Q&A with Chris Osborne, Founder, FeedZa
Bangkok, Thailand-based FeedZa (www.feedza.com) is a brand new public online RSS reader that pulls in snippets of feeds from blogs and web sites approved for quality by human editors. Users are able to find new content by browsing through snippets of feeds that are in its network, vote on the feeds they find interesting and view the most popular feeds of the day, which are decided by the FeedZa community.
SUB: What is the site’s primary value proposition?
Chris Osborne: FeedZa is a community-driven RSS feed reader. Users are able to discover new content and new sites and blogs that have RSS enabled using a very easy to use interface. Users are also able to join in with the community by voting and commenting on individual feeds.
SUB: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?
Chris Osborne: We started working on the technology side of FeedZa in May 2008. FeedZa came about due to wanting to create a really easy to use platform that would allow a community to organize the best content bloggers were writing.
SUB: Who do you see as your competition?
Chris Osborne: Blogged.com, which pulls content in via RSS feeds and then categorizes them which is what we do. However they don’t have the social voting elements. Regator.com is another.
SUB: How is FeedZa differentiated from, say, Technorati with its “Authority” feature?
Chris Osborne: There are many ways that FeedZa is different from Technorati. The most obvious is that we solely concentrate on individual blog posts rather than the whole domain.
SUB: Can you describe the underlying technology behind the site, and how the site works for users?
Chris Osborne: Sure. When a member of our quality control team comes across a blog with great, unique, interesting content, we add their feed to an appropriate category on FeedZa. Every 25 minutes our site checks all of the feeds in our network for updates and displays the new content in the most appropriate category. Users can browse through thousands of recently written entries and vote and/or comment on the feeds they find interesting.
Under each category we have two tabs. The first is “New Feeds,” which ensures that bloggers writing great content get the exposure they deserve, while the second tab displays the most popular feeds, which are decided on by the FeedZa community.
As for the underlying technology, the site was written in-house with PHP, java script and AJAX.
SUB: What were some of the technical problems you encountered in creating FeedZa, and how did you overcome those?
Chris Osborne: Our lead developer had the technology side of the business wrapped up within a few weeks. We experienced far more problems with the front end design than the underlying technology. Our vision from day one was to build a platform that anyone could use, from a non internet-savvy user to someone that operates their own blog and understands what an RSS feed is.
SUB: How many employees do you have currently?
Chris Osborne: We have 5 full time employees at the moment.
SUB: Have you raised any outside funding to this point?
Chris Osborne: The project has been self-funded so far.
SUB: Are you going to be seeking funding, either through angels or VCs in the near future?
Chris Osborne: We have been in touch with a few angel investors and we have come to the conclusion that we would see how the project pans out over the next few months, especially as we’ll be launching many additional features that will really improve both the end user’s experience and also give bloggers more control over their feeds and interactively within the site.
SUB: Finally, what is your revenue model? How do you plan to make money?
Chris Osborne: We are only in our second week of operation, so we have put the revenue model on the back seat while we put all of our energy into making FeedZa what I strongly believe it will become. With that said, we of course do have a revenue model in mind; it’s just that we are not building that right now.
Chris Osborne, founder of FeedZa, worked previously at a telephony company in London managing web-based clients. After 5 years of tweaking and playing around with web sites, he decided to move on and took a year out traveling around Asia. Chris decided to make Bangkok his permanent residence 3 years ago, and opened up an office to manage his portfolio of web sites (mainly affiliate marketing). Earlier this year, decided to put the affiliate marketing projects aside so that he could build a web site that would be of real value.
