Jonathan Abrams is the founder and CEO of Socializr. Launched only a few months ago, Socializr is working to bring users a service that seamlessly combines social networking with event functionality.

For those of you who are not familiar with the name Jonathan Abrams, he is best known as the man that brought you one of the first social networks that hit the internet, Friendster. Read more about the journeys of this successful entrepreneur at his website.

One of the panel discussions at the Web 2.0 conference was a topic called “Build to Last or Built do Sell: Is There a Difference?” How did Socializr get started? Do you have any comments on your philosophy when you got started?

I started the company in late 2005, but really got serious with it in June, 2006 when we raised our seed round, got an office, and started hiring some folks.

Combining Evite functionality or event functionality with social networking was an obvious idea that people asked me about when Friendster launched back in 2003. But to this day, I still feel no company has met that need.

Being someone who owns a bar, and does a lot of parties and events, it was an obvious thing for me to do. It’s a product that I myself and my friends would use and that nobody has really done “right.” As far as “building to last” vs. “building to sell,” at an early stage, you really don’t know.

A lot of companies like Slide.com or Paypal started with a very different model than that which they succeeded with. To presume that you are going to be a huge public company when you are really small, may mean that you take on a cost structure that’s prohibitive too early or you end up with expectations that are too high. But if you focus exclusively on the idea that you are going to flip the company quickly, you may make other mistakes.

I think the reasonable thing to do is to not assume either outcome. Build a product and a business and see where it takes you. I really never go into anything assuming I know how it’s going to end up.

What is the differentiator between Socializr and your competition?

Well, our most obvious competitor would be Evite. One of the differentiators between Socializr and Evite is our integration with numerous other web sites such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace, or widget providers, photo sites, and events sites. We have integrated with a lot of companies and sites in both directions.

What is Socializr’s revenue model?

Right now, the state that we’re at is building out the product. At some point, that will shift more to growing the user-base, and after that, it will inevitably shift more towards revenue.

Currently, the anticipated business model is one based on advertising. I think the unique thing about Socializr compared to a generic social networking service that generates a large number of page views per user, but has very little context is that a site that’s focused on people making social plans and deciding how to spend their time and money when they’re not at work is more targeted.

I think in that context, there’s probably some interesting business opportunities for sponsorship, promotion, e-commerce, and advertising. But again, we’re not at the point right now. We’re really focused on building out the product.

Since, one of the core ideas at Socializr is being able to see what their friends are doing, there seems to be an important connection to the mobile space. Does Socializr have any plans to address this?

Yes. Absolutely. We already have mobile features.

We have the ability to get mobile reminders on the events you RSVP to which is a feature that I myself am finding quite useful. Then, I can tell Socializr that when I RSVP “yes” to an event, an hour before the event, send me a reminder via text message to my phone with the address.

Also, we have the ability for users to click on a link that allows you to send the event to your phone so that you don’t have to copy down that information.

If you are a Socializr member, you can also send a text message to Socializr and actually query what things are going on that night on your calendar or with friends.

We have a number of mobile features that we are in the process of improving to better let users know that we have those features.

We have a mobile partnership that we will probably be ready to announce over the next three months. So far, on the mobile side, the features that we have developed are based on SMS. We’re focused only on the U.S. market for now.

We feel that browsing on the phone still does not work very well. It’s very slow. The user experience is still not very good. For any kind of mobile browsing or mobile applications, we still don’t feel that this is something that has been adopted by the mainstream in the U.S.

So for now, we’ve addressed mobile features for the U.S. market with a text messaging interface and that’s been working pretty well. You send a message to Socializr. We send you a message back. And you don’t have to sit there and try to use the mobile browser and wait. Although, text messaging works best for now in the U.S., we are open to other things and I do imagine that as technology develops, mobile browsing may one day become usable in the U.S. and if so we’ll be ready to adopt it.

At Socializr, what has been your marketing approach? At PageFlakes, they have hired an external PR firm, at Powerset, they have relied on word of mouth marketing, the blogging community, and social networks like Linkedin. What has been Socializr’s penetration approach?

We don’t have a PR firm. We’ve been in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and San Francisco Chronicle, just to name a few. We’ve received some good press coverage so far, but since we are still such a young company, our focus is still really on continuing to build our product. Our site just launched in March, 2007, so it’s only been a few months since it has been open to the public.

We are still focused now on listening to feedback from power users, such as, party promoters and people who throw lots of parties and events, to find out the things that they want.

With all the talk on Facebook apps and the topics that were discussed at CommunityNext’s Viral Marketing Conference about Facebook, does Socializr have any intentions on developing a Facebook app?

Well, already on Socializr, when you look at an event, you can send it to your phone, you can add it to a blog, you can add it to Outlook, you can update it to Twitter, or you can share it on Facebook. I think it’s inevitable that we have a Facebook application as well, since our strategy is to integrate with everything.

When you’re doing something that involves events, people really want to be able to invite all their friends to an event regardless of whether or not they are members of one specific site or not. You can invite people to an event using Socializr even if that person is not a member of Socializr and they’ll be able to see that event and RSVP. We want to make it easy to take your event and put it on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, or on any place you want it to be.

We are going to work with Facebook, but I think what makes Socializr cool is that we’re going to work with all of the popular sites so you will not just be limited to the people that are on Facebook or just the people that are members of Socializr.

We’ll integrate with everything.

What is your opinion about the importance for a startup to have an exit strategy? Certainly, no one wants to focus on the negative like an exit strategy when building any startup, but do you feel that its necessary to have one and if so, what is Socializr’s exit strategy?

If you are structuring your business as a cash-generating business, you probably want to structure it as an LLC or an S-corporation, a flow-through entity where employees and investors all have the right expectations.

If you’re raising VC money, or angel money, and giving people stock options which is typical for any tech startup, all of those things set forth an expectation that there will be a liquidity event of some kind where people some day will be able to sell their shares. Inevitably, what that means is that there will be an exit of some kind.

But I don’t know what exit “strategy” really is. As far as I know, you can only sell your company, go public, or sometimes you do both. Would we like to get acquired for a ton of money? Sure! Would we like to go public and be worth a lot of money? Sure! Those are both great outcomes! But I don’t have a magic “strategy” for guaranteeing either of those.

We are building a site that we think a lot of people will use, we think it is something real – that there’ll be a need, and we’re not spending a lot of money, and that’s where we are today.

We are hoping that in a year or two that will translate into a successful business with good revenue and profitability, and inevitably at some point, that will translate into a liquidity event for our employees and investors.

But for a company that has just launched with three employees, presuming that we know how where we are going to end up and how we are going to have a liquidity event is a little presumptuous.

What do you think attributed to Friendster’s success in Singapore?

I actually have no idea why Friendster is popular in Singapore. I have not been to Singapore myself, yet. I am from Canada and live in the States. I really have no idea why Friendster is so popular in Singapore and some of the other countries that it’s popular in.

I have a suspicion that some of these sites, whether it be Orkut or Friendster, some of their international growth maybe attributed to random chance. For Socializr, we’re really focusing on only the U.S. market because there’s a lot to be done for a very small startup in terms of completing the product, making sure the technology scales and is reliable. We don’t want to get distracted yet by international concerns in markets we may not understand.

First, we’re focused on making sure we’ve got the product developed, features done, scalability addressed, and have eliminated all the bugs, so for focus reasons, we’re only U.S. for now.

Given your experiences and knowledge that you have learned at Friendster, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned that you can apply to Socializr?

At Friendster, we learned that it’s really important to focus on the technology, to make sure that the technology works, that the product works. If you haven’t done that, everything else doesn’t really matter.

You can get a bunch of bigshot CEO’s and VC’s that are trying to do big deals with large companies such as AOL and MTV, but if the site isn’t working well, then it doesn’t really matter.

Also, what I learned is that if you get a team of people that are already really successful and have fancy resumes that may not really be the best thing. What maybe the better strategy is to find people that are still hungry, passionate, and fit into the demographic of your product and users.

I definitely learned the importance of focus. Often, it’s very hard for startups to focus on the few things that really matter. For Socializr, we’re really focused on a small number of things and trying to stick with that.

What do you think is going to be the next big boom after Web 2.0? Also, can you please shed some light on your reference to Web 3.1?

Well, Socializr is a Web 3.1 company, which is an arbitrary and silly buzz word similar to Web 2.0, but even sillier and 55% better. It’s sort of a joke on our part to indicate that we think the term “Web 2.0” is overused and lacking in real meaning.

Having worked in the Internet industry for quite some time now, I know that what goes up must come down. And we’ve been pretty frothy for a few years, not quite the same as 1999, but we’re seeing a lot of silly stuff going on. I assume at some point there must be some kind of a correction. Although, I have no idea when that may be.

During the crash period between the dot com boom and Web 2.0 bubble, there was still growth to the internet. Moore’s Law didn’t stop, the internet didn’t stop growing, and companies like Paypal, Ebay, Google, Overture, and others kept doing very well. So the Internet industry will continue to grow even if there is a bust.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be some kind of correction coming at some point. Actually, I think that it’s during those fallow periods when the real innovations are born that may become the basis for a lot of things in the next boom, but I absolutely have no idea when that might happen.

I’m pretty excited about video, about the inevitable migration of content from traditional television to the internet, but I think that might still not be even hitting its peak for another 5 years or so. The entire crop of companies that are doing web video now, may not even be the ones that are important 5 years from now. It’s still quite early. So I am sorry to say that I have absolutely no idea how to predict the future, I only know how to make stuff.

As an entrepreneur myself, I take it upon myself to ask this question for me and our readers is Socializr hiring?

Yes. That’s a wonderful question! I appreciate you asking. Our entire company is only 3 full-time people and a couple interns. We are just about to look for some new people to expand our team. What we’re looking for next is 3 programmers to join the Engineering team and help to build the product.

Message to leave with:

We’d love to hear from people that have ideas for Socializr. I think one of the whole reasons for our existence is that Evite hasn’t improved for over 5 years. We’re only three people, but I think that we’ve already surpassed what Evite has done in so many different areas. We have integrated with social networking sites, video, music, and all these kinds of things that you can share with your friends, but we’re not done by a long shot. We’re excited to hear from more people what you want in the ideal, ultimate, events sharing site. Let us know and we’ll build it!