The Scariest Fun : notes from a web startup

Seekler added the ability to add full reviews to items you rank awhile ago. Only recently have we been showing off this feature, and making it obvious to the users. It has been popular for users to read reviews about the items ranked on our lists. So as a little thank you to our users that have started adding reviews, I present the top ten users with the most reviews on Seekler.

1. dan
2. ben
3. michaelwong38
4. peter
5. vacelts
6. DomFilosa
7. galactic_dev
8. drew.klein
9. nicole
10. Jezebel

Congratulations, and thanks for your time and reviews, keep up the good work.

Today we're trying something new at Seekler - we're creating a list of the best Super Bowl commercials of 2008 in real-time while we're watching the game. If you want, feel free to join us and create your own list of favorite commercials as you watch the big game!

We've also got a list of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time that you can vote on as well. Check it out!

We have always known that consumer opinions about products and services was an interesting and profitable area to be in. For example, according to some recent statistics in Entrepreneur magazine*:

"62% of shoppers read consumer-written product reviews online.
80%+ say their purchase decisions have been directly influenced by reviews.
70% of shoppers share product reviews with their friends, family, or colleagues.
18% of consumers say they look for more product information online or in other locations in addition to on the product's packaging."

Since Seekler's community-built lists provide an incredibly easy way for shoppers to find and share their opinions about products, this means that

62% of shoppers could be looking at Seekler lists.
80%+ could have their purchase decisions influenced by Seekler lists.
70% of shoppers could be sharing their lists with friends, family, and the whole Seekler community.
18% of consumers could find product information at Seekler.

We know that's we're a tad bit optimistic, but it just goes to show how many people are using existing review sites and could find new products and services more quickly and easily by using Seekler.

*February 2008 issue, page 26, source of stats not cited

We had some great successes last week promoting our list of the most anticipated movies of 2008, but as that traffic dies down - we're looking to promote one of our fastest-growing niches: video games. Seekler has a great list of the best video games of all time as well as a list of the best free computer games.

But my favorite is definitely our list of the best online flash games. If you are looking to ease your boredom at work or school, definitely check this list out. But be warned - I unintentionally spent over three hours last night playing these games. Some of them are very, very addictive!

Just a few quick announcements:

Last week was a great one for Seekler. Just a few days after we launched our beta, we got an incoming link from FARK.com's showbiz section, which brought us a ton of new visitors. Sorry if the site slowed down a bit - we'll be addressing that this week.

Secondly, Seekler got another nice post at Mashable. Thanks, Kristen!

After many months of hard work, we're proud to unveil the beta version of Seekler. We've added lots of features since we released our alpha version, but the most important one is that as of today, user registration is completely open to everyone!

We've only gotten this far because of our amazing alpha users and we will continue to be dependent on the support of users like you. If you can, doing any of the following would help us out immensely:

1. Use Seekler! Seekler will be able to attract more users as there is more and more useful data on the site. Making a new list or adding to an existing list would be a huge help. Also, you can add reviews to items on your existing lists to give them more depth.

2. Give us feedback! Seekler is far from finished, but we will continue to need your help to improve it. What features do you wish we had? What tasks are painful to complete? What lists do you wish we had?

3. Tell your friends! If you've been waiting to tell your friends about Seekler because it wasn't easy to create an account, wait no more. Anyone can easily create an account and start making lists.

4. Link to us! Incoming links will help us get traffic and improve our position on search engines like Google. If you have a website, a blog, or even a MySpace of Facebook profile, and incoming link to Seekler would be very much appreciated. You can link directly to http://seekler.com or to a list that interests you. If you're into movies, a link to our "Anticipated Movies of 2008" list would really help us out since we're currently trying to promote that list.

Thanks!

Recently we wrote about our efforts to find some good niches for Seekler. Our theory is that if we can get a lot of great content in a few key areas, that will get a lot of visitors to our site - and hopefully, they'll start using it for other niches as well.

We've recently found our first really successful niche - Most Anticipated Movies in 2008. We're in the first few results on Google for search terms related to anticipate d movies, and as a result, a lot of traffic is coming for this list. We've added a lot of content to the list to make it really useful, including links to trailers, descriptions, and tags.

Another things we've done is add to the ability to attach your own review to an item. Instead of just ranking the items in order, you can also explain why you placed a certain item at the rank you did. Not all lists have reviews (it's such a new feature), but the Anticipated Movies in 2008 list does - for instance, here are the reviews for my personally most-anticipated movie, The Dark Knight.

Hopefully our strategy of aggressively targeting niches pays off. What other niches would you like to see Seekler target?

One way we think Seekler can be useful is for interacting with readers on a website. Publishing a list on a blog is a common post. The comments on published lists are commonly suggestions for other things to add to the list, or the commenter's own ordering of the list. Trying to read through all the comments and combine them mentally is pretty hard. If you create lists on your blog with the Seekler widget, not only do you have a nice looking list, you also have a way to collect feedback from your readers in a useful way. For instance compare, Most Wanted Guitar Hero 3 songs with a blog post on that topic. Below I have included my list of Seekler feature requests, you can also check out what the community is requesting. Feel free to contribute to the list.

The widget shown above is our first test of a widget that will show one specific list. We also have a widget that will show all lists by a specific user.

Take some time to check these widgets out and give us some feedback so we can improve them and make them ready for release for all of our users.

We originally built Seekler with a few key niches in mind, including comic books, programming resources, and movies. We have kept Seekler fairly general hoping that it could serve a large range of areas. As we have approached launch we have discussed many niches we thought we could target with Seekler, but we didn’t write down or fully develop our thoughts. We knew that we couldn’t try to attack all of our niches at once and that some would be a better fit initially. We also knew that some niches were already well-served by existing sites like Amazon.

After a few of our Seekler pitches didn't go as well as we would have hoped, we realized the example niches we used heavily affected how people thought about that site. Sometimes coming up with the examples on the spot didn’t lead our conversation in the right direction. We realized we needed to spend some time and reflect on which niches Seekler could be perfect for and which were not as good. After working on our niche list, we started seeing patterns and discovering new niches we think Seekler could serve. Figuring this out has been incredibly valuable, helping us focus our development.

To help us focus in on the best niches we created a graph like so:

We then started placing our ideas along the graph until patterns began to emerge. It forced us to realize some of the topics we thought we could serve were actually bad matches, while other topics we never considered were well-suited for Seekler. The resulting graph can be seen below.

One pattern we noticed is that Seekler is not good at niches that require professional reviewers. We previously used digital cameras as an example for a good product people could use Seekler to narrow their choices down and then find in-depth reviews. It turns out the using the community review process for digital cameras really makes no sense. We allow a large community to build up opinions by offering lists in order of best to worst. The average consumer only buys one camera every few years, how could they rate their 10 best digital cameras every year? Only professional review groups can get full collections of cars, cameras, and other more expensive or rare items. These are a bad fit for our community review process, and well served by professional reviews which often fully review the entire market of items.

Seekler is excellent at products that people buy or use regularly and cost little to no money. The average person goes through a lot of music, books, comics, and games, for example. So it is easy for a comic fan to list his favorite Marvel comics. These niches are a better fit for the Seekler community and actually harder for expert reviewers to cover, as they can’t expect to have in-depth reviews across the entire space. Another reason community reviews can be useful is that in some cases, the opinion of experts isn't as important as much as say the opinion of your friends, people your age, or of a diverse community in general. There are many areas where the long tail of reviews is often poorly served, while there are clearly many fans that exist with valuable opinions on often overlooked niches. For instance I think Seekler will reach a collection of the top 100 punk songs far before Rolling Stone will ever create that list.

In some ways we see the community review process as complimentary to in-depth reviews. While topics like punk music the opinion of the community may be enough to warrant a purchase. There are other cases where the user still may want in-depth reviews, after narrowing down your choices. We think the community review process can help you quickly narrow down the list of comics or anything you're interested in faster than trying to read a huge collection of expert reviews. In this case while the user still may really be interested in in-depth reviews that get into the details of a comic, Seekler can still help them find interesting new comics which they can then follow up on.

Just learning these concepts about Seekler was important, as it helped us to improve our pitch. It also helped us realize some of the features we had planned were more important than others. Taking a step back from our code, after months of programming, and thinking more about the problem we are trying to solve gave us a better focus on our problem and a better understanding of our users. We don’t think we have found all of the best niches to initially focus on, but we have a better understanding where we should begin. If you have any suggestions, we are all ears as we are hoping our initial users will also help lead the direction of the site, by suggesting niches for Seekler to target.

Seekler is in the web news again with Mashable's Seekler preview write up. Overall it sounds like pretty good first impressions. The comments are a little weird as they are giving out prizes for troll week in a Halloween theme. It is nice to see some links and interest popping up on the web as we start to reveal more of Seekler.

The wait is over - you can check out Seekler. As I previously mentioned, we're doing a staged release, so in this version you'll need an alpha site password to create an account. We hope to open it up to more users in the next few weeks. If you'd like to be invited, be sure to sign up.

Here are some of our most popular lists right now:

• Best Movies
• Best Cities to Visit
• Best Presidential Candidates

We're very excited about this release. Please check out Seekler and let us know what you think. Any and all feedback would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

Launching is a tricky business. One one hand ...

We want to show Seekler to the world as soon as possible.

For one thing, we want to get more eyes on Seekler so we can start getting a wide array of feedback. But we also want to start building buzz, getting incoming links, etc. Just as importantly, we want to start to get a glimpse of what our scaling needs might be.

At the same time ...

We want to make sure our existing users have a near-flawless experience.

We want to continue to get detailed feedback from our current small group of users so we can respond quickly and fix almost every bug they run into. Also, we want to make sure that the site doesn't slow down to the point it's unusable or crash altogether.

After thinking about it a lot, we've decided that a staged roll out makes the most sense. Here's our current plan:

Stage 1: Publicly Viewable

First, we're are going to let everyone get a look at Seekler. You'll be able to see how Seekler will help you find cool stuff by checking out all the lists that are hosted on the site. However, only a small group of beta testers will be able to actually submit data at this point.

Since most of the viewing operations are cheap, we think we can show off the concept of the site to a lot of users without killing performance. We can also continue to refine the data submission and editing experience with our awesome beta testers. At the same time, we can hopefully get more users excited about Seekler and let some search engines crawl the site as well.

Estimated Release: Sometime this week!

Stage 2: Private Invitations

After that, we're going to move to an invitation system for sign ups. We'll expand our group of beta users considerably. If you're interested in getting an invitation, submit your email address at Seekler

At this point, we'll have ironed out the big issues in data submission and editing, so we can continue to invite as many users as our servers can handle. We'll continue to incorporate the feedback we get from all our users during this expansion.

Estimated Release: Hopefully about a month or so, but we'll see

Stage 3: Public Beta

Finally, we'll open up the sign up system so anyone can join. We'll probably continue to call this release 'beta' just because that's so Web 2.0 ish. Then we cross our fingers and hope that we can continue to grow our user base.

Estimated Release: When it's ready

So that's the plan. Stage 1 is coming next week!

Dan and I are incredibly excited and honored to get the chance to interview with Y Combinator in Cambridge, MA this Nov 3-4.

For those of you that don't know, YC invests in very early stage software companies. If we get accepted into the program, it's quite literally the best thing that could happen for Seekler at this stage of development. We really, really want this.

But we're trying to not get our hopes too high - this is far from a done deal. Many of the teams that fly out to Cambridge will come back disappointed. As Paul Graham said:

"In the startup world, closing is not what deals do. What deals do is fall through. If you're starting a startup you would do well to remember that. Birds fly; fish swim; deals fall through."

With that advice in mind, we're going to keep working on Seekler as if there is no chance that we'll get accepted. You're going to see some big announcements in the next few weeks.

As we were completing our YC application, I remember thinking that even if we didn't get an interview, the process of doing the application was hugely valuable in itself. It forced us to understand our project and business a lot better. I feel the same way about the interview. The absolute worst-case scenario is that we interview and don't get accepted - but that means we get to talk face to face to Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston about Seekler! How cool is that?

By the way, for those who didn't get an interview, we feel your pain. We applied last cycle and got rejected (from both YC and TechStars). Remember that every person interviewed in 'Founders at Work' was rejected, often several times. They say that persistence is the single most important trait in a founder. Keep moving forward.

Some people have asked how the alpha release is going, so I figured that we could share some site statistics. We have been happy about how the alpha has been going: we have been getting phenomenal feedback from our users and made hundreds of tiny improvements over the last few weeks.

Current Seekler statistics:
45 Community Lists
200 Individual Lists
1000 Items
500 Tags
40 Users

We have been sending out new invites every couple days, so if you are interested in getting a chance to help drive the direction of the site, feel free to sign up at Seekler!

We have completed the alpha version of Seekler. This release includes the graphic design work for the site, the initial feature set planned for launch, and far too many bug fixes to count. We had hoped to have this release out a bit sooner, but various things kept us holding it back and in the end I think we have a better application for it. Along with announcing the Seekler alpha release, we are happy to share the first screen shots of our application in action. I can't begin to describe how cool it is to begin to see users testing out our application.

My current 'Best Movies' list. My rankings are automatically merged into a community list, which I can view by clicking on the 'view community list' tab.

We have been touching up this release with the help of many of our friends and family. A huge amount of thanks goes out to everyone who has been using the site and giving us feedback. It has been incredible to get so much information about Seekler. We would have never been able to improve the usability of the site as fast or to the degree we have without all of you. After a couple weeks of being live, we have closed out most of the glaring problems and will start working on issues we had been waiting on until after finishing the alpha version. We of course will still be looking for more feedback, making improvements, and fixing bugs quickly as issues are pointed out to us. If you weren’t invited to try out this release, don’t worry: we will be inviting more people very soon. It is time the for our users to help guide the general direction of Seekler.

The community list for ‘Seekler Slogan ideas.’ There are eight users contributing, resulting in 'Seek Together' being the #1 slogan suggestion overall.

We are excited to start sharing more of Seekler's features and getting additional feedback on the screen shots. If you have a particular aspect of Seekler you are interested in knowing more about, let us know and we can start sharing more about our current vision for the product.

OK, I'm back with another preview of Seekler. Our latest mock-up shows off the latest proposed look 'n feel.

This mock-up shows the same page as last time: you can see how a list will be displayed as well as the UI for adding items, navigating pages, and searching.

What do you think of our look? Does the page layout make sense? Do you like the color scheme? Is it too complex? Or too simple and boring?

Seekler won't launch for another month or so, but in the meantime, we're going to start a series of posts that will preview the planned look and functionality of the site. We really hope you enjoy these sneak peeks and we look forward to your comments and feedback.

Seekler is, at the core, about helping you find the best of anything. Do you want to find the best hot sauce? Or how about the best hiking trails in your area? Or the best comedy on television? Then Seekler is for you.

Seekler is a community-driven review site similar in purpose to Epinions or Amazon reviews, but we've ditched long textual reviews and "star" ratings. Instead, we focus on putting items in order to create ranked lists of the best hot sauces, hiking trails, TV shows, or anything else you can think of. Seekler makes it super easy to find the list you're looking for.

Where do all these lists come from? Hopefully, they'll come from users like you. We've built some tools that will make it really fun and easy to create your own personal lists. Seekler will use lots of user lists to create community lists that show the best overall items in any category.

In the next few weeks, we'll talk more about Seekler and explain some of our features in detail. We'd love to get feedback from you. Do you think we're missing some key feature? Do you like or hate the user interface? Do you think the site will be useful for you?

Until then, we'll leave you with an early mockup of Seekler. You can get a basic idea of what the site will look like and what features will be included (we would like to show a real screen shot, but although most of the features are completed, the pretty CSS isn't).

If you click on the image and visit Flickr, you can hover over the image to see some additional info on various sections of the page.

The folks over at Mashable wrote a short piece on Seekler this week! Check out the article! We're looking forward to promoting the site more and more as we get ever closer to launching ...

Our deepest apologies for the lack of posts, but we've been busy:

1. We picked a logo
2. We picked a graphic designer and we're starting to work on the site design
3. We've launched seekler.com!

Admittedly, it's not much right now, but you can see our logo and read the first public announcement of what exactly this grand secret project is all about.

Over the next month or so, we'll be going into more detail about Seekler on this blog. We'd definitely love to hear your feedback, so keep checking this space!