A week ago on Monday I was able to have a quick phone chat with Startups.com’s community manager Fred Imparatta.  Our talk was good, and I learned quite a bit about the Startups.com network and some of what they have planned for the future.  From there, I was able to get into contact with Pepe Amorin, the Startups.com network VP of Marketing.  Pepe was kind enough to answer the following questions about the Startups.com network’s newest website – Startups.com.  Startups.com is an interactive community wiki-style website where anyone can ask any question about any type of business, and get an answer from others in the Startups.com community.

How did the Startups brand get started?

It all started with KillerStartups.com in January 2007. Once it started to roll, we thought about launching other websites that could help business people find information online, so we launched Dataopedia.com (a website where you can find everything about any website) and bought Stimator.com (where you can get your website valuation). In 2008, we found out that the domain Startups.com was for sale and thought it was a great opportunity, so we went for it (though we didn’t know very clearly what to do with it). We changed the company’s name to Startups.com Network, and last November, we came up with an idea that thought would fit the domain perfectly: a Q&A site for business.

What is your overall mission with KillerStartups and Startups.com?

We want to help people do business. We’re not only talking Web 2.0 and social media moguls here. We want everyone to hop in. Shoe-making-one-man-company in Ohio, a Fortune 500 executive, a New York book publisher, a surf board shaper in California, you name it. Everyone doing business has questions and valuable answers, and Startups.com is the place where we want them to happen in. There are 30M small businesses in the US (half of which are home-based) and 600,000 new companies created yearly, 75% of which have no employees. All these people need someone to turn to for help. So that’s where we want to be. Community is the word.

How have you leveraged it to create such a vibrant community at Startups.com in such a short time?

According to the success we have had so far one would think that we had some kind of elaborate strategy cooking for months, but that was not the case. We saw the opportunity, and launched to see what happened. The very day it was launched we got a LOT of coverage, so people with their questions and answers started coming in. We had over 10 thousand unique visitors on our very first day, and from then on, it was word of mouth, a few bucks we spent on advertising, and a lot of day-to-day hard work, communicating the amazing product we have. Again, if you build community (which we have been doing for nearly three years now with KillerStartups.com), everything is easier. We were also blessed with a group of VERY active users (very knowledgeable users too) to whom we gave moderator privileges, and they’ve been doing a wonderful job so far. They have their own Google Group and get a weekly exclusive update with news and ideas to hear their opinions.

What has been your approach in responding to your readers/community’s feedback?

Our community is the most important element of Startups.com. Without the community there’s no Startups.com. So I’d say we pretty much read (and reply) every email they send us. Our Mod Team is always pushing us to launch new features (such as the Twitter bridge which we launched a couple of weeks ago), and since every user understands that Startups.com is made for and by the community, they have been sending us pretty amazing ideas to implement. Our Live Q&A with well known entrepreneurs is one of them. So far, we had Gary Vaynerchuck from WineLibrary.tv, Josh Abramson from CollegeHumor.com, and Mike Michalowics aka “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur”.

Do you feel any “heat” from Dharmesh Shah and his small team of startup veterans and experts with their Answers.OnStartups.com community?

Judging by the number of users, questions, and traffic, I’d say we’re far, far ahead…but we don’t feel we compete against them. I think our community is targeted to a much broader audience, because we don’t want to limit it to Internet startups. We’re there for everyone in business. So in Startups.com you will find questions so diverse as “Terms of use for an e-commerce SAAS solution” or “Teaching My Child to be Entrepreneurial”. Everyone’s in there, and we want to be open for any business person that needs help. The result is that 99% of questions get answered within 15 minutes.

What is you/your teams greatest success so far?

I can’t pick an individual “greatest success”. Every day is a success. Having the privilege of working with a group of amazing people, getting 3 million visitors every month in KillerStartups.com only, creating and growing a community like Startups.com, getting Thank You emails from people that got their problem solved with an answer to their question, getting testimonials from people that are actually getting clients from Startups.com, all of those things, at the end of the day add up to making us love what we do, and that is our greatest success.

How can people get involved with Startups.com?

Visit us, share your knowledge, ask your questions (you WILL get help), stick around, email us if you have ideas (email address on the site – we reply every email), let us know if you consider you should join our mod team, spread the word, jump on board. We’re waiting for EVERYONE out there doing business to be a part of Startups.com.