CommenTag | official blog

Sorry to have been so long.But here it finally is. It is just a summary of interesting thoughts that came up from this meeting and which might be interesting for anyone who is in the process of bootstrapping a startup. We talked about many things and describing everything would be a bit too long so let’s focus on the essential. 

First there is that funny quote about French people saying that because of our French culture we feel like we have to release fully polished products (and therefore we wait too much). 

About the concept of commentag he highlighted the fact that our real contribution (ie. our killer feature) was our concept of “Nested Tags”. The fact that when you click on one tag, you get directly the other related tags allowing you to narrow down your selection. This is our real innovation and we should more communicate about that.

Concerning my slides, he said that we should more highlight the market.The number of potential users, converted users.How many users will we be able to reach?That’s the very question. It is first all about how to grab the market, then in second how to turn this market of users into a revenue model.

Funny enough, this is almost contradictory with what we are used to in Europe. We just met Patrick Crasson, responsible of the Startup Essentials program of SUN in Belgium. His very first question was “What is your business model?”. “How will you make money” comes here first and not “how will you gain users”. So in Europe, you first have to focus on your revenues, then on the user experience. While VC in the States would allow you to first focus on the user experience (as long as there is a real market).

Both approaches can be good or bad depending on the business. The very question is in which game should we play? Should we see big and focus on user experience, or should we play safe and focus on a smaller market but on which we will be able to make money quite quickly?

Talking about the future applications of commentag he said “it’s not about a piece of software that could be applied to many different situations. It is all about a distribution channel”.  “If you start targeting public content like comments, then you can’t apply your product to manage emails or contacts. Because the distribution is not the same. The former is public whereas the latter is private.
However, you could apply it to different type of public content.So the idea here is to focus on developping a distribution on which a piece of software will be applied. Not the contrary.” 

This is a very interesting thought.Because at a first glance we would all think in terms of software (or product) and in its capabilities.At best, we will think in terms of market pain and try to address the issue (what we did), but never we would have thought in terms of distribution.So it is very important to focus on one distribution and then leverage it.

About the current downturn he said that it only gonna hurt companies selling advertises in the range $4 to 20$ cpm (cost per mille). ie. all companis playnig the role of useless intermediaries.However, in the funding stage the situation will probably be more difficult as investors would invest in less projects (which is already the case in Silicon Valley, see doom and gloom hits Silicon Valley).

Thanks again Reshma and Scott. Your advises are like always very helpful and much appreciated.

Yesterday night (Thursday 13th of March) I had a one hour skype call with Scott Rafer, CEO of MyBlogLog and founder of Lookery.
We have definitely a lot to learn from Scott’s experience. And as expected it was a very useful conversation.
Scott has been very kind an gave me a lot of advises that I want to share with you below.
If you are also in the process of bootstrapping your company (hi guys from @minibar!), they might be more than interesting.

He wouldn’t invest though as he is already in too many businesses.
However he is more than keen to help us and that’s priceless.

Sum up of his feedback:

• He loves the idea
• He loves the way we implemented it so far (letting users to create on-the-fly their own taxonomy by selecting multiple tags)
• We are not ambitious enough
• Although we can start with tagging comments, we should extend our system to any kind of small content (”bunch of microdocuments”). We could tag twitter messages, polls of polldaddy.com, presentations on slideshares.net, … plenty of such little things.(personal note: the web so far has been all about interconnecting meaningless html pages. The future of the web would be an interconnection of smaller entities (an address, a contact, an event, a bank statement, a poll, …) but which convey a defined meaning. The thought of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, is worth reading on that topic).
• We should change the name “commentag” to something else otherwise it’s gonna restrict us to deal with other things than comments.
  • His proposals:
    • tagtronica.com “it’s 4 syllables and 3’s normally but limit, but it’s not terrible”
    • tagtize.com “is shorter but it bugs me”
  • My proposals:
    • centraltags.com (I really like this one)
      
      Quick draft for a logo
      
    • tagtoes.com (funny enough, my colleague David told me this afternoon that a toetag is a tag we used to put on the toe of the dead people (with their names and other infos). That might be a good name then as we will tag content that would be lost in a mass of other content, and if you are lost, then you dead somehow).
    • tagtoo.com (unfortunately the domain is already taken…)
  • Any other proposal? Feel free to let us your thoughts below!
• We should not care at this stage about any business model
• Our only concern now should be:
  • raise £300k to put 5 guys (included ourselves) full time on the project
  • Only address the mass market (don’t care about B2B)
  • Once you get into people referrer logs, you’re done. (ie. for the moment, we do not exist yet)
• When asking about moving to SF he answered: “San Francisco (SF) is a great place for funding, but terrible place for hiring”
• What a lot of companies do is setting their commercial management in SF for the networking and let their CTO and engineers in another country.
• We should consider using a virtual hosting platform like the one proposed by Amazon. @Arnaud: please go check it out!
• Next steps:
  • Define a roadmap for the different phases of our project
  • 1-2 page business summary. Not about the features, but more about the market size, the opportunities, … (ie. SWOT analysis)

After thoughts:

While seeking for a name, I land on tagfs.
A name a bit too techy but the idea is all in there: We could imagine a file system for the web which would be mainly based on tags.
tagfs would be a platform containing only i-nodes (ie. only reference to be able to find the content back - like in the unix filesystem).
Any web service would be able to register any atomic entity (a poll, a presentation, a picture, a bank statement, a booking, a thought, …) in that platform. Allowing users to gather at a glance all their stuff concerning, for example, their last holidays (pictures, contacts, bills, reviews of hotels, …).

To be continued…
(stay tuned)