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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.
There is generally great conversation, but I cringe every time I see a question like "What is a function?" or something equally inane.
Market. Validation.
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.
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.
A quick anecdote from a recent experience I had with the company I recently started working with - we produce http://www.postmarkapp.com.
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 http://www.beanstalkapp.com - 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.
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.
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 entire market to be successful.
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.
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 our market.
Great ideas don't make great businesses - great markets make great businesses. Amazon saw what we'd already seen, and validated it.
There's 4 ways to enter a market and win.
1) First 2) Best 3) Cheapest 4) Luckiest
If you can't be one, you've always got the other 3 to try out.
It's not a winner-take-all market — in fact cozy separate spaces could be preferred.
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).
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. 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 :)…
looks really awesome. keep going.
You should allow URLs to be converted to links, and eventually similarly with images and videos. This could be really, really sweet.
In the scope of your story, I have two words that come to mind: Market. Validation. 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. 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…
also:
5) Ruthless-est
For example, I'd argue Microsoft was a combo of 1, 4 and 5, and perhaps 3 -- with respect to OS's. But definitely 4 (the IBM/MS-DOS thing) and 5. In contrast, Apple's goal has been 2. Google was clearly not 1 with respect to web search, instead, 2.
Just tried this, tweeted about it, and the interface crashed... looks really awesome. keep going.