Monday, April 9, 2007

DIY site tries new model

By Christopher Calnan

A Marblehead entrepreneur has launched a website with the goal of making money by enabling do-it-yourselfers to practice the digital version of clipping photos of sofas from a magazine or comparing brands of sinks at the local home building store.

The company, DesignIn Inc., launched MyDesignIn.com last September with an online tool for drawing floor plans and what some say is a one-of-a-kind strategy to generate revenue whenever users drag and drop home-furnishing catalog information or images to a location on the site.

Although the site is in its infancy -- although it is in talks with investors and advertisers, it hasn't signed with either yet -- the company has attracted some high-profile board members, including an early Netscape veteran, Jeff Treuhaft, who is now an executive with Verisign Inc. on the West Coast, and Andrew Burton, director of product management of Symantec Corp. in Cupertino, Calif.

MyDesignIn also enables users to place the images into interactive blueprints -- which users create themselves, using the site's online computer-aided design, or CAD, tool. Generating revenue whenever users place an image of, say, a Viking range into their kitchen plan is an innovative one, say experts.

Advertiser products are represented as image thumbnails, similar to those found on websites operated by California's Stylehive Inc. and Kaboodle Inc., whereas non-advertiser products are represented by architectural line drawings, not actual products ­-- in theory, giving manufacturers an incentive to partner with MyDesignIn.

The website's drag-and-drop feature can also enable advertisers to track consumer behavior by monitoring how users combine products and at what point a user makes a purchase.

Treuhaft, VeriSign's senior vice president of digital content and messaging services, is expecting widespread adoption of MyDesignIn by manufacturers and retailers.

"They're dying for something like this," he said. "That's why I think (MyDesignIn) is in such an interesting spot."

Doing it himself

DesignIn CEO Ramsay Hoguet, 39, has been on the road, pitching his business plan and trying to generate early interest in his venture. He presented his business plan last week at the Web Innovators Group in Cambridge as well as the national DEMO conference in California in February.

Hoguet, whose site combines his experience as a former general contractor with his CAD development background, has financed the venture himself and is now seeking an undisclosed amount of outside investment. He started working on DesignIn's business plan in January 2006 and enlisted a team of 12 Russian developers last summer to produce the software.

The business, which includes a social-networking feature that enables do-it-yourselfers to share remodeling suggestions, is targeted toward consumers planning remodeling projects, he said.

The website's design tool, coupled with its information-sharing network, could create a wider audience by enabling different uses of the site, said Matthew Lees, vice president of Patricia Seybold Group, a Boston-based consulting agency. "It's the mix of services that is the overarching value," he said.

Although searching online catalogs is nothing new on the web, most of the best do-it-yourselfer sites are operated by individual brands -- think HomeDepot -- rather than a third-party website. That makes MyDesignIn unusual, said Rob Griffin, senior vice president of Boston's MediaContacts, the interactive arm of the Media Planning Group, a New York-based ad agency.

"I'd say, for the (home remodeling) space, they're fairly ahead of the curve," said Griffin, who is also a board member of the Boston Interactive Media Association, the online advertising division of the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, a Cambridge-based trade organization.

Some third-party competitors could include such sites as DIYonline.com, of Tuscon, Ariz., which combines individual project plans with links to home-furnishing retailers, and diynetwork.com, the online site of the television network of the same name.

Hoguet was previously the senior product marketing manager for Cambridge-based Mathsoft Engineering & Education Inc., which was acquired by Needham-based Parametric Technology Corp. last year for $63.2 million.

Before Mathsoft, Hoguet was product marketing manager for Concord CAD software maker SolidWorks Corp. from 2000 to 2004, and worked at California-based IMSI from 1997 to 1999.

Treuhaft said MyDesignIn's practicality for consumers is one of its main attributes. A major challenge to growing the business will be identifying consumers willing to change their planning process from a manual approach to an online tool, he said.