Snapsort raises $ 500 K to expand its product recommendation engine

Alexia Tsotsis currently works at TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She majored in writing and art, moved to New York shortly after the end of the work in the entertainment industry and media. After four years of his life in New York and to attend courses in New York. ? Read More

Snapsort, until today, the famous site of the popular camera recommendations was raised $ 500 K from undisclosed investors to extend its technology recommendations algorithmic product in other verticals, ranging from cars to Carsort.com and phones at Geekaphone.com.

Snapsort co-founder Christopher Reid compares technology for the actual Snapsort and Metaweb, but tells me that it is much cleaner than the former and richer than later. Snapsort.com, formerly in stealth mode, has more than 5 million monthly pageviews, with a time of 4 minutes average site and average 10% for us visitors according to Reid. His team in the year to build the show Reed and three persons.

Snapsort, Carsort and Geekaphone scrape data daily from sources, including retailers, manufacturers and final reviews. On the site Snapsort you can find products based on drill down criteria like price, model, and through a user-friendly interface.

"We are more like friendly knowledgable geek differentiation of trust for all your gadget tips, less like a list of products on the Web site of Best Buy, you can not freaking", Reed explained, referring to Snapsort in human friendly ambitions.

The company plans on being in 20 verticals by the end of the year and has its sights on dominating the recommendation products for electronics, entertainment, travel and education of children. "We want to provide advice on all issues," Reid said.

Snapsort recommendation of instant and personalized camera is not available anywhere else. Compare, review, round up and learn about cameras in one place, all the cameras in any way you want to look at. ..

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Lean startup thinker Eric Ries: "don't be in a hurry to get big, be in a hurry to have a great product"

Eric Schonfeld is currently working on TechCrunch as co-author. He joined in 2007 and based in New York. Schonfeld oversees the editorial content of the site, selects and edits guest posts, conference program helps Disrupt and CrunchUps, produces some TCTV shows and daily wrote in a blog post. He is also the father of three. ? Read More

Each tech founder thinks he or she works lean startup. But what does this mean exactly? In a video interview above, Eric Ries, who coined the term Lean startup and is the author of upcoming book of the same name, explains his theory of learning by a small number of the first clients to enhance and improve your product before exposing it to a wider audience. "Don't be in a hurry to get big", he sums up the results at the end of our conversation, "to be in a hurry to have a great product."

RIES argues that the greatest advantage of the entrepreneur is their obscurity. If your first product sucks, at least not too many people will know about it. But this is the best time to make mistakes, provided that you learn from them, to make the product better. "It is inevitable that the first product is going to be bad in a sense," he said. Lean startup methodology is to systematically test product ideas company.

Fail early and often. "Our goal is to learn as soon as possible," he says. He also claims that launches start their products quietly until they figure out what clients really want. We discuss how color could use these recommendations. RIES also gives me a crash course in some of the more popular Lean startup, terms such as "minimum viable product", "product market fit" or "construction measure know feedback loops."

But you can build lean run in bubble (if we still have one)? "This is even more important," he says, go meat, when each throwing money at "the success of the theatre and to demonstrate vanity metric. "Vanity metrics are the numbers that you want to post on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad," he says. Don't believe their own propaganda, or run your company on these metrics. Useful metrics that actually allow you to understand what drives your growth are much more important.

RIES of lean startups in writes startup lessons and will serve to break the SF.

Eric Ries is the author of the book, [Lean Startup] (http://theleanstartup.com). Previously, he was one of the founders and served as the Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of ...

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