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Wannabe Interview: George Decarlo, part 1

I was lucky enough to grab George DeCarlo, formerly of Dotster, to sit down and talk about his latest online venture, called Hatchable.com. 




Crunchbase's profile of George: "George is a serial entrepreneur who currently incubates and launches new web startups through his company Hatchable. Prior to Hatchable, George founded the internet services company Dotster in 1999. One of his most recent ventures is iAte, a company that tracks and makes discoverable restaurant reviews that Twitter users share in their status updates."  

George, how did you come to start Hatchable?
I've always found the launch and early stage of business the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding.  I created Hatchable to focus on launching interesting web businesses from the idea stage.

The site lists it as "web ventures" to incubate web startups and turn ideas into businesses. What does that mean to you?
 "Hatchable is an incubator for my ideas currently. I've been very busy with those, but one day I may transition to more of an incubator style with additional entrepreneurs."  

 Describe your latest release: Woobox
 Woobox is a free tool that lets businesses send fan-only restricted offers that require sharing to generate a coupon.  As more businesses create Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to communicate with their customers, they need effective tools to send coupons and grow their customer base.  By requiring users to share an offer with their friends before they can get a coupon, Woobox lets businesses run truly viral campaigns.  Woobox can also be used as a simple coupon service.  A number of offline and online businesses are using it simply to send one-time use, one-per person coupons to their email lists. 

Where did the name come from?
 I really liked the idea of businesses wooing their customers with offers.  I think of it as an inbox for all of your woos.

Is there a premium plan coming with extras? 
I plan to keep all of the core coupon features of the site free.  There will be a few new advanced features rolling out that will be part of a premium plan.

Finally, what other cool things are coming down the pike from Hatchable? 
There are always cool things in the pipeline :)  Seriously though, Woobox just launched two weeks ago and is already seeing great traction.  I plan to focus on building out and promoting that for a while.

You can find George on Twitter here: @wooboxapp or @georgedecarlo Or find George talking on Woobox's Blog.

That's part one. Come back tomorrow to learn more about George's older, but equally cool releases from his Hatchable incubator!

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