Convore vs Banterly - Beaten to the punch

Look at what makes you different. The twitter integration is brilliant, it means you can have much faster, realtime conversations bouncing off twitter. That's your angle.<p>Make the 'Share on Twitter' button more... meaningful. What it really does is open up a chat room for all your twitter followers to join. I don't want to 'Share' it, I want to open my chatroom up to the world on twitter. Not sure how to word that :)<p>Can you imagine celebrities getting on board with this? It's perfect. 50 Cent would love this, celebs of that ilk on twitter already spend much of their time bantering with fans and this allows them to do it faster. You just need ONE of those twitter celebs to tweet a link to their chatroom and you've got yourself 10,000 new users.<p>It's twitpic for chatrooms.<p>Promote it to celebrity tweeps, hard.

The culture/community of your product is as important as the tech. Myspace held out for a very long time because, for a while, their product was focused on a different set of users than Facebook. Convore -- right now -- attracts a lot of programmers, designers, startup junkies and other tech folks. There is plenty of room and the market is far from decided: 14 y/o girls (not kidding), moms, music fans, sports followers or whoever else.<p>There are also a lot of really good ideas that you can apply this technology toward. To me, the most uninspired way to attack this space is to try to make your site a one-stop portal for chat. There are a lot more possibilities if you can bring the chat to other destinations, or allow people to integrate chats with their sites.<p>You should be aware that being in the startup universe tends to make your worldview myopic. You're hyperfocused on the hundreds of users Convore might have and right now that looks like they are miles ahead. Zoom out for a minute and realize that there are millions of users to be won before this game is decided. You are both still at the very <i>very</i> early part of the curve.

Keep going, nothing has changed. A startup beat you to the punch, not a multinational behemoth (e.g., Google obsoleting Kiko). You both have zero revenue and face the same challenges. A million things could still go wrong for both of you.<p>They got some good press so you're going to quit? Whatever motivated you to start still applies.

Why the hell would you want to stop your project over the miniscule adversity of a pseudosimilar, vaguely-defined and -implemented platform that hasn't even gained traction yet?<p>If that's enough to make anyone quit a project, I don't think the startup scene is for that person.<p>For what it's worth, your project looks a lot more interesting. (Aside from the Flash.)

Definitely continue developing! I believe this space is wide open. With the death of Google Wave, I've been looking for good, free, persistent chat. Something like Campfire, TalkerApp, and others. I think XMPP integration, a nice API and embeddable content would be good things to work on.

In the scope of your story, I have two words that come to mind:<p>Market. Validation.<p>Building something revolutionary and brand new is a long, painful path of combatting misunderstanding and selling people on something they don't even know they need yet.<p>Regardless of who else they see in the market, now you've got something you didn't have before: a known market, and the validation that someone else saw value in that market as well. Let them do the hard work of teaching people why this solution is needed - and then come in with your distinct vision and value to show the people that are now looking that you're an option they should consider.<p>A quick anecdote from a recent experience I had with the company I recently started working with - we produce <a href="http://www.postmarkapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.postmarkapp.com</a>.<p>I've been friends with the founders for a long time and know their vision and capabilities for building a great company very well. But unlike our other product <a href="http://www.beanstalkapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.beanstalkapp.com</a> - Postmark laid in a relatively new marketplace. The challenge wasn't getting people to use our product, it was getting them to realize why they needed our product in the first place. That's a high barrier to climb, and the team was already doing a remarkable job before I joined.<p>3 weeks into my first month, another little company - you might have heard of them, they're called "Amazon.com" - introduced a "competing" service to Postmark. Now THATs about a monday morning.<p>Much of the internet, including some folks on HN, predicted our demise. But the more we taked about it, the more excited we got. Amazon just entered the market we were looking to serve. We know that our style of serving our customers fundamentally differs from AWS, so we'd compete on that edge. Markets are big, and diverse. You don't need the <i>entire</i> market to be successful.<p>And Amazon had just opened the door for many of our potential customers that don't fit their market to discover us instead, without us having to do anything new.<p>Conversations with customers in the last month have confirmed this. The very things that had us wondering "what does this mean" on day one of the SES launch have helped us hone our focus on how we serve <i>our</i> market.<p>Great ideas don't make great businesses - great markets make great businesses. Amazon saw what we'd already seen, and validated it.<p>There's 4 ways to enter a market and win.<p>1) First 2) Best 3) Cheapest 4) Luckiest<p>If you can't be one, you've always got the other 3 to try out.

Building a business isn't about 'a punch'. It's about hard work, day after day for a long time.<p>Convore has got a nice UI, they haven't really got traction yet, and there's space for <i>tons</i> of chat like services. They're nothing new, they've been about for decades and they'll be around for decades yet.<p>Right now Convore have something like 200 users online. That's not unachievable by any means...<p>Keep going and listen to your users.

The people who will ultimately make such a service successful haven't heard of either of you yet.<p>It's not a winner-take-all market — in fact cozy separate spaces could be preferred.<p>So: full speed ahead. Perhaps keep an eye on each other for novel discoveries of user-pleasing features, perhaps shade your marketing towards users/regions the others haven't yet emphasized (so there remains the chance you find an adoption-gusher first).

I like the concept of Convore -- if it were an internal product, or a product I could run within my own firewalls, I think it'd make a brilliant enterprise tool.<p>What I dislike about Convore is the same thing I dislike about Quora, Digg, et al., in that it caters to far too large a population.<p>There is generally great conversation, but I cringe every time I see a question like "What is a function?" or something equally inane.

Not sure if this is due to the sudden traffic spike, but discussion pages keep on reloading. It is near impossible to post comments before the page refreshes.

If I were in your shoes I would Ignore the echo chamber, listen to your customers, find a unique market niche and go really fast.

You know, at first blush I would want to throw in the towel as well, but on second thought you really might consider making a proper go of it. The idea has now been validated by a lot of smart people, and frankly you've got a solid MVP going. I'm leaning toward the general sentiment of comments on here. :)

FWIW I like your name better :)

You should allow URLs to be converted to links, and eventually similarly with images and videos. This could be really, really sweet.

Just tried this, tweeted about it, and the interface crashed...<p>looks really awesome. keep going.

Build a team beyond yourself and forge ahead.