How much have you raised?
We’ve raised $5 million from two of the co-founders, Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, as well as Benchmark Capital.
Not from you or Jim?
No. Paul was actually employee number 20-something at Google and Sanjeev was very early as well. So they’re financially in a slightly different group than Jim and I.
With all that money, are you going to grow fast?
We plan on growing our engineering group -- which is the whole company, I guess -- so we’re hiring a handful of engineers. But we’re not necessarily like a lot of other startups who instantly want to grow the company to 100 people and hire a bunch of executives. With a product like FriendFeed, the challenge is it’s a new product category. I think we’ll have to do a number of iterations before we find something that’s useful for the technology community in Silicon Valley and also to a more mainstream audience.
You’re an example of perpetual beta.
We release features every single day. We are a company designed around iterative improvement. Natural word of mouth marketing only comes if you’re constantly improving your product, addressing people’s concerns, and getting real usage and feedback. That perpetual improvement of the product is the right way to develop Web software. The products that continue to innovate and evolve are the products that people will continue to use the most.
One blogger observed that you guys were so enmeshed in conversation with users that he could tell when you took a staff retreat.
We always joke that creating a product like FriendFeed is really bad for our productivity because every time we open our browser we get distracted for two hours finding interesting stuff to read. We use FriendFeed as a communication tool with our users. I subscribe to 200 people and end up interacting with a lot of people. A lot of the early adopters of the product are very passionate about the product and tend to have strong opinions about the path that we should take.
How and when will you start making money?
We’re not currently monetizing the site. Probably the first thing we’ll try is some form of advertising. For example, you can connect your Netflix queue to FriendFeed so that your friends and family can see you’ve rented a movie. American Gangster shows up in my FriendFeed, there’s a lot of opportunity for related ads. That American Gangster movie is tied to me, almost as an implicit endorsement of that movie, which is a really interesting context that we think has a lot of potential for advertisers.
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Recent Comments | 6 Total
June 10, 2008 at 5:25pm by michelle mccormack
Isn't this like wicked old news?
June 10, 2008 at 9:23pm by Marianne Bellotti
See the problem with these kind of things is that people have different "types" of friends and the ability to regulate information, even the most basic kind, between them is essential to good relationships. For example on my Facebook account I have friends who are drinking buddies from college and I have business friends who I may have a casual and personal relationship with but whom the foundation of our relationship is essentially professional. I don't necessarily feel comfortable sharing the same level of information with each group.
June 12, 2008 at 5:09pm by Lynne d Johnson
@michelle mccormack - FriendFeed may be "old news" to early adopters, but it's not like it's a mass market product. It's not as if "everyone" understands how to use it or what it is. So to many, it is extremely new and useful news. Even as old as Twitter is now, it's still new to many people in various business industries, including media and marketing.
June 17, 2008 at 11:38pm by Shashank Tripathi
FriendFeed is new how?
July 3, 2008 at 10:55am by Jim Hughes
v