An interview with the man who bought Wiki.com
Who is John Gotts?
The man who made millions by selling spyware and spam killers at Adware.com is less "serial entrepreneur" and more "massively parallel entrepreneur." While running his first site, along with Searching.com, FightClub.com, and others, Gotts recently bought Wiki.com for $2.86 million.
How was he going to profit from a domain named after wikis, a largely not-for-profit industry best known for powering Wikipedia? The same way Gotts and his two-person company ("There's me and there's my secretary," Gotts tells me) profit from his other sites: working up ideas and hiring another company to make it all work.
Now he's partnered with MindTouch, a 15-employee company that took Wiki.com live in 48 hours.
The plan is to give away hosted wikis, run ads on them, and share the revenue with users. The partner, MindTouch, does all of this grunt work, while Gotts makes the deals.
His funding comes from angel investors, who are putting together a round of $30 million that will give them 25% ownership of Gotts's entire business. "They've been extremely generous with giving me freedom to do what I want to do with their money," he says.
His voice is energetic, high on the drug of moving millions. Buy space, make ideas, hire out the work, gush to the press. Sounds like a fun way to make a living.
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