Thanks! The YC bump would be nice, but it doesn't really make a difference. Focus on the experience you're creating for your users, and the rest is marginal.
I just realised the irony in that sentence. You're right! What I meant was, we haven't really figured out a product for consumers, let alone the enterprise, for us to be able to go for it. Having said that, what we're now doing is that we have created a beta users group on Facebook and have added quite a bit of people to it (and still are...). What we will be doing is get feedback from them and mould the product exactly how these users sound off there.
Matt Schlicht (Hipset / Tracks.by, YC S'12) gave me the advice to do it and we're just doing that. Working now to roll it out to these users first and listen intently and give them exactly that.
YES!! I don't think ideas need to be protected if you can back it with great execution. Ideas aren't unique, can never be. As René Girard said, all desires (and hence ideas) are mimetic! So, I don't buy into the philosophy that ideas need to be guarded. It curtails innovation.
A couple of years ago when I was building a product, our board convinced us to apply for a patent. After a provisional application and following it up with a proper submission, we finally had an offer that granted us the patent. Never pursued it. I know, it makes sense to protect your ideas; but we had Whatsapp, Pinger and other apps kicking ass in the space.
I would agree with you on this one. I've never worked with news publishers before but we wanted to explore how the need for distribution affected news quality and what all we could do to extrapolate from there. Ended up spending a lot of time with a fairly large newspaper and iterating on ideas to finally arrive at personalisation as a solution. We got away with a product we could evolve, revenue and lots of insider information about how the publishing industry works. And, everyone knows everyone else, so they referred us to a ton of others too! :D
We're applying to YC with this for YC'14 and would love your feedback. The end goal for the product is to use all your interest and conversation data to create a personalised feed for you. Over a period of time, publishers would be able to write to it and hence you shall see a feed where information would come to you without the need to search, follow or like anything. We're still a few weeks away from launch but would really like some honest feedback so that we can work it into development than the other way around.
I, personally find content on Twitter, something I'm able to skip over pretty quickly as compared to Facebook where social context is key. Negativity, hence, doesn't really matter, does it?
