

Show HN : Review my startup : Risely – Filtering your social news - c_schmitt

Link: www.rise.ly<p>Hey guys,<p>We just finished building our site, and would be very grateful if some of you guys could test it out.<p>Basically, Risely is curation platform that filters the noise from your social stream and only shows you stories on topics you care about. You just need to connect your social networks and select your topics. Trending stories get bigger as they get more popular.<p>We are in private beta right now, but I have made arrangements and you will receive an invite 5 or 10 minutes after you signup.<p>Thanks
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adidash
Nice design! Clicked on create an account button thinking I will be able to
create an account and customize my feed. But it just added me to your
waitlist. Found it a bit deceptive - maybe you should change the text to
request an invite.

Its a crowded space with many options. Best of luck!

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c_schmitt
Thanks, you should have received an invite. Check your spam folder.

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adidash
Thanks for the invite! But thats not my point - a create an account button
should exactly do that - start me with account creation process. I am not
questioning the approach but merely the wording on the button and messaging
after entering my email account.

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nashequilibrium
"only shows you stories on topics you care about." "Trending stories get
bigger as they get more popular."

These two statements are in conflict, stories that are bigger and trendy are
not necessarily stories that I care about. You have to analyze me, my actions,
my social graph interaction to find stories in my social feed that I would
care about.

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c_schmitt
Sorry my statement is confusing. You only see stories from "topics you care
about". We don't really need to analyze you because when you signup you select
your own topics (We got around 170 atm) which you can change at anytime.

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.

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nashequilibrium
Okay cool, I really like the layout so far. The question now is, since this is
a solved problem, you already have competitors, how are u going to get me to
move from Zite, flipboard and pulse? I do use all especially pulse and Zite.

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.

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c_schmitt
Thanks for the advice, Marketing has been quite a struggle for us and I
started working on a landing page that integrates some of your points.
However, we got high differentiation points with Pulse, Zite & Co.

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.

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nashequilibrium
U really need to interview your target market, use an empathy map. This will
save u a lot of time in getting your MSG across and will get u to focus on a
few hardcore problems "Solutions over Ideas". You should have drawn up an
empathy Map before building your product but on the bright side u have a
prototype so go an interview people, try Starbucks, lots of people will let u
interview them there.

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brackin
I'm not sure how you can compete with the competition, which is focusing on
tablets & mobile at this point. I don't use any social news 'apps' (I won't
consider HN or Reddit an app but a destination) on the web, I either go
directly to a blog or use Twitter.

On mobile I use Prismatic which fixes this problem aptly and Flipboard (for
visuals).

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c_schmitt
We have more a news filtering approach. If you select for e.g. "Ruby on Rails"
we will analyze your twitter feed and only show you stories from people you
follow on twitter that have curated this kind of stories. You can of course
set multiple topic filters.

Prismatic has a different approach, where they try to figure out your
interests, then they suggest you stories. Those are not stories curated
directly from people you follow on your social networks.

With Flipboard, you follow blogs or curated magazines. No detailed filters.

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dezinelife
There are a quite a number of sites providing more or less the similar
service. You need to carefully analyze them and proceed.Good luck.

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shail
Very nicely done. I like the interface. I would suggest that you should let
the users play with it without asking them to signup.

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c_schmitt
Thanks, when you login you get a menu on left where you can filter your news
by topics pretty much like on the new Facebook design.

That's a good point and we were actually thinking about doing that at the
beginning, however it could also make Content Publishers very unhappy.

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bbissoon
Good work, this reminds me of the concept for something I'm building :)

