Who's Who: Ray Kim, GoGoPin

LYNNWOOD — The creators of GoGoPin have a vision, creating a space online for small businesses that isn't much different than a walk-in storefront downtown.

Business owners can still greet customers, though it might be through a smiling avatar. There's a space for asking questions in real-time -- even a place to talk face-to-face through video.

The Lynnwood-based startup launched in August under the umbrella company MotionCloud. GoGoPin's business Web site services are still in closed-beta mode for now, open only to a select group of users.

Ray Kim, vice president of GoGoPin, said the service will be open to the public in early 2010.

Beyond providing drag-and-click Web site templates, GoGoPin features ad and communication services to help small businesses promote products and interact with customers.

“Each service has its own mission, but in general, our mission is to provide small local businesses with everything they need to run successful businesses online,” said Kim.

He and GoGoPin CEO Danny Chun have a short but thorough list of potential clients, including eBay- or Amazon-based businesses, “brick-and-mortar-stores” transitioning to online marketplaces, and business owners with no knowledge about making and maintaining a Web site.

Kim recently answered a few questions from the Herald:

Question: What is GoGoPin?

Answer: GoGoPin Business (http://business.gogopin.com): Small businesses can not only create the Web site by simply pointing, clicking, dragging and dropping, but also easily and conveniently communicate and interact with the customers.

GoGoPin Ad (http://ad.gogopin.com): This free service is for any individuals and businesses who want to create free classified ads and flyers online.

GoGoPin Communicator (http://communicator.gogopin.com): This service enhances their instant messaging and email experience. Instead of sending plain text message to their customers, small business can easily attach videos, photos and maps.

Q. What's the philosophy behind GoGoPin?

A. Until now, technologists have focused on creating a content ‘holder.' But we believe that what's important is ‘content' in it. Content is conversations with your friends on Your Facebook profile page, your daily blog posts on WordPress, or pictures you stored in your Flickr photo albums. And the challenge people face these days is that it is still difficult to create one's own content online, even tech savvy people have to spend quite long time to create something online.

We wanted to provide a dead-easy content creation tool for non-tech-savvy people -- a tool that doesn't require any knowledge about HTML, CSS, and FTP, a tool that doesn't require additional software such as Photoshop, a tool that works in all Web browsers so that all you need is the Internet connection and a Web browser, and finally a tool that lets you create rich and interactive content which is searchable.

Q. What's in GoGoPin's future?

A. We believe the next two important keywords for small businesses are ‘local search' and ‘mobile.' Combine local search and mobile with GoGoPin content -- we believe it will greatly enhance the life of small businesses and customers as both can find out about and communicate with each other anywhere and anytime via mobile phones. GoGoPin will soon come up with great features supporting local searches and many smart phones available on the market.

Q. What's GoGoPin's greatest challenge?

A. GoGoPin itself is a small business. With limited budget and manpower, it is always tough to perform the marketing campaign that works. However the greatest challenge is to provide the best customer service. Being a small company, we can't buy expensive ad space or marketing campaigns like the big company does and we'd like to prove ourselves and our users that great customer service can be as effective as other expensive marketing campaigns. Since the best customer service can't even be defined, even though we are doing our best, it seems very challenging.

Read Amy Rolph's small-business blog at www.heraldnet.com/TheStorefront. Contact her at 425-339-3029 or arolph@heraldnet.com.