Then when people you follow on social networks (or Risely) have shared a story that has generated a lot of interactions, we make it bigger.
You need a hook, a story that will get me to use you. I am not motivated to add you to my iOS home screen or use you on my desktop.Therefore if u can differentiate your product enough to get me(someone like me) then u onto something. Test some crazy stuff since u have nothing to loose and the status quo will kill u. Maybe become the zappos of curated content or priority inbox for your social links.
Another thing is copy Zite and let me explore the site without signup. Create a session Id in browser, let the user select their interest tags, then refresh the page with the curated view. If they sign up just us their session Id to match them. Also allow them to push the articles to Evernote, Dropbox and drive. This is how Zite got me to try and test them out and I was hooked afterwards.
3 points: - Contrary to our competitors our users mainly get their news by filtering curated stuff from their existing social networks. Let's say you have selected 'Baseball' as a topic filter, and your FB friend shares an article on 'Soccer', well you won't see it. Basically, you can filter all the stuff your friends shares on your social networks (or Risely) and only see the stuff from topics you have selected. The effect is really good with Twitter, where I follow people that are known experts in their field but often curates stuff I don’t care about. That’s a very different approach than Zite where they suggest you stories, or Pulse where you directly follow certain blogs.
- Second, Risely is curation platform but also a social network with built-in popularity mechanism. The more your curations generates interactions, the more you become popular and recognized: you get to be featured in “Topic boards” but one of the most radical effect is that it directly influences the layout of the stories you share to your followers. They get bigger, and thus you get more chance of being read.
- Third, you will be able to make money based on a revenue sharing program. How it works is that we provide some information on terms of the article you are reading. For e.g. if we detect a link to a product from one of our partners, we show you some information about it (small image, price, title, brand). If you click on it you are of course redirected to the merchant. How it comes to play is that if you share this article to your followers, and you make a lead, you will get a cut out of it. And if one of your followers shares it, and makes a lead, you still get a cut. We are extending that to “Personalities”, Places etc… This feature is limited for the moment, because we don’t have many partnerships.