Interview: Former HuffPo CTO, Paul Berry’s RebelMouse Gains High Profile Social Traction

Managing multiple social media accounts is easier said than done. Brands, businesses and people alike struggle to develop a consistent presence on preferred social media sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram).

In June 2012 Paul Berry (former HuffPo CTO) launched RebelMouse to solve that problem by creating the social web’s front page.

The social aggregation platform boasts a real-time publishing system that lets users connect social accounts (i.e. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) and creates a web page that features the latest content they’ve shared. “Based on the idea that people’s personal websites are often neglected, RebelMouse takes your social presence across the major networks and organizes it into what it calls a “beautiful, dynamic and social site.”

“It’s meant to be extremely easy with very quick instant gratification, but it also has depth,” said Berry.

“We have people using RebelMouse at the ‘mom and pop’ store level, making their blog and company website suddenly really beautiful and something they love, all the way through to the Wall Street Journal social media team using it to cover the fiscal cliff … We’re getting quite a bit of traction because the world needs a publishing system for the social, real-time web.”

Learn how Berry developed the social aggregation startup and why he believes entrepreneurs should create companies and products that are a direct reflection of themselves.

How I Got Started:

Before starting RebelMouse I was the CTO at The Huffington Post. When I joined [in year one] there were two people on my team and the Huffington Post had about 3 million unique visitors a month.

On a traffic level it felt big, but when I left there were 300 people on my team and we had 145 million visitors a month. As CTO I ran product and design as well as engineering. I was asked somewhere around 20 times a week how to [develop] a better website. It was clear that the solutions that were available [at the time] weren’t solving their problems. That became very clear to me [and led me to my] next step in my life.

I am m very happy and proud of the initial investors and the board, which includes some of the most influential people in media and tech, including Eric Hippeau (partner at NYC-based angel fund Lerer Ventures) and Ken Lerer (former chairman and co-founder of The Huffington Post), and Jonah Peretti (CEO of BuzzFeed).

[We have] incredible investors like First Round Capital, SoftBank, Oak, and Betaworks, and angel investors like Chris Dixon, John Battelle, Howard Lindzon, and Greg Coleman. Now, the team is about 25 developers and about eight of us in New York [with various backgrounds in] media and publishing and helping big brands.