To help you to get to know the companies presenting at LaunchUp #6 we asked each to respond to a few questions…

The following Q&A segment is from Jason Barnes of iActionable.

Q: What does your company do?
A: We help sites and services attract new users and increase interactions by providing a personalized Achievement System. Sites can define and automatically award public badges to their users when specific actions are performed.

Q: Why does that matter and how do you make the world a better place?
A: We believe that a good way to encourage good behavior or use of a site/service is to provide a few goals for users and offer a public rewards for those who achieve them.
With Achievements you can make things fun to use, promote exploration, encourage return visits and sometimes create a little friendly competition between users.
By offering a centralized achievement system and badge repository service we hope to push this new trend forward and help sites create better user experiences and increase usage of a product or service in an desired and beneficial way.

Q: Why is your company cool?
A: The Badge/Achievement trend is very new and we believe it is going to grow rapidly. A few major companies or sites have successfully implemented Achievement Systems on the web and more and more people are going to want to implement one. We want to make it easy for anyone to create one!
We are the first to offer a service based achievement system powered by a customizable event based rule engine. Very little is required to initially hook in our API to track events. We also make it easy to modify the criteria by which achievement/badges are awarded without additional dev work.

Q: What 3 lessons/observations would you tell other entrepreneurs?
A: Start Ups are like a roller coaster. One minute you’re excited and swear your idea will take over the world, the next you’re starting to wonder if you’ve done the right thing. New ideas and projects can be bad temptations!
Find a good co-founder. It will ensure that things keep moving when either of you gets busy or starts to burn out. Keeping each-other in check but also motivated is important.
Release early and get feedback as soon as possible. We waited too long to really get our idea out there and discovered there was a whole different need that wasn’t being met and we quickly changed directions.

Q: Pick 5 people for your entrepreneur dream team (assuming you and your team were riding the bench)
A:Phil Haack (Microsoft), Scott Guthrie (Microsoft), Fred Wilson (avc.com), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)

Q: Which one pursuit? Golf, Basketball, Skiing/Snowboarding, Knitting, Mountaineering/Climbing, Bowling, Watching Grass Grow
A: Bowling, definitely bowling.

Q: Why are you an entrepreneur in Utah?
A: Ryan and I met while attending Neumont University in Sandy. We both landed our first software development jobs here in Utah and have been working together on startup ideas ever since.

We look forward to LaunchUp #6 and hearing more from iActionable!