Tag: startup

Apathetic Visitors are Death to Early Stage Startups

Human Capital Trumps Monthly Visits

Startup founders and early stage investors are blinded by explosive user growth numbers (user attention). To be honest I can think of little else at this pre-traction stage of Victus Media. Although I know there’s much more that needs to happen after the first signs of user adoption, without it the project is dead in the water. User excitement, utility, and retention are all factors that drive growth rate. The mistake we make as founders and investors is boiling down human capital to a few coarse metrics.

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Semantic bots that learn what you like

Imagine the information you publicly shared was crawled by more than search engines. A new type of information gathering bot is about to begin accessing your twitter streams. At Victus Media we’re experimenting with semantic extracted tags that accurately capture the essence of status updates. So far the relevancy in our personal tests is accurate over half the time, and needs minor adjustments for many of the mismatches. But we’re at a design impass on the Intelligent Media Manager, as there are many development paths which lead to improved performance. One long term goal is to construct personalized search assistants tuned to each user. What we work on next will highly be a function of what users find most appealing to fascilatate our longer term development path. (more…)