Cracking me up, in a good way: interview with Twittley founder
Twittley.com is like digg for twitter, Enough said! The traffic has been pretty decent and is picking up in a big way recently. I got hold of Goran, the developer behind Twittley. While English is NOT his first language, Goran managed to pull off some classic quotes, unintentionally.
Quote 1: One day while I was surfing the net, I found Twitter.
Quote 2: I worked pretty hard (5 hours a day)
Quote 3: Well there are no real competitors
Quote 4: Currently Twittley doesn’t make money and I am not sure when it will.
Well, that for sure gets your appetite going. Let’s read the whole interviews Q/A.
1. What is Twittley? What is your vision for twittley?
Twittley is first Twitter social news website made for people to discover and share content through Twitter network, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.Well, I want Twittley to become the biggest and the best application for Twitter. It sure has lots of possibilities and it’s a matter of time.
2. How did you come up with the idea (love to hear your background info, inspiration etc. leading to the launch of the project), how does your personal background serve up this venture?
One day while I was surfing the net, I found Twitter. Lots of people talked about it as a great traffic source. After i tried it I was really impressed. I’ve found out that Twitter has Api and started to play with it. First I’ve created a script which showed what Twitter users think about something (I used it for some software repository site).I worked on that few hours, and liked Twitter API immediately. I wanted to find a way to better use Twitter traffic and I found it. Twittley is one of the best ways to get Twitter traffic to your site.3. How long did it take to launch the app from idea to app? Are you a full blown start-up with funding or bootstrapping?
I worked pretty hard (5 hours a day) and it took me around 1 week to build everything. Currently I can’t find any sponsors and I’m working “pro bono”. On the site there are no ads and it won’t be at least for next few months. I’ve started this project with 20$ (domain + hosting) plus lots of my free time.4. Do you have other favorite “competitors” if any?
Well there are no real competitors. Others just track twitter links and that’s all. There is no site which has even 30% of our functions. Not only that we track twitter links, we create twitter links (we’re something like Digg/Reddit for Twitter), we allow users to vote, we have algorithms for tracking quality of votes plus awesome button for every site(button is better than the one you have on your site).
5. How is the adoption since launch? Who are the most active people using your service and what your target audiences are?
Currently there are just 2000-3000 users and traffic for now is pretty small. Currently site on front page gets around 300-500 visits (targeted twitter + twittley). My targeted audiences are all twitter users who like web 2.0 and social bookmarking.6. How do you make money?
Currently Twittley doesn’t make money and i’m not sure when it will. We’re looking for sponsors but without any luck for now.7. If there is one thing what it is that is critical to Twittley’s success?
Hm… I think hard work, constantly adding new function and listening what users want (I get lots of requests on my mail and create 90% of those functions)8. Future growth plan? Technology, business partnership etc.
We will add lots of new functions(soon firefox extension(within a week or two),ability to follow someone and get friends on twittley).
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