Sean Ryan is the CEO of Meez. They provide online Avatar services. He was CEO of Listen.com that was bought by Real Networks and served as the VP of Music Services for them. Meez is one of the pioneers leading the way to the popularity of Avatars for both marketing and entertainment value. To find out what the buzz is all about, create your very own Avatar here.

What is the motivation behind how Meez got started?

After selling Listen.com to RealNetworks, I was looking for the next big thing. In addition to seeing how Avatars had taken off in Korea, I had some relevant prior jobs and work experience
at GAP, where we had always talked about the "dress up" concept.

Later, I had moved to Sega and I was running a women's software unit called “VirtualMakeover,”
that was a very successful in the late 90s. This allowed a person to scan in their picture, and then give themselves different hairstyles and jewelry, among other things.

This was crude technology by today's standards, but we still managed to sell over a million units.

This experience reinforced my thinking about how important this market was.

This was about the time that it all came together for me. That is, I realized the rise of social media and online user presentation.

So in 2005, I left RealNetworks after running their music division for about a year.

My perspective was Avatars were the equivalent of a ringtone. Meaning that when your phone rings, I know something about you by what your ringtone plays.

Similar with Avatars, it's a form of self-expression.

And for users under the age of 30, it's all about “Look At Me.”

Self-expression is the most basic of human needs. Otherwise, we would all be wearing the same clothes and driving the same cars.

So that’s when Meez got started.

What kind of obstacles does a startup like Meez face?

It's a good question.

The key issue we faced was that 18 months ago, almost no one in the U.S. had heard of Avatars.So the first obstacle was educating the market about a new product.

Fortunately for us, we had the help from some of our competitors and in today's flat marketplace good ideas travel widely.

The next part was to actually build the product. The challenge there was that we took a harder, but ultimately more rewarding path – 3D on the web. It took us a full year to get our user experience working at a level that generally worked well for everyone.

Now, we were able to build features on top of the platform to give users a richer, more interactive experience.

I have to admit, there were times last year when I thought we had made the wrong choice in core technology. But as the market grew more competitive, I'm really pleased to have a differentiated service and one which is very partner-friendly.

The next challenge was hiring, hiring, and more hiring. In today’s marketplace, good employees have a lot of options. Luckily for us, we had good connections in the Bay Area and a cool product that worked well.

Summary: Market education, product development, recruiting talent.

What is the business model the founder(s) chose to best fit into the culture at Meez?

Another good question and one that is shifting.

I was the founder and my original plan was built entirely around the sale of virtual items.

Since, that idea is still relatively new here in the U.S., it brought with it a nice business margin with a lot of creative marketing hooks (eg. give away Coinz to encourage behavior)

However, for the mainstream user or early adopters, virtual item sales were still a little foreign for early adopters.

And because our service has been always aimed at a group that were still getting used to the concept of virtual items, we had to shift our business model a bit.

At about the same time, advertiser’s interest in this category was exploding upwards
driven by trends such as the popularity of social media and virtual reality (eg. Second Life) and of users consuming less traditional media (eg. tv, radio, and magazines).

So the question was how does an advertiser reach this 13-30 age group audience online,
who weren’t well served by “Cost-per-click” ads on Google?

The vast majority of Meez items are free and will remain that way, but if you look at the Female-side of Meez, you'll see a couple of tests we ran with advertisers.
For example, you'll be able to see a set of items we built for Hint Water and SingShot Karaoke. It is items like those that cost Coinz (virtual money) I was talking about.
A second example of a test we ran was an article of clothing, background, and an animation "Themes" based promotion in December.

We were incredibly pleased by the response from our users who adopted the items by the thousands, and then exported their Meez all over the internet wearing the items we had created for our advertisers.

As a result, you'll begin to see paid advertisements show up on Meez shortly, that are along the same lines of primary brand advertising except of F&B, fashion, beauty, or automotive products. The advantage is that advertisers can graphically show off their brands in a really attractive way and get users to adopt them and export them to other parts of their internet for more eyes to see.

What I like about the idea is that it is not intrusive. In other words, users have the option to choose the items or not.

So our distribution model is to encourage users to export their Meez all over the Internet, and partner with larger sites to offer Meez to their users, all in a revenue sharing arrangement.

How big is the Meez team?

We have 15 full-timers, a few interns/contractors, and 2 offshore teams in India.
One offshore team handles the development of our actual 3D objects, while the other helps with the QA and part of development.

In these times, it is almost impossible to have a company now without taking advantage of offshore options. However, our core technology and team has always been here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In addition to using Meez’s online avatar services, for cost effective ways to conduct Marketing, do you see the possibility of integrating security into Avatars, to transform these digital I.D.’s into “Identities” people can use to conduct e-commerce? What is your vision for Meez in the next 3 – 5 years?

It's funny that the security question keeps coming up. Whenever it comes up, I think about what my friend Philip Rosedale (of Second Life) said, “company models and vision are driven by the founder." In this particular instance, I'm a digital media guy which means that even if the security concept was a brilliant idea, it wouldn't work for me since I focus solely on entertainment and media.

For the next 3-5 years, vision for Meez is very simple.

I believe that everyone below the age of 30 will have at least one Avatar in the next few years which will represent them all over the Internet as their persona whether it be phones, social media sites, blogs, or in video games.

As the amount of time people spend on the internet increases, these virtual identities will start to become more and more important to us, since we will have relationships with people who we have never met. How we present ourselves will grow in importance and when it does, Meez will be waiting.

Message to leave with:

We like to surprise our users each month with new features and bonuses so the message to leave here with is stay tuned later this month. We will be offering our users a whole new way to generate Coinz so they can buy a bunch of premium items. It will be an exciting Q1.