David Weekly is the founder of PBwiki. David is also founder & CEO at Coceve, Inc., co-Founder at SuperHappyFunHouse, and President & Executive Director at Online Policy Group. Visit the company blog here.

What were the key components to making PBwiki a success?

Capital efficiency and experimentation. We experimented like mad. We expected to be really wrong about some of our hypotheses and knew that in order to rectify matters at hand, we needed to talk to our current and potential customers. We tried contacting them through any means necessary to get a better understanding of what makes them tick, what keeps them up at night, and what makes them look like heroes. We found out how they paid for things and made it a point to understand that process. We did not fall into the trap of perfectiveness and believed in the motto of "just do it" and so we launched our service once we got the most basic thing that worked even though it was considered early. Any bugs or problems we encountered, were dealt with by talking to our customers afterwards.

With the competition levels of today’s cut throat economy, how are you retaining and hiring employees?

It’s hard. That’s actually maybe the hardest single part of a modern dot-com. You’re competing against thick six-figure packages and lavish benefits. And you can’t use Linkedin or Craigslist to seek that kind of talent either because the people that are actively using those services are generally NOT “A-list” potential employees. The “A-list” people are pretty much all already happily employed. They’re not sitting at home, with a beer in one hand and the other in their underpants waiting around hoping someone will hire them. So you have to poach “A-listers” via a network.

Did you fund the startup yourself? How did you approach getting the funding to start your company?

Well, I started off with a few thousand in savings and a general idea of wanting to start my own company. I threshed through some ideas for about two months before hitting on my first service (IM Smarter), raised funds from friends and family, and went heads down on it. I worked on IM Smarter for a year and a half, but the market didn’t emerge for it so I wrote PBwiki instead and that exploded (it took me one weekend to write it). After PBwiki really took off, I pulled a small angel round to help us grow. That closed about two months ago. But it was more or less bootstrapped with friends-and-family help.