Social media management app Postling has achieved a measure of startup success, rethinking its user base and closing a $350,000 angel round, all within just a few months.
A member of Philadelphia-based accelerator DreamIt Venture’s fall 2009 class, Postling helps small businesses navigate the social web and manage their brands’ presence online. The product is a simple-to-use, all-in-one dashboard that rounds up the usual APIs. Users can even manage multiple brands from one account.
The company soon plans to add a real-time tracking feature, according to Co-founder Dave Lifson. “We’ve done a partnership with Collecta where local businesses will look at search terms and see any mention of those results in social media, blogs, mainstream media… we’re tying together the results to create a steady stream, and with a single click of a button, you can tweet it, comment on it, reblog it. It’s an amazing curation engine. No one is doing anything like this.”
Lifson also revealed that one week later, Postling will launch an RSS feed reader, a homegrown product they’ve built along the same lines and with the same featues using using XMPP . “We want to solve problems for people we really care about – small businesses,” Lifson said. “The number one thing they want is to know what people are saying about them online right away.”
In addition to real-time technologies, Postling hopes to integrate geolocation data — increasingly vital to small and local businesses — in the near future.
The differentiating factor between Postling and its competitors is that, instead of peddling their wares to marketing agencies, the Postling team has recently decided to cut out the middleman and give the product directly to small businesses who wish to take control of their own social media marketing. This decision, said Lifson, is a large part of what helped them get the funding they needed — and get it quickly.
Funding via AngelList
Hot on the heels of a $150K friends and family round earlier this year, the team became the second-ever startup to be funded by
AngelList, a VentureHacks-founded team of investors that also found funding for a Y Combinator stealth-mode team a few weeks ago.
Here’s how AngelList works: Startups fill out applications; if one makes the cut, the application is circulated among the angel investors involved, and e-mail introductions are made between interested parties. In the case of Postling, several introductions were also made at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin last month. The result was a cool $200,000 round of funding secured in a few meetings held over the course of six days.
The all-star team of investors for this round include Dave McClure, who invested in Mint (
).com; Chris Yeh, who invested in PBWorks; Paige Craig, who invested in Plancast; David Rose, who invested in Gowalla (); and Gary Vaynerchuk, who founded Wine Library TV.
So, how did they do it? With a team that included two Etsy co-founders, the company’s personnel foundation was solid. The product was marketed on a freemium basis, which means Postling had a revenue stream out of the gate — something investors generally like to hear.
And when the team realized they were competing in a crowded space, they gave their product a different spin — working with small businesses rather than ad agencies — to ensure Postling would stand out in the market
by Gordon Green
March 19th, 2010
AUSTIN, Texas–Twitter CEO Evan Williams took no time in getting to the juicy part of his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Monday afternoon. He announced the “@Anywhere” platform, a way to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.
A brief demo of @Anywhere showed off “hovercards” that bring up Twitter information with a mouse-over, let readers or users connect with their Twitter accounts much like Facebook Connect, or explore more specific possibilities, like instantly following a newspaper columnist’s Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline.
The placeholder Twitter account ‘@anywhere.’
“Discovery is one of the hardest challenges,” Williams said. “It’s putting these in context where you’re already aware of them…Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.” The company has 13 launch partners, including Digg, The New York Times, MSNBC.com, eBay, Amazon, and Bing. As Williams describes it, “it’s not an ad platform, it’s an ‘@’ platform,” referring to the syntax of using the ‘@’ symbol to denote communication between individual Twitter users.
While Williams was still speaking, a post went live on the Twitter blog about @Anywhere, describing the technology as “a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the Web.
Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com.” Indeed, a philosophy similar to Facebook Connect.
Williams was interviewed onstage by Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, in what was arguably the most highly anticipated event of the SXSWi lineup. A massive event hall at the Austin Convention Center was filled to capacity, with a line snaking through the hallways half an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin.
It was a quick demonstration. And the Twitter CEO was sketchy about the details of how @Anywhere will make money, though there are some guesses that big partners will have to pay up for access to the “firehose,” much like its search deals with Twitter and Bing that were announced late last year. Williams described those as “a couple of the first guys that we shared our full stream of public Twitter data with.”
There are 50 million Twitter “tweets” posted every day, Williams said.
“Inevitably, it’s going to take experimentation,” Williams said of how the business side of @Anywhere will evolve. “Google started out thinking that they were going to sell search services.”
A report circulated last month that Twitter was gearing up to launch an ad platform in conjunction with SXSWi, stemming from comments that the company’s head of product management made in a conference panel. Company executives had heretofore been ambivalent as to whether they would start rolling out ads any time soon–or ever.
SXSWi is more or less Twitter’s birthplace: the company made its debut there in 2007, and became an instant sensation with the early-adopter geek crowd. It took about two more years before it could be deemed a legitimate, mainstream sensation, but SXSWi is its home turf.
Williams says that @Anywhere taps into Twitter’s deepest values of openness and transparency. “A window is transparent, but a door is open,” he said. “A door lets people come in and mess with what you’re doing.”
From the start, Twitter has had an extensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that have led to a colorful array of third-party developer apps. “Openness is really a survivor technique,” Williams said. “It’s being open to the idea that you are wrong, and that other people probably have some good ideas.”
