Kyle
A new Boston area startup called Wizgig launched in March offering the wisdom of both experts and the crowd. The caveat, all of the wisdom comes in 150 characters or less. It’s like Twitter for wisdom with 10 more characters.
Wizgig co-founders Matt Murphy and Mark Boswell feel that by limiting the advice tips to 150 characters users will get right to the point, without the clutter. We’ve all been there, reading three and four page expert advice columns and finding that the meat and potatoes is no more than a few sentences.
The trick is going to see if the tips can be in intelligent, easy to understand language. We’re even guilty of shrinking some of our tweets down to hash tags, and internet lingo.
Here’s an example of a Wizgig tip, this one is on interviewing:
Prepare beforehand and research the company, the people, the culture, etc. Be prepared to match your skills and background to the company’s needs.
Here’s another on quitting smoking:
When you do your spring cleaning, make sure to get rid of all the ashtrays so they don’t remind you of smoking.
All of the topics are laid out in a nice looking design and easy to navigate. With 150 characters or less you can view many tips at the same time. This is what the teaching category looks like.
Although I tend to be modest about it, I often speak as a “twitter expert” at conventions and conferences. I think my use of Twitter since the very beginning is why I was so intrigued with Murphy’s pitch to nibletz. I got a chance to talk to Murphy about starting up Wizgig.
Check out the interview, after the break
What is Wizgig?
Wizgig is a community driven quick tips site. People come to Wizgig to read, add and debate tips on a growing variety of topics. Right now some of our more active topics include interviewing tips, energy saving tips and hangover tips. It really varies but that’s because we’re trying to develop a comprehensive database of tips that people can reference when they need to, and quickly. Almost like a Wikipedia of ranked tip Tweets.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
We are two software developers from the Boston area with significant web development experience. My name is Matt Murphy and I do mostly front end work. The other cofounder’s name is Mark Boswell and he’s mostly server/database tackling high-availability problems, although we share a lot of the codebase and other duties. Together we have over twenty years of software development experience delivering complex and scalable solutions.
Where are you located?
We’re based out of the Boston metro area.
What is the problem Wizgig solves?
Right now scattered throughout the web is a ton of really great and useful information. Wizgig aims to solve the problem of where to go when you want quick, comprehensive tips and information on topics that you would not otherwise easily find in one place.
Who is your target user?
Because of the growing variety of topics we don’t have a specific target user beyond basic demographics such as English speaking and some web sophistication. We currently have both a desktop and mobile version of the site which has helped to expand our reach.
What is your secret sauce?
A combination of persistence, belief in our idea and a steady stream of iterating based on feedback.
Is 150 characters long enough to answer important questions, it’s only 10 characters longer than a tweet?
So far we’re finding that most tips can be whittled down to 150 characters and still communicate the main point. One of the founding points to Wizgig was that the tips would be quick to read and yet useful at the same time. We find 150 characters strikes a good balance between effectively communicating a tip and being able to read it quickly for digestion.
Admittedly modest. We’ve been working hard to improve our rankings in search engines but that takes some time. In the meantime we’ve been using advertising to attract new users.
Nailing down the details of an idea can take some time. We’ve had to refine our message numerous times as well as redesign the user experience to fit changes to our idea. This takes time and persistence.
Linkage:
Check out Wizgig and find the knowledge in 150 characters or less here
Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else, check out these new stories here
