There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great ride so far.
we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.
One problem is that you log in and you have nothing to look at. You really want to have something for new users to get a great "out of the box" experience and they'll be more motivated to come back.
Totally agree - we're rethinking that first experience at the moment so that you go through a more guided process. The intent is to send you to connect your social networks, then fill out your profile, then send you to the home screen. With a priority queue for new users, we should be able to get you to a home page that is full of your links by the time you first see it.
On a lot of services you are automatically followed by the founders, like greeters at the door of a party. One idea could be to either seed some initial links (via suggested users) or add some top links (links with high frequency) from either yourself or Alex.
We threw the greeters idea away mostly because we selfishly want to choose who we follow on Trunk.ly because we find it really useful. If we follow everyone we'd have to have some other account that we 'really' use.
Seeding the links is a good idea - maybe we'll make new users automatically follow us which would achieve that goal and means they have some links in their Timeline.
I am glad to see Trunk.ly get this kind of attention.
I contacted Alex and Tim last month to see if there was anything that I as a novice programmer could do to help them with their suddenly overwhelming workload. I was seeking just a little bit of work as a learning exercise, and these guys asked me to write an RSS connector for them. It was the most effective learning experience I've had, ever.
I am very happy for these guys. Two class acts who gave me the chance to actually get some code put into production. (AFAIK they're still using the RSS connector I wrote, with some adaptations and what have you I didn't know to include.) Kudos, guys.
Excellent app, imported my delicious bookmarks, set up twitter/fb feeds, works like a dream.
The only thing that would make the experience complete would be tag suggestions based on previously entered tags in the bookmarklet popup (you know, type a few letters, get a list of tags). Or maybe a list of all tags, I don't know, a simple alpha-sorted block of tags.
Even if you don't do any of those, I would still use it though :)
The short answer, I submitted a press release to GigaOm, they wrote an article based on that and the NYT syndicate their content.
The long answer, I'm not a PR professional, but what's been working for us is to find some headline hook.
I'm not trying to write the article for the journalist but to pull out what's interesting. If it's an Australian blog, I'd make a big deal of the fact we are Melbourne based 'Aussie battler hits Top 20K sites globally in first month'. If it's someone like GigaOm, I'm trying to find some other 'cut through' that will grab the journalists attention.
I think in this case, the headline I went with was 'New startup Trunk.ly bookmarks 5 million links for users in its first month'.
The press release itself was basically the same regardless - a story about how we launched, what we do in the first paragraph, then facts figures and quotes. Overall I try to tell a story, but I make sure there is plenty of quotable things too.
In practice this seems to of been working OK - what's interesting is that the quotes facts and figures rarely, if ever, get used, but I think what's going on here is that we are capturing the blogger /journalists interest enough to want to research more and write about us.
I never tried to pitch the NYT, I think pitching a tech blog is a lot easier.
The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the article, or was it purely automatic?
"... The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the article, or was it purely automatic? ..."
Follow the flow of information. Who is the original author? Where was the piece originally published? Well the author is Simon Mackie from GigaOam. The piece was published in the "collaboration" section ~ http://gigaom.com/collaboration/ an area of reader interest that gigaom has a separate category for. If we look a bit closer at the author we and we check his bio, I noticed Simon did a stint at SitePoint ~ http://www.sitepoint.com/about/ Now I know that's a Melbourne company because I worked with Daks (Mark Harbottle) in a previous startup. I guess you should ask the author about the jump to the NYT ~ http://twitter.com/spiky_simon
The point is, the product is in a growth category and the author knows the startup scene in Melbourne. So is it a case of luck? or making your own luck? I think the later is the case.
Thanks for this answer. A minor question: how long was your press release and did you attach it as a document in the email or just copy-pasted the content in email?
I'm asking because from what I read bloggers don't particularly like getting traditional press-releases.
"... How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask? ..."
Probably by making a product that people want and maybe a good bit of timing. If you read through the first post by Alex ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 you'll see a mention of Yahoo refuting a claim they are closing delicious, but instead making it know the wish to sell.
When launching a new service with a big existing competitor, uncertainty can be used to boost user interest in alternatives.
historious has been running for more than six months now and it hasn't been mentioned in the NYT... Not only that, trunkly does basically exactly what historious does.
I don't know the Historious team at all, so I can only comment on what I see.
I saw Pinboard, Diigo, Evernote and Licorize working to take advantage of this (like getting mentions, actively posting on blogs, answering questions in Quora - all the things we've been doing) but never really saw Historious doing the same.
The other thing (yes I'm biased) is that I think Historious isn't the same as Trunk.ly - Historious is a Delicious replacement service that builds these features on. The attraction to users is that it's Delicious plus.
What we're trying to do with Trunk.ly is rethink how the whole bookmarking experience should work. So yes, we took advantage of the cut through we could achieve by positioning against Delicious, but in reality our market is not frustrated delicious users (which is kind of where I think Historious is placed). There's been very deliberate design decisions to resist at the moment some things that Delicious users think are critical.
We're trying to bring bookmarking back to the mainstream audience who left Delicious behind a long time ago and moved on to social sharing in Twitter, Facebook and others. While functionally there are similarities (how many ways can you bookmark a link), from a positioning and direction point of view we believe we are different and have a different vision.
From a coverage perspective we have a simpler positioning and broader "mass" appeal, which is likely to be more attractive to a larger blog property.
Here's an example of what our press release says "Trunk.ly is a service that hooks into your online social networks, collects all the links you share then builds a personal search engine of the web page those links point to." Not once in there do we actually describe ourselves as a "bookmarking" service, although that does get written about us by others. So it could also be a bit of differentiation.
"... What we're trying to do with Trunk.ly is rethink how the whole bookmarking experience should work. ..."
The concept of fixing "broken ideas" is counter-intuitive to spot because by nature you have to see they are in fact broken to start with. PG essays are littered with this simple concept ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fpaulgraha...
If anyone is looking for a simpler bookmarking app, I made http://saaave.com/ last weekend.
Bookmarks are added with a one-click bookmarklet that saves your current URL. No tagging or further action necessary. The app indexes the content of your bookmarks for fulltext searching.
It's lacking a UI, but feel free to give it a try :)
Great. doesn't even need much UI. Not sure how you will scale indexing with more users - so if I could install it on my own server and and you add addons/plugins (get 1 free with every account) as extra payable features (imports etc) while keeping this bare bones install free then that would work for me.
There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great ride so far.
we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.