Need Advice for my Startup - Listolia
Manish Sahajwani
6 replies
I started building Listolia (https://listolia.com) a couple of months back as a curation platform where people could easily create lists on any topic of their choice. In lists, people could curate products, books, articles, or anything. Lists could be private lists if they are researching some things for themselves. They could also create public lists which could benefit everyone.
However, with time, and based on some feedback I've received, I've begun to think that it may not fly unless we ourself seed it with lots and lots of content. Even then, it will look and work more and more like a publication with lots of list-type content rather than a community platform.
Also, some people expressed interest in making it more useful as a tool for personal organization of their knowledge and content as they browse through the web. This sounds something interesting.
I've kind of gone in a loop in my mind about what direction I should take. I definitely think there is potential, and early pivoting can help roll this in a good direction.
I'm seeking help of the community here to help me with validating this idea and get feedback on how to make it more purposeful/useful for people.
Replies
Monil Shah@monil_shah2
Thanks for your post, and for being so open to feedback!
An initial look at Listolia definitely makes me curious. Here's how my naive mind sees it:
1) A place where influencers (eg: Tim Ferris) could write his top 5 favorite leadership books (for example).
2) A platform for anyone to create an account for making private lists for groceries, etc.
Question to think about for both scenarios ->
why would any influencer/anyone choose Listolia as opposed to let's say, Twitter or a normal notes app? Listolia seems to have great organization, whereas for Twitter I need to drill down to find a thread where Tim recommends his best books.
Hope this helps!
Feel free to check us out too, if you're looking for some journey visualizations for listolia.com!
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@monil_shah2 Thanks for your feedback. Yes, it's a big question about why an influencer will choose Listolia. For the second part about private lists, I was thinking more on the lines of private lists of articles, resources, etc for research purpose or for some planning etc. How to get Tim to use Listolia to use organize his research for his books, talks, etc. Or may be he wants to share references around his book with his audience. What do you think?
Are you measuring your retention figures? If you do have users who do come back regularly, what makes them come back?
The site looks pretty interesting, but initially when I hit the first page, it was a bit overwhelming and I didn't what to look for. Only later did I notice that it was possible to sign up. Have you tried making the first page like a traditional landing page that explains what the site is about, to encourage users to register?
You can have a look to how Missinglettr is monetising curation list as a source of inspiration.