email
- Pin board – Pin to Pinterest
- World Map – Store all things travel related (sites, reservations, explore)
- Box – Upload important files
- Bed – All the sites you like to hunker down with
All the things you do online can be stored, saved and enjoyed all in your online room. And, your room is fully customizable, making it a very personal experience. Whether you want a London backdrop with a Parisian interior design, MyWebRoom has tons of beautiful designs to choose from, to make your room truly one-of-a-kind.
We caught up with Artem Fedyaev, CEO and Co-Founder of MyWebRoom, (aka “Rooms”), to get a little more scoop on this innovative new web browsing experience.
The Story Behind the Inspiration
MyWebRoom started, fittingly, in a dorm room. As students at Bryant University in 2011, Artem Fedyaev and John Gonzalez realized there had to be an easier way to organize the insane amount of websites and resources we use on a daily basis, while keeping our personality and identity. And, Rooms was born. The two took a fateful trip from NYC to Silicon Valley where they now have a team of 15 working to make Rooms the next big thing. Check out their full story here.
It looks like I’m not the only one that thinks it’s great. You’ve got over 32k likes from Facebook and MyWebRoom is only in beta. How have you gotten the word out?
First we started creating pages on many social networking websites. The idea was to create the hype around the brand as well as to test which social media channels would work best for us. Facebook started, with friends and family liking our page. Then we began posting different trending content that we believed would be interesting to people in general: interior design, tech news, photography and so on.
Our company believes in the power of images and we focused on posting primarily image-related content. Now we have over 32,000 likes with minimal spending. We have utilized similar methods with other social media channels such as Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram. We have actually discovered some interesting ways of targeting specific people on those networks for free.
What have your biggest challenges been so far with the site and how have you overcome them?
The biggest challenges with the project were explaining to people the idea and the potential of it to grow into something very big, using “one sentence.” When people visited our landing page, they were not sure what our website was about. Some thought that it was an interior design website, some thought that it was a game, and someone even thought that it was a replication of Airbnb. We are none of those – we are something very new and very different. Every time we had an opportunity to sit down and walk someone through the website and actually explain what it is, what it does, and what it will do in the future – feedback changed drastically! People really liked the idea; they started to come up with ideas on the spot on how to make it better, and so on.
There were a couple ways that helped us to improve the conversion rate. First we changed our landing page, and added more explanation to what it is people are signing up for. Second we improved our blog, where we post things daily, regarding our product, our vision and how the world is moving towards something that we are building. Then we added a “DEMO” – a pre-set room that people can try prior to registering. We believed that giving people an opportunity to play with the website and “learn as you go,” was better than keeping the whole thing a big mystery. Those three things helped us to decrease our bounce rate by 26%.
How do you keep yourself and your team motivated?
When it comes to the founders, we are motivated by one major factor – NEWS. Every day we read things about current startups and new things that are coming out to the market, and most importantly how people/users react. We realize every day, that our product will work, and that our product can do great things and actually make a change on how people interact with their computers and the internet in general. We as founders don’t consider ourselves to be technical gurus or experienced businessmen. What we are in reality – we are users, and we are building this for ourselves in the first place and for those like us, which there are many of (we tested).
As for our team, it is difficult to say what motivates them as a group. What we have been doing, is working hard to satisfy each person on an individual basis. Everyone is different and people want different things. One employee of mine wants stability and comfort, and that’s what we provide for her. Another employee wants to take a lead role and see his ideas come to life, and we accommodate him as well. We only work with people who we can consider as teammates and not employees. And going farther, at our startup, the word teammate, turned into a word “RoomMate” – we are building rooms!
To emphasize on the word “RoomMate,” I would also like to mention that we work out of the place we live in and live in the place we work at. We have a spacious loft in SOMA and a fun working environment. During the day it’s an office; during the night it’s our home, where three founders live. Our office has a common kitchen, couches, television and all those things that make it seem like home. Our RoomMates feel like they are at home and not in the office, which makes everyone more comfortable and motivated.
We have lunches together and Bagel Mondays! We ask people to wear home slippers in the office. We are also looking into doing more team-building activities such as attending events together, and going to sport games and parks for recreational purposes.
What are your short-term goals for Rooms? How do you measure success?
Our short-term (3 months) goals are:
- 50,000 returning users (to create our loyal base, and ask them for feedback in order to improve our product before the big launch)
- 1 Major Brand partner to come on board
Our success can be measured by achieving the two goals mentioned above as well as getting as much feedback we can from our users. Whether the feedback is good or bad, it doesn’t matter. If people bother to type it up, it means that they engage with our concept!
What’s the best business advice you can give to other entrepreneurs?
The best business advice is to follow your dreams but never forget to listen to your users. Don’t be afraid if something that you start building today will drastically change in the near future because your product should be tailored to people who will like your idea and find it useful.
Best Advice: No matter how experienced someone is, if he/she tells you that your product sucks – don’t listen, he is probably jealous.
If you’re looking to streamline your web-browsing experience and actually have fun doing it, check out MyWebRoom. It’s currently in beta, so test it out and please leave your feedback. We value all your suggestions and we would love to hear your feedback.
All your favorite sites, all in one place. I promise you, it’ll be the best (online) room you’ll experience.
Photo Credits
Courtesy of startup founder | MyWebRoom
