Kyle
A few months ago on our first leg through Washington DC on the sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip, we got introduced to Artie Patel co-founder of DC startup Edorati. When we first met with Patel Edorati was a curated news magazine set up with a newspaper feel and interface. They’ve since pivoted from that, gunning to become your source for news.
Edorati integrates with your Facebook account so you can share what you’ve been reading with your Facbeook friends. They’ve also included a bookmarklet making it as easy as pinning on Pinterest to share a great news story. In fact we encourage you to go ahead and install Edorati onto your Facebook and share away, all the news and interviews from Nibletz.com.
We got a chance to interview Patel, who’s very excited about the new pivot that Edorati has taken and how they hope to become the number one destination for people to share news.
Check out our interview with Patel below.
What is Edorati?
Edorati is a social news sharing web app. It’s a wonderful way to share and discover news articles from the web. It also allows you to discover interesting articles read by the people that matter to you, your friends and family.
The concept is simple. Read an article on the web, click the Edorati button, and it gets uploaded to your Edorati page. This page is for your friends and family to see what you have been reading and think others should check out as well.
Edorati is about creating a dedicated reading experience for people. We are focused on sharing news articles and nothing else. We want to be one of the daily websites you check in the morning to get your news. Where all the news comes from people who approved of those articles, friends and family. You can invite friends to see what you have been reading or follow those whom you think read cool stuff.
Also, many of our users share handfuls of articles a day on Edorati while sharing none on twitter and fb. It’s been very interesting to see.
Who are the founders and what are your backgrounds?
Artie Patel and Alex Kehayias
Artie graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in Finance and Entrepreneurship. He worked on the trading side of Wall St for the first 2 years out of college before moving into the startup world.
Alex is a graduate from Pace University with a degree is marketing. Alex worked as a product manager out of school helping to launch several products at Morgan Stanley and Comodo. He also made the shift to the startup community after a few years of being a product manager.
Together, Artie and Alex launched their first startup BeanSprout in late 2010. BeanSprout is a marketplace for channel partnerships in the technology industry. The goal was to connect technology vendors to new distribution sources more efficiently. The target user is a business development professional in search of new leads for partnership opportunities.
Since BeanSprout, they have launched several small projects including Tweetkey, Timeout Debate and GoalSay.
As of now, both are committed to Edorati. Alex is the lead web developer while Artie handles the customer development and marketing.
Where are you based?
Arlington, VA. Just across the river from DC
What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from previous startups that you were able to avoid with Edorati?
We have learned several. One is to not overbuild. When we had the idea for this, we could have drawn everything up and built everything according to our expectations. However, we learned from last time that it’s key to leverage user feedback into building. So our mvp was basically a bookmarklet that uploaded articles. Since, then we regularly speak to users about what works and what doesn’t and it has help mold the product that you currently see. Cliched I know but it’s vital when resources are thin and has made us more efficient.
Also, be careful with funding. With BeanSprout, we built and mvp and hit the road with speaking to investors. It’s important to have a decent amount of traction before you engage in talks for money. This doesn’t mean you can’t speak to an investor about feedback, just hold off talks about money until you have more of a story to tell
What is the problem Edorati solves?
Edorati solves the problem of information overload when it comes to finding compelling articles to read. In today’s world, we compete with conversations, pictures, videos, complaining, etc in our various social networks. When it comes to seeing what our friends are reading, it can be a real pain to sift through all the nonsense. So, we created a dedicated place to share news articles and have conversations around them.
What is your secret sauce?
The ease of use and our design. We have made it so easy to add articles and view other peoples articles on Edorati. Our design has always been a key winning point when it comes to speaking with users. We always hear something about how wonderful and easy it is to view content on Edorati.
I’m sure you already know that FlipBoard does a phenomenal job and that the boys behind YouTube are offering a similar product is there still space for Edorati?
Yea, I am aware of both but we feel there is space for us. We are focused on the human element of discovering content. All articles added on Edorati are done by an actual person and there still is no clear winner in doing that for articles.
What’s one challenge you’ve faced in launching Edorati?
Competing for people’s attention. There is so much innovation going and so many awesome new products for people to try right now. Getting someone’s attention just for a few minutes is a challenge because people are constantly getting new things thrown at them.
What’s next for Edorati?
Well, we just made a pivot. Edorati was about creating your own newspaper to share articles but we have moved on from that. We just launched the new version last week. The newspapers are gone and the focal point is about what you read. So for now, our focus is to learn from this latest release and move forward from there.
Linkage:
Check out how easy it is to share and find news with Edorati here
Nibletz has some great startup interviews from “everywhere else” here
We’re on a sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip here click this link
