Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

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eHub Interviews TailRank

Thanks to Kevin Burton, creator of TailRank for this email interview posted April 7, 2006.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

TailRank: TailRank is a memetracker which reads blogs “so you don’t have to.” Essentially we find the hottest news stories among the top 50k blogs and present them in an easy to use interface.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

TailRank: The number of information sources I had to monitor kept growing.  The amount of news I had to filter on a daily basis became overwhelming and I wanted a Web 2.0 app that could do it for me.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

TailRank: I’ve been working on TailRank full-time (including nights and weekends) for 3 months now. TailRank is my full-time job.  I’m currently stretched between both my CEO and engineering roles right now but it’s been fun.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

TailRank: We’re a small and virtual team.  I’m the lead engineer and CEO.  We have an awesome advisory board helping us and we’re in the process of bringing on 2-3 new engineers shortly.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

TailRank: Release early release often.  I’m a poor designer but I find that the feedback from our user community has been invaluable.  We try to listen to our customers as much as possible and push about two releases of TailRank a week.

So far this has worked amazingly well and TailRank just keeps growing and growing.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

TailRank: We’re a Linux, Java, Apache, and MySQL shop.  The software stack we’re using is designed to scale so we should be able handle a lot of traffic here moving forward.

eHub: What are the most requested features from your users/community?

TailRank: Mostly user interface changes. More whitespace, changes to layout, etc.  We’ll be trying push out more personalization features and better result relevance here soon.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

TailRank: I’d say about 80% but around 20% of our community comes from Europe.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

TailRank: Six months right now is a long way off.  In that timeframe I think scalability will be a big concern.  My goal is to have TailRank very successful around that time so we should have a non-trivial amount of page views.

I’m mostly heads down working on our 1.0.  I’m trying to shoot for the March timeframe.  I don’t want to give everything away right now but we have some cool stuff we’re working on.

Stay tuned ..

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

TailRank: Our own execution.  I think a lot of companies try to worry too much about Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft coming in and crushing you.  The truth is that all you have to do is build a good product.  We’re just trying to build a really amazing product that will make our customers happy.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

TailRank: Tighten up the UI and have better recomendations than our competitors.  We’re going to be working hard to have provably superior results to all our competitors in the space.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

TailRank: Super sekret!

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

TailRank: We try not to disclose our traffic information.  My recommendation is to check out Alexa.

Compare TailRank’s traffic to that of our competitors.  We’ve had shockingly amazing growth in only 3 months time.  Most of our competitors took 1.5 years to reach our size.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

TailRank: The scalability of our product and our time to market.  A lot of companies stumble and create a product that can’t be used by more than 10 people or take seed money and reach the market in 2 years.  Luckily we’ve avoided these problems.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

TailRank: It’s like the singularity only really really really slow ... but with Ajax.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

TailRank: BoingBoing, Vsocial, Technorati, gigaom.com, scripting.com

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

TailRank: Sleep?  What’s that?

Honestly I’m thinking of migrating to the uberman sleep schedule.

Thanks to Kevin Burton, creator of TailRank for this email interview posted April 7, 2006.

Visit TailRank
Originally added to eHub on Feb 04, 06

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eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan