Ask HN: Review our startup, Philtro | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our startup, Philtro

11 pointspaulsingh12 comments

http://www.philtro.com

We're a small bootstrapped team based in DC, SF and Ottawa who've built a semantic filtering system for Twitter. (Read: Philtro is a spam filter for Twitter) The concept is that you rate tweets with a thumb up/down action, we learn pretty quickly and immediately start filtering out the irrelevant stuff from your incoming twitter stream.

We're in private beta but HN folks can use this link to get immediate access: http://www.philtro.com/openinvite/351

Thanks in advance!

Paul

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Are you doing some strange caching?

I get a 'Thank you, invitation sent.' when I first hit the page.

A couple bugs: - The signup screen showed two forms, and showed the error form when I filled and submitted via the top form. - The slider hid all tweets and wouldn't show them regardless of position of tweets and the category navigation

A couple thoughts: - This may work better as a client versus a stand-alone site. - It would be nice to know when it starts filtering, and when you are training it. A simple "Great, now we can help you find more of what you like" or "We have filtered your tweets for you" would be great.

Great feedback on the bugs -- thanks, we'll start looking a little deeper.

re: client -- yes, we're talking about integrating Philtro into some existing desktop clients via our private API. No promises yet but it's something that we think makes sense for everyone.

re: "training mode" -- absolutely, we'll put some thought into how to integrate that into the UI.

Just a small bug; as soon as I load the site it says "Logout successful!" even though I haven't interacted with the site yet.

Probably the same bug. It says "Thank you, invitation sent." on the home page.

Any current business model on how to make money?

We've got a couple of ideas on how we can make money. We'll be running a few experiments over the next few weeks to see what works, etc.

> We're a small bootstrapped team

Are you bootstrapped, or merely self-funded-so-far?

Isn't bootstrapping and self-funding synonymous?

We haven't taken any outside money and have been working on this since the beginning of January. I'm on this full time and have been paying the other two from personal funds.

I guess he's wondering whether your business plan involves taking funding, or whether you're going to make it entirely on your own.

Exactly.

Ah, you're right.

We've been talking to a bunch of different angels and VCs over the past few weeks but haven't taken it much further than that (yet).

We've got a couple of ideas on how we can start pulling in some revenue on our own but the starting point for that will be a (relatively) solid product UI that improves Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio.

That being said, I'd seriously consider taking on some outside money if it comes with some smart folks that can help us improve the product and introduce us to their friends. :)

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