coComment is a new service which allows you to enjoy the full potential of comment-based conversation on the web. To find out more about what this promising startup is all about, read their blog here. Matt Colebourne is the CEO at coComment. Nicolas Dengler, is the founder & Chief Strategist. Christopher Lemoine is the CTO. And Marco Chong is one of the funding board members from Swisscom.

What are the most important qualities/character traits you look for in an employee?

We believe in passion, integrity, and professionalism. We’re a small company so we need people that believe in what they’re doing and can get it done with minimal supervision. We look for people who’ll refine something to the best of their abilities with the mindset that doing your best matters and not just because you are worried about losing your job. We believe in the power of open discussion so we encourage our employees to express their opinions. This is crucial in a startup environment and knowing this, we try our best to get it “right” by pushing everyone to say what they think.

What were some of the factors that led to the success of attaining funding from Netage and Swisscom AG?

We put together a compelling business case and upheld a solid business model.

Once we started doing the necessary due diligence to understand the market for coComment, we surprised even ourselves about the potential. Once we had put together our proposal, the issue wasn’t so much about getting funding as it was deciding who we would choose as an investment partner.

What were some of the challenges you faced and how were they addressed?

The first, and possibly the biggest challenge we faced, was the development of coComment. Nicolas Dengler, our founder, first came up with this idea. Getting that to work was a major challenge as comments appear in so many different environments that capturing them, indexing them, and making them usable to the end-user was a huge undertaking.

The next challenge we faced was to find out if there was a demand for the service. We did a pre-Alpha release for market validation. Since then, we have had accelerated growth and managed to double our user base.

Initially, there were considerable challenges around supporting a larger user base than we had anticipated. As a result, bugs presented themselves at a much more rapid and larger rate than we had expected.

The last challenge was that of communication. We had a limited budget so we had to convert all our full-time employees to consultants. As a result, at one point, people were under the perception that the key founders had left coComment.

What is your vision for coComment in the next 3-5 years?

Our vision for coComment is that we become the portal to the conversation world in much the same way that search engines have become the portal to websites.

Currently, this technology for commenting is in its early stages. It is very difficult to have a meaningful, productive conversation about a product or service, as comments are not typically searched. The best content about a particular product or service is found within the comments of users. For instance, you might search for a particular camera but what you’ll find are places where you can buy it or places where you can compare it to other cameras. The problem here is that it is all published content rather than commented content from people who’ve experienced it.

coComment seves to address this problem.

Message to leave with:

coComment is hiring aggressively because the key challenges for 2007 are to take a nascent piece of technology used by highly sophisticated users and turn it into something usable and accessible to a much wider audience.

We’re planning on frequent releases this year (first one will be late January). We want to stay on-track with our development efforts to ensure they meet customer needs
so we more than welcome any feedback from the public.