iWeb Communities: Blog

This is an interview of Aydin Myarzee, who founded chide.it, a web company based in Ottawa, Canada which develops web applications. Chide.it has launched last week FluidSurveys, and we thought it was an ideal time to discuss with him about web entrepreneurship and web hosting.

Can you present yourself and your background? Do you consider yourself as a developer, an entrepreneur, or a project manager?

I’d consider myself an entrepreneur more than anything else. As an entrepreneur, you have to do everything… which happens to include both development and project management (in addition to other things).

I grew up in New York City and came to Ottawa to go to school. I had always been interested in starting companies. My brother and I started doing freelance web development work back when I was 14. It was great… we would find our clients on the internet and whenever we had phone conversations with customers, I would put a cloth over the phone to muffle my voice to sound older than I really was. As far as anyone was concerned, we were a major company :)

Our web development company occupied us for some time while we were in school. We tried a few more things in the process (like trying to compete with Yahoo by introducing a better search engine… needless to say, that didn’t go over so well – it was a learning experience though). We kept with web-dev and hosting services for a few years from there.

While in school, I decided to join an organization called the Student World Assembly in its very beginning stages. While I was with the organization, we grew dramatically to reach over 17,000 students in over 100 countries. As assistant to the executive director of the SWA, I was responsible for the finances and fund-raising of the organization.

I also worked for Nortel as a software designer and team leader for a little while after graduating from the University of Ottawa. My first big venture was bOKnow.com (a mobile 2.0 company). bOK started to do quite well and was even featured on CTV. We had the chance to make some funny commercials in the process. bOK was tons of fun, but after a peak, things started to go sour and we had to shut it down eventually.

Since then, I’ve co-founded a new company called Chide.it. Chide.it is a software company focused on web applications. We currently have two products: ReviewRoom and fluidSurveys and are growing fast. We are a team of 12 passionate technologists and entrepreneurs looking to destroy the boundaries between the desktop and the web :)

In my free time, I am an advisor to SuitUpp.com (Designer Brand Retail Store for Men that I co-founded) and write for the StartupOttawa.com blog in addition to my own blog: beUnreasonable.org.

Can you tell us about your businesses and products, and projects? What kind of traffic & technology needs do you have to get them running?

Our main product is called ReviewRoom. ReviewRoom is a great document review tool at its core. We’ve all been in situations where we’ve sent out a document to 5-6 people and gotten back a number of documents with varying and conflicting comments. Reconciling all of the comments that you receive from a review is very time consuming and arduous. ReviewRoom addresses this problem once and for all.

We didn’t leave ReviewRoom just as a document review tool. We also added workflow and business logic to it. ReviewRoom can also be used to handle more structured reviews such as those in business plan competitions, loan reviews, proposal reviews, etc…

 (if you have any questions about ReviewRoom, send us an email: info@chide.it).

 Our second product is called fluidSurveys. fluidSurveys is an online survey creation tool which does a much better job than current tools such as SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang.

What kind of plan do you have with iWeb? How long have you been at iWeb?

Right now we have dedicated boxes with iWeb. Every time we acquire more customers, we call up iWeb to get an additional box onto which we install our software.

What made you choose iWeb, compared to other web hosting companies?

Everyone we talked to who was using a hosting service in Canada was using iWeb. Not only that, but everyone who we talked to also said that they had a great experience with iWeb. After hearing all of the rave reviews, we had to sign up. Now, whenever anyone asks us about hosting, its almost second-nature for us to recommend iWeb.

What have been your experiences with iWeb so far? Is there a feature that you’d like to see offered or improved by iWeb? Would you recommend the company’s product to a friend or a colleague?

iWeb is simply great :) If I had to make a recommendation, I would say that it would be amazing for iWeb to add virtual hosting to the list of services they offer.

I would absolutely recommend iWeb to people I know!

Thanks Aydin for taking his time to discuss his case with us! If you have any questions about this, feel free to leave a comment below.

For more information about dedicated servers at iWeb, see here.