Keep it Simple, Stupid: Skype with Crowdbooster

It has been a little while since our last post so apologies for the length of this one. It’s been a while simply because we’ve had so much on. I guess it’s one of the challenges we’re facing with Twocial being both bootstrapped and a part time endeavour. When I say part time, what I mean is that we both have day jobs. For those who don’t know us; Martin is a coding ninja who is seriously well respected in the coding community, and I’m an ex-coder ex-banker product guy (classically trained - long story). Twocial is being developed in our spare time which is our evenings and weekends. 

But don’t get me wrong though, Twocial is pretty much all we talk and think about. 

Skype with Ricky

So as per our previous post, we’ve been making some friends in the US. Our next Skype was with Ricky cofounder of Crowdbooster. Me and Martin met up at North Tea Power and used their WiFi sat on the veranda. Crowdbooster, based in Palo Alto, CA is a social media dashboard which helps businesses manage their social presence. Most interesting about Crowdbooster is that they analyse your twitter audience and they provide you with stats around what time is best to tweet to maximise your impact. 

Ricky already had a handle on what we’re about from our emails, but he was very interested in hearing about what makes us stand out from the 500 other social media analytics out there. 

Keep it Simple

Our differentiator is the sentiment, we are able to identify which conversation about your business is worth listening to. Not only the sentiment of what is being said, it’s how you engage with people and the quality of the engagements. That’s our secret sauce. We talked about the standard social metrics that users have grown to expect and that naturally we’d provide them too. Ricky, without hesitation made it clear that this would be the wrong thing to do. His advise is to keep it simple - do what you do best and focus on that - and be awesome at it. Forget the rest of the features that people already use HootSuite for - the cost of converting a customer from using HootSuite to Twocial would be too much. So why bother? Build something simple and you’ll stand out.

Y-Combinator

Ricky with Crowdbooster have been through the awesome Y Combinator startup incubator. If you’re not aware of Y Combinator, stop reading this and come back when you have. Ricky could not speak more highly of Paul Graham and the influence he had on his idea. Me and Martin have both discussed applying for YC in the past but Ricky said just do it - although we’ve missed the deadline for the current intake - we’re dead set on applying for the next.

The call lasted about 45 minutes and we got some amazing advice on how to focus our efforts. We’ve officially dropped the idea of providing standard metrics that everybody else does - we’re all about user sentiment and user engagement. But most of all it’s not about numbers, stats and charts - it’s all about people.