Convore vs Banterly - Beaten to the punch
bitdrift.com
bitdrift.com
Make the 'Share on Twitter' button more... meaningful. What it really does is open up a chat room for all your twitter followers to join. I don't want to 'Share' it, I want to open my chatroom up to the world on twitter. Not sure how to word that :)
Can you imagine celebrities getting on board with this? It's perfect. 50 Cent would love this, celebs of that ilk on twitter already spend much of their time bantering with fans and this allows them to do it faster. You just need ONE of those twitter celebs to tweet a link to their chatroom and you've got yourself 10,000 new users.
It's twitpic for chatrooms.
Promote it to celebrity tweeps, hard.
There are also a lot of really good ideas that you can apply this technology toward. To me, the most uninspired way to attack this space is to try to make your site a one-stop portal for chat. There are a lot more possibilities if you can bring the chat to other destinations, or allow people to integrate chats with their sites.
You should be aware that being in the startup universe tends to make your worldview myopic. You're hyperfocused on the hundreds of users Convore might have and right now that looks like they are miles ahead. Zoom out for a minute and realize that there are millions of users to be won before this game is decided. You are both still at the very very early part of the curve.
As we've been working on Banterly for the past few months, we've had a lot of the same thoughts. That's a big part of the reason we decided to focus our product on the Twitter community first. Our hope has been that as people discuss topics around various #hashtags that they will have a way to take the conversation to a deeper level rather than overwhelming their followers with @replies.
The comparisons to Convore are more at a feature level and prompted because many of our original ideas were geared toward giving the IRC community something more "up-to-date" (though it's hard to say whether or not open source programmers currently using IRC will ever really leave for anything else anyway).
They got some good press so you're going to quit? Whatever motivated you to start still applies.
If that's enough to make anyone quit a project, I don't think the startup scene is for that person.
For what it's worth, your project looks a lot more interesting. (Aside from the Flash.)
Launching at the same time as a competitor creates more static in the press. I remember when the movie "Deep Impact" was announced close to "Armageddon". I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, this is too much". I don't think that whichever was the last one to hit the big screen was riding the coat tails of the other, or that the earliest one deserved my attention or money more than the last one.
Should Pepsi have called it quits, because they knew that Coca Cola were doing a coca beverage? Of course not. A competitor can be a pain in the ass in some ways, but it also makes for a great way to analyze your market and customers without looking inwards, which can be very difficult for anyone. If they gain traction, you'll know that there's a market.
If they die, you'll have their example as a cautionary tale; if you don't have a lighthouse to navigate by, navigate around the ship wrecks ahead of you.
I think he's annoyed that Convore launched a similar project and received some good press and community love (as little as it is outside the distortion field of the Valleysphere of Techcrunch and HN).
I always think of ReadWriteStart's mantra that "the early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese".
"Is it important to be the first one out with the 'same' idea" is one of the many inane theory-crafting discussions that serve little other purpose than discourage people from launching.
p.s. second mouse gets the cheese...hilarious
Market. Validation.
Building something revolutionary and brand new is a long, painful path of combatting misunderstanding and selling people on something they don't even know they need yet.
Regardless of who else they see in the market, now you've got something you didn't have before: a known market, and the validation that someone else saw value in that market as well. Let them do the hard work of teaching people why this solution is needed - and then come in with your distinct vision and value to show the people that are now looking that you're an option they should consider.
A quick anecdote from a recent experience I had with the company I recently started working with - we produce http://www.postmarkapp.com.
I've been friends with the founders for a long time and know their vision and capabilities for building a great company very well. But unlike our other product http://www.beanstalkapp.com - Postmark laid in a relatively new marketplace. The challenge wasn't getting people to use our product, it was getting them to realize why they needed our product in the first place. That's a high barrier to climb, and the team was already doing a remarkable job before I joined.
3 weeks into my first month, another little company - you might have heard of them, they're called "Amazon.com" - introduced a "competing" service to Postmark. Now THATs about a monday morning.
Much of the internet, including some folks on HN, predicted our demise. But the more we taked about it, the more excited we got. Amazon just entered the market we were looking to serve. We know that our style of serving our customers fundamentally differs from AWS, so we'd compete on that edge. Markets are big, and diverse. You don't need the entire market to be successful.
And Amazon had just opened the door for many of our potential customers that don't fit their market to discover us instead, without us having to do anything new.
Conversations with customers in the last month have confirmed this. The very things that had us wondering "what does this mean" on day one of the SES launch have helped us hone our focus on how we serve our market.
Great ideas don't make great businesses - great markets make great businesses. Amazon saw what we'd already seen, and validated it.
There's 4 ways to enter a market and win.
1) First 2) Best 3) Cheapest 4) Luckiest
If you can't be one, you've always got the other 3 to try out.
also:
5) Ruthless-est
For example, I'd argue Microsoft was a combo of 1, 4 and 5, and perhaps 3 -- with respect to OS's. But definitely 4 (the IBM/MS-DOS thing) and 5. In contrast, Apple's goal has been 2. Google was clearly not 1 with respect to web search, instead, 2.
Convore has got a nice UI, they haven't really got traction yet, and there's space for tons of chat like services. They're nothing new, they've been about for decades and they'll be around for decades yet.
Right now Convore have something like 200 users online. That's not unachievable by any means...
Keep going and listen to your users.
It's not a winner-take-all market — in fact cozy separate spaces could be preferred.
So: full speed ahead. Perhaps keep an eye on each other for novel discoveries of user-pleasing features, perhaps shade your marketing towards users/regions the others haven't yet emphasized (so there remains the chance you find an adoption-gusher first).
What I dislike about Convore is the same thing I dislike about Quora, Digg, et al., in that it caters to far too large a population.
There is generally great conversation, but I cringe every time I see a question like "What is a function?" or something equally inane.
looks really awesome. keep going.