Need opinions on my startup

[Russellm2]

I'm trying to get feedback on my startup.

It's Zeedex.com.

The idea is pretty simple. Zeedex gives you suggestions to help you
search.

Do a search for a topic you want to learn about (board games, World War
2 battles, Indian food, etc.) and Zeedex will pop up lists of terms
related to your search.
Clicking on a term will add it to your search box, and then you can
search and find out more.
Anyone can create or edit a list, wiki-style.

Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Russell
rus...@adamm.net

[jso...@gmail.com]

Hey Russell,

I think this is pretty cool. My problem so far with it is obviously
that there's not a lot of depth -- i.e., you don't have a lot of
"lists" for stuff (some search terms i tried: comedy, wikipedia,
zeedex, etc. yielded no lists). I really like the wiki aspect of the
lists - could be very useful should this thing scale up.

If I could offer a suggestion it would be to automatically populate the
lists (just to get them started) with data from Google Sets
(http://labs.google.com/sets), or some similar suggestion engine.

How do you plan on getting penetration here, i.e., attracting a wide
enough base that it's useful?

Regards, and good luck. It looks great! (I even clicked a couple ads to
get things going... haha). Peace!

- James Somers

[Russellm2]

James,

Thanks much for checking it out.
I'm trying to ad a couple more lists each day, but
automatic lists might be something for me to think about.

As far as penetration, that's something I'd like advice on. How did
wikipedia and del.icio.us get so big without any marketing etc?

-Russell

[jso...@gmail.com]

Russell,

That's a pretty big question, but I'll see if I can offer an opinion on
those two examples. I do think that wikipedia and del.icio.us are
different beasts.

Wikipedia did one important thing really well: it made it easy for
smart people to offer something they prize really highly, that is,
information. In other words, it gave them an outlet for their
academic/intellectual interests. This kind of thing wasn't new with
wikipedia, though; what made Jimmy Wales's vision unique was that given
the state of the web at the time of launch (relatively ubiquitous),
there was hope for these random people that their little tidbits of
knowledge would make it big. That is to say, as ridiculous as it
sounds, wikipedia appeals to every intellectual's wet dream: spreading
knowledge on a grand scale, and sparking other intellectuals'
curiosity. It gives the life-long learner, the Emersonian "man
thinking," so to speak, something to do in his spare time that he
thinks will be really useful to society at large. Now such an
idealistic view of things seems impossible given that there are so many
people on the web; naturally you'd expect a lot of spam and shit. But
since "sharing knowledge" is something people really care about, there
was a really strong community surrounding the project's launch,
interested in protecting it from all that spam. I recommend reading
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia for more on
wikipedia's contributors. What does this all mean for you, though?
Well, it means that it's important for a service to be *important* and
*valuable* for people enough that they're going to give you their spare
time. That's not the easiest thing in the world. But if you can
convince a core group of people, call them "search gurus," let's say,
that helping people refine and expand their search terms is really
important, you might encourage them to "protect" your project in the
long run (from spam, vandalism, etc.). I think there might be people
out there who you could tap. Relating to wikipedia, it's almost like
you're appealing to a kind of intellectual arrogance (i.e., "you're so
damn good at x, here's a tool to share that with the world.") At the
very least, you've made that really easy to do, so it's a good start.

Del.icio.us is about two things: (a) that same kind of arrogance (i.e.,
"I'm really good at finding cool/obscure shit, and I want people to
know that, and I want to be *recognized* for my contribution -- this is
key, too: wikipedia, for instance, has a lot of self-reinforcement and
support within the system... stuff like "featured articles" and
"projects", etc., encourage people to contribute to certain articles in
order to gain notoriety among their peers... reddit's karma system taps
the same vein, I think). and (b) a social thing. When people find cool
shit, they want to share it with their friends, and people are
interested in seeing what they're friends are up to.

I think tapping the first thing will be your bread and butter. I.e.,
it's important that you incentivize the system so people *want* to
contribute to suggested search. How? Show them how many people clicked
their suggestion, so they feel like they've done something meaningful
when they add to your site; create a community around certain topics
that need improvement (if, say, there's not enough shit about "dogs,"
get some dog lovers on board by featuring that area); maybe you can go
as far as rewarding people with a cut of ad money if their suggested
terms get clicks for you.

You've got a great start in that you're making it really easy for
people to do something. Effectively you've lowered the "activation
energy" of zeedex, which is really one of the hardest parts of building
an effective web service. On the other hand, you're going to need to
get a big community here, and community-building is all about giving
people incentives to get started. Some good incentives are social
(seeing what friends are up to, sharing shit with friends), competition
(rewarding people for better contributions), and tasks/projects (making
it seem like adding search terms to "computer topics" is important),
etc. People like those things.

Hope that's helpful, I kinda rambled. Peace!

- James Somers

[Russellm2]

James,

Thank you for such a great, well thought-out response. It's given me a
lot to chew on.
Thanks very much!

-Russell