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Success Stories: Webs.com

If you have an idea and 10 minutes, you can create your own interactive Web site, thanks to Webs.com. You don't need money, design skills or a contract with a webmaster. That was the goal when brothers Haroon, Zeki and Idris Mokhtarzada formed FreeWebs (now Webs.com) in 2001-to create a Web design service easy enough for their own mother to use.

"My mother is a professional and an intelligent person, but she doesn't have any kind of technical skills," says Haroon, who serves as CEO of Webs.com. "So that's why we chose her. Because, if she could do it, most people could do it."

And more than 20 million people are doing it. This widespread success has led Webs.com to be ranked No. 119 on Deloitte and Touche's national Technology Fast 500. Now, the brothers Mokhtarzada are eyeing the $10 million mark in annual revenue, which raises some questions for Haroon, 29: "Do I want to just create profit or do I want to take whatever I'm making and reinvest it in the company? And that's more the angle I'm going for: If we grow our revenue, then we'll grow our team, and we'll build more, faster."

The young CEO traces these entrepreneurial roots back to his childhood. His family fled Afghanistan in 1983, and they settled in Silver Spring, Md., Haroon's birthplace. Leaving their country with virtually nothing, Haroon's parents started their own business, a visa and passport procurement company. "It exposed us kids at a very young age to two things that are important," Haroon recalls. "One was entrepreneurship, and the second is we got access to computers really early because they got a computer for the business."

Haroon remembers that, as a child, he was "always interested in starting businesses." In the winter, he'd recruit friends to shovel snow; in the summer, they'd mow lawns.

His parents stressed the importance of education, and while enrolled in a science magnet program during high school, Haroon discovered the power of the Internet. "I remember thinking, 'This is going to change everything,' " he says.

In 1997, Haroon started college at the University of Maryland majoring in economics. Because Haroon had done some Web design work, and since older brother Zeki was a computer science major at the same college, friends and family members began asking the brothers to design sites. Recognizing a growing need, Haroon, Zeki and younger brother Idris decided to start their own Web design business-but not before assessing consumer demands.

"We thought, with every business and every professional, there are going to be millions and millions of Web sites," Haroon says. "They cannot each hire a webmaster to go and manage that site every time they want to change it. It needs to be more of a self-service platform. We looked at the stuff out there and didn't think any of it was easy enough to use. So we said, 'Let's build FreeWebs and make a system that's really simple.' "

So they did, with just $2,000 and a server housed in a closet. At the time, Haroon was approaching graduation and, on a whim, took the LSAT and applied to Harvard Law School-where he was accepted. "It was too good of an opportunity to pass up," he says.

After graduating in 2005, Haroon dedicated himself full time to FreeWebs. Yet, he doesn't regret getting his law degree. "What they really teach you [in law school] is to understand both sides of an issue," he says. "And that's just been immensely useful because running a business is all about making decisions."

In 2006, FreeWebs received $12 million in backing. Thrilled about reaching this major milestone, the brothers Mokhtarzada decided to fund a women's shelter in Afghanistan. "That was our way of giving thanks," Haroon says. "Me and my brothers got together and said we should do something on our own that just sort of recognizes how fortunate we are."

The next major milestone was changing the company name from FreeWebs to Webs.com in 2008. It's a shorter, catchier title and domain name, and the fact that the service was free was no longer an important selling point since so many other free services had emerged.

But, the broader significance of the change was that it reflected the site's evolution. "We started as this simple Web site builder, and, as the Internet matured and the market matured, we started to realize that Web sites-those static pages of old-were not useful today," Haroon says. "What's more interesting is if there's some sort of relationship between the site owner and the people who come on it. If the people can leave comments, talk to each other-basically there's a community involved in it. So we decided that Web sites needed to evolve."

They expanded the service to enable users to create community-driven Web sites, where visitors can join as members, discuss topics in forums, post photos, blog and more, changes in line with Web 2.0. "The Web isn't just a place for people to consume content; it's a place for people to generate content," Haroon says.

Inspired by the social-networking phenomenon Facebook, the brothers Mokhtarzada created an open platform for Webs.com, which allows people to develop and submit their own applications (e.g., games, quizzes, etc.) that function within the framework of Webs.com pages.

That's just one example of how the Mokhtarzadas are staying on top of their fast-paced industry-one of their biggest challenges as a company, Haroon says. "You think you're doing something great, and, all of a sudden, the market changes. ...You keep having newer and newer technology. You have to figure out, 'How can we make our product meaningful and integrate it with all this new stuff?' "

Haroon says that he and his two brothers have worked together as a team incredibly well, and much of that comes from identifying and leveraging their individual strengths and weaknesses: "I have sort of more of the business sense, practical application side and people skills than my older brother, who's more of a really brilliant math/science/technology person. So that's really how we feed off each other."

They've certainly hit on a winning formula, as Webs.com continues to grow daily. The 32-person company is based in Silver Spring, where Haroon lives with his wife and two children. He wants the company to become "the foremost place to build a meaningful social Web site," he says. "Right now, we have 30 million unique visitors touching one of these sites every month. We want that to be 50 million or bigger."

Whatever the future holds, it's clear that the Mokhtarzada brothers aren't going to rest on their laurels. "Success is relative," Haroon says. "There's always someone doing something better or more interesting, or they're bigger or growing faster. ... There's always a drive to do more and to achieve more."

Original Article URL: http://www.successmagazine.com/success-stories-webscom/PARAMS/article/788/channel/2015#