Marc Köhlbrugge

BetaList - Discover tomorrow's startups, today.

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Ryan Hoover
Yo @marckohlbrugge! I appreciate anyone helping founders/product builders. Great work with Beta List! I know several investors follow Beta List (same as PH) hunting for promising startups. I'm curious if you are or have experimented by offering services or paid features for investors.
Marc Köhlbrugge
@desisaran Thanks for the kind words and retweeting :) @rrhoover Thanks Ryan. You're reading my mind. Seriously you are. Every week or so I see you mentioning something that's in my Trello board haha. – Plan is to provide a newsletter just for investors for $xxx/mo with the most promising startups, including in-depth interviews + some magic sauce that I'm keeping secret for now ;) @_ryangilbert Great to hear that. Thanks!
Marc Köhlbrugge
Some of the startups we featured before they launched and made it big include Pinterest, IFTTT and Mailbox. There are some similarties to Product Hunt except that we focus on pre-launch startups only and all startups are submitted by the founders themselves. This means we're often truly the first to cover a startup, before any other site. Would love your comments. Happy to answer any questions. I also just wrote this Medium article how about I started BetaList: How I tricked TechCrunch into writing about my startup http://btl.st/1nMBJsK
Marc Köhlbrugge
@rrhoover When you say curating do you mean the startups to include, or the investors? Choosing the right startups involves some manual labor combined with traction data we'll start measuring at some point. I have no plans to filter the investor side yet (except for the paywall) and will have the startup founders do their own vetting. (At some point perhaps with a TheFunded-like anonymous feedback system)
Ryan Gilbert
@marckohlbrugge BetaList is one of the few sites I check every morning :) Also love your story for getting TechCrunch to write about you.
Lily O
This is fun place to look for new products and service!!
Brenden Mulligan
Any info to share on numbers? How big is your community? Etc..
Desi Saran
@marckohlbrugge very cool this is more of a blog then, correct?
Marc Köhlbrugge
@mulligan At the moment our core functionality is available without the need to register, so it's hard to quantify our true community. That said we have over 16,000 registered users and over 12,000 submitted startups (99% of them submitted by the founders), but we've only published close to 4,000 of them. 4,000 still need to be reviewed and the other 4,000 didn't meet our standards (e.g. already live) or were duplicates. @desisaran Interactivity on the website is currently limited, yes. We're different from a blog however in that all startups are submitted by the founders themselves. Practically that doesn't mean much yet, but it enables us to do a ton of fun stuff in the future. (Founder AMA's like here on PH is one example, but we've got a lot more in the pipeline.)
Desi Saran
@marckohlbrugge very cool, and awesome story, I just retweeted your Medium post! Between Product Hunt and Beta List, you guys are going to consume hours of my day :)!
Ryan Hoover
Haha, that's funny, @marckohlbrugge. I'm very curious to hear how it's received and how you're curating the list. One of the challenges is that as the list grows, the value decreases.
Yonz
@marckohlbrugge Love the idea but dropped off after seeing the twitter permissions the product demands. Why do you need that much Twitter access?
Marc Köhlbrugge
@yonz Fair question! We initially required write-access, because some the website functionality needed it. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't developers select which exact permissions they need, so we had to ask for all those different permissions. These days though, we've removed most of this write-access functionality and so there isn't a good reason to still request. We're in the process of adding regular email/password accounts. If you want to submit your startup to BetaList right now I suggest just connecting with Twitter (we don't do anything nefarious) and disconnect afterwards.