myWebRoom Picks Up $2.8M To Build Out Its Online Platform For Self Expression, Drops Beta Tag

This morning myWebRoom dropped its beta tag and announced that it has raised a total of $2.8 million to date.

As a service, myWebRoom is something of a hybrid social, bookmarking, and user-expression experience. In short, each myWebRoom user has a WebRoom that might look something like this:

Screen Shot 2014-04-08 at 3.50.09 PM

(Yes, that’s my Facebook profile picture. I apologize.) Anyhoo, WebRooms items are interchangeable and clickable. Click on the computer, and you are presented with a number of search engine options, for example. Other items offer up different sets of personalizable websites.

So, your room is at once a portal of sorts, and a digital representation of things that you like. The company intends to make money by having brands pay it to put their items in the WebRooms of its users and so forth. You could put a Sony TV, if I can invent an example, in your WebRoom, perhaps.

myWebRooms also includes a social component in that you can have “friends” on the site (you can invite them in from Facebook, naturally).

The $2.8 million includes $600,000 in angel money, and $2.2 million from Konstantin Nikolaev, a Russian billionaire.

What I like about myWebRooms is that I am utterly not in its potential user group. Wrapping a skin around my Web experience, while perhaps aesthetically pleasing, would only slow me down. Also, I have an actual apartment to decorate, making my need for a rival digital space somewhat lessened.

That said, it’s good to realize you are not the only person alive.

During its beta period, the company picked up 35,000 registered users, generating around 25,000 monthly hits. Leaving beta, the company told TechCrunch that it wants to reach 100,000 registered users by the end of the year. That’s a modest goal.

myWebRoom will need to scale quickly to attract large-dollar brands — at lower levels of usage it wouldn’t present a large enough audience to garner the sort of brand attention that it needs to be a viable business.

So fresh out of beta and with a stack of cash, myWebRoom now needs to prove product-market fit.