Sometimes failure is the best way to find entrepreneurial success. That's the advice from Kevin McCarthy, whose first crack at the social shopping business didn't go quite as planned. But the entrepreneur learned from the mistakes and quickly shifted gears, positioning OtherPage Social Shopping for big things in the e-commerce sector. We caught up with McCarthy -- who previously founded SearchMarketing.com -- for the latest installment of Startup of the Week.

What’s your elevator pitch... With OtherPage Social Shopping, you earn cash back when you or your friends shop.

We came up with the idea when... Our first attempt didn’t work out. Consumers are a fickle bunch. Coming up with something that is cool and unique is tough. We’ve been working on OtherPage for almost two years now. Initially we put up the site as a revenue-share based comparison shopping engine, but as it turns out (shockingly), consumers don’t really care if you’re a cost-per-click based business (like Shopzilla, Nextag, and others), of if you’re a revenue share based business. What finally got us to this business model was a year of struggle. While that is definitely not fun, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the journey of failure. When you’re backed into a corner, it forces you to think and act differently than you would have if given say a moderate level of success. We’ve done some real innovation in the social commerce space, and we wouldn’t have done that if our initial business had been successful.

The word that best describes our company culture is... Distributed. We don’t have a central office. I have a small office that serves as a meeting place, but our employees like to work from home.

McCarthy

We are different from the competition because... We think that the term Social Shopping needs a definition. Social Shopping is not group buying. Social Shopping is not simply sharing everything that you buy on your credit card with your friends. Social Shopping is involving your friends at every level of the purchasing process: Before, during, and after the purchase. And OtherPage Social Shopping provides the framework for these organic product conversations to happen, with actual real money incentives. We’re much more than a price comparison service, though we offer that, too. With our “Conversation Starters”, we’re enabling users to attach an emotional reaction to a product, merchant, or deal. So I can say that I’m angry about this product, and I hate it, in a relational way, and OtherPage stores that, and also posts it to Facebook for your friends to see and further comment on.

The biggest challenge we face is... Getting the mainstream press to pick up on our story. Seriously though, we don’t have tons of cash to reach users. We’re trying to reach end users through the inherent virility in our business model, and also hope that since we’re the first company (that we know of) to offer a way to make money off of your friends, that this story, and business, will have some spark to it.

We’ve raised... Our glasses in celebration of our launch, and our founders’ blood pressure.

If we had $3 million, we’d... Spend it mostly on marketing. We haven’t tried to raise any serious money. This business, as was our last one (SearchMarketing.com, sold to ChannelAdvisor Corporation in 2005), is bootstrapped. While it’s much more glamorous to raise a bunch of money, we think that having a tight budget is not always bad thing. And owning the whole business isn’t either.

The oddest thing about our company is... That we’ve managed to build a very sophisticated product in a decidedly amateurish fashion.

The one thing missing from our business is... Customers. Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, revenue.

We won’t fail because... Social Commerce is such a nascent space. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone is raising money at absurd valuations to support new thinking and new “business models.” We’ve actually got a business model and a working product that can both scale, and a ton of learning about the how social networking relates to commerce. Even if we’re slightly off the mark with this launch, we’ve got several other arrows in our quiver.

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