Do conferences such as the Internet Summit do much for the companies with promotional tables at the event?

Gabriel Stevens launched ownCMS four days before this year’s event at the Raleigh Convention Center hoping that it would.

Stevens, who launched the content management system with his wife Julie, funding it via income from Stevens Interactive, their Fuquay Varina-based consulting firm. He intentionally launched just before the event to see what sort of response he would get.

Stevens shared a table at Internet Summit with Raleigh-based Chartreuse Moose, one of the consulting firm’s strategic partners, which sells a menu of creative and storytelling services. The response to Steven’s ownCMS was “pretty good,” he said.

He set up meetings with other firms and expects to follow up on other connections.

ownCMS is intended to be hassle free content management. Anyone using a CMS knows that is not always the case. One we use regularly requires six or more steps just to make a url link live, for instance.

Cloud-based, ownCMS is billed as free of the frustration of open source systems such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomia. “Updating copy becomes as simple as copy, paste and refresh,” his web site explains.

Product will evolve

Stevens told WRAL Techwire at the Internet Summit that he and his wife, who is primarily a designer, have been doing Stevens Interactive for 20 years. “We’ve done a bit of everything in digital development,” he said.

“I worked in game development for five years and did email marketing.” He worked with National Geographic on a game and created “Political Rampage” for 519 Games and educational game for another startup.

The new project, ownCMS took about six weeks to develop and will evolve. Stevens decided to build it because some of their consulting clients wanted to add one or two pieces of content to a site without really messing with other pages or content management details.

“I went through hundreds of content management systems,” he said, but didn’t find what exactly what he needed. Since ownCMS runs in a secure cloud environment, buyers don’t need to worry about the backend at all. It sells for $39 a month and can be edited or published from anywhere on any device.

It works via a line JavaScript code pasted into a user’s HTML.

He’s not looking for funding currently. “Funders like it a lot better if you have traction and sales,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s not so easy to get their attention. We want to make sure this is a product that has a market and can grow. If it catches its stride, we might look for funding at that point.”

Overall, Stevens said he was pleased with the response he received at Internet Summit, even though he lacked any highly visual displays or the trappings of promotion. Just being at the Chartreuse Moose table led to valuable connections and likely future business.

  • VIDEO: Watch a sample video at: