A little insider info on Conversationlist. »

Long time readers of this blog (all two of you) might remember this post where I mentioned a simple questionnaire I like to fill out for each project I'm working on...well like anything it's evolved a little over time, but I still use a basic version of it for any personal project I'm thinking about taking seriously.

As such, I've started filling it out for each of the wow.ly projects...and once again I figured, why not share this with you. So here's the first one which covers the first wow.ly project we released - conversationlist.com

Conversationlist

What it offers:

Daily built Twitter list of the people you are talking to or about on Twitter.

What makes it unique:

Dynamic, focused, and simple (set-and-forget).

Emotional tie to client:

Focused around the user's own actions and interests (ie. people who have their attention).

Why and who should purchase:

Any Twitter user that wants to share a list of the people they are talking to and about

Where to find prospects:

Twitter.com, oneforty.com, and various comment threads where Conversationlist or it's competition is being mentioned.

How to sell:

Viral by nature (name of list is always conversationlist and description gives link to site).

Cost to reach 100X required customers:

n/a

Expected conversion rate:

n/a

How much it costs:

free.

How many clients are needed to make 100k (or break even):

n/a.

Estimated time to reach 100k:

n/a.

Resources needed:

Server to host site and code to rebuild lists.

Existing competition:

http://favstar.fm and http://twittfilter.com

Current Subscribers:

About 6,276 at the time of writing this post

Current Income:

$0.00

Current Resources:

n/a.

Other Notes:

Because of adoption of this application, we are able to build out our own social graph showing who people are really talking to and about (which may help present a revenue stream).

Next 3 Steps:

1. Start logging more complete social graph of who's really talking to each other.

2. Release API to allow develoeprs to access this new social graph.

3. Build front end report for users to see their own version of this social graph on-demand.

Estimated time to complete 3 steps:

1 week.

So as you can see, there's no direct revenue stream on this project right now...and that probably makes a lot of sense since Whitney and I really just threw it together as an interesting Twitter hack to start and weren't initially thinking about it with any business objectives in mind.

We were lucky enough to have it generate some buzz (thanks to tweets by some very influential people like @fredwilson and @ev and some press on Techcrunch) and our user number has been steadily growing ever since.

And what's probably most interesting to me right now is that, thanks to this continued growth, we now have this new social graph data/idea to play with (something that's a true side-effect of the project and hadn't ever really occurred to us as something to build towards)...again not sure if it will reveal any sort of a revenue stream or not, but it should help to continue to generate buzz and add to our overall data collection (and maybe even help get some other developers to buy-in and rely on us sticking around)...and to me, that's the kind of loss-leader worth having (especially when the 'loss' is really just some cheap server cycles!)

But what are your thoughts on all this? Would you answer any of the above questionnaire differently? See any gaps in my thinking or directions that you think are leading me down the wrong path?