Gimme your best shot! Rankables.com
The Product: Rankables is news and discussion community organized by topic. Users personalize their content feed by following topics and blogs/publications they care about. They can also post content (links, images, text, polls, lists) to topic feeds. These items can also be up/downvoted to modify its ranking in the feed.
The Market: The current content is focused on 18-35 year old males interest in tech, gaming, and entertainment. Basically anyone who likes to read news or participates in online communities.
Product Analysis/Competition: Flipboard, Feedly, reddit. Flipboard and Feedly are good news readers, but they don't really have a community, or allow users to post their own content. Reddit allows users to post content, but doesn't pull in news content automatically, and the UI is very different.
Stage: Currently in open alpha/dev mode. Still figuring out the product and have pivoted twice. It's a one-man operation so it's website only for now. Possible native mobile apps in the future. I don't need money until there is proven traction and market fit.
Customer acquisition: Word of mouth initially. SEO for the unique content (polls), and sharing features for news posts.
Why me: I'm a product engineer who has founded and exited his own company in the past. I've built consumer media websites from scratch that scaled to 5 million MAUs and millions of dollars in revenue. It included a passionate community around the content, so I know how challenging it is to build a UCG community. I've been an individual contributor as well as a manager of a large engineering team for the past 8+ years.
The Product: Rankables is news and discussion community organized by topic. Users personalize their content feed by following topics and blogs/publications they care about. They can also post content (links, images, text, polls, lists) to topic feeds. These items can also be up/downvoted to modify its ranking in the feed.
The Market: The current content is focused on 18-35 year old males interest in tech, gaming, and entertainment. Basically anyone who likes to read news or participates in online communities.
Product Analysis/Competition: Flipboard, Feedly, reddit. Flipboard and Feedly are good news readers, but they don't really have a community, or allow users to post their own content. Reddit allows users to post content, but doesn't pull in news content automatically, and the UI is very different.
Stage: Currently in open alpha/dev mode. Still figuring out the product and have pivoted twice. It's a one-man operation so it's website only for now. Possible native mobile apps in the future. I don't need money until there is proven traction and market fit.
Customer acquisition: Word of mouth initially. SEO for the unique content (polls), and sharing features for news posts.
Why me: I'm a product engineer who has founded and exited his own company in the past. I've built consumer media websites from scratch that scaled to 5 million MAUs and millions of dollars in revenue. It included a passionate community around the content, so I know how challenging it is to build a UCG community. I've been an individual contributor as well as a manager of a large engineering team for the past 8+ years.