Freewebs

Spent a very interesting hour with Haroon, Shervin and Zeki of Freewebs at their Sliver Spring digs. They are the executive team at one of the few internet startups in the DC area with significant customer penetration, all created by viral marketing. Non-technical users can design and build web-sites and host them at freewebs. Customers must like their service as they are currently hosting about 13 million websites. Impressive!

You can either get a free site with ads from Freewebs or a ad-free site with a subscription. They claim that they are 2nd only to geocities (owned by yahoo) in this category.

The visit took me back to my days at a small startup I worked at in the mid 80s in southern California. There was no signs of excess I saw at startups during the Bubble. They seem to be building their business the old-fashioned way.

Will try to build a web-site on their site over the next few weeks!