Rushline

@chrismessina regarding target audience, ultimately I believe it's a mass communication tool. Early on, we're targeting a small number of demographic/use case pairings, startup and product management topics being one. User comprehension was one of the biggest challenges of our beta. We found Rushline challenges deeply held expectations of privacy and how conversations work. We did finally get through, keying off the ability to follow other people's private conversations. Here's a video mashup of the user comprehension during final message testing (audio required). Not production grade, my apologies, just something I put together for the team. http://bit.ly/2eFxTBx Regarding comfort level, there was a split of enthusiasm and apprehension. Apprehension was generally overcome through a successful experience.

@bydanm great answer — and thanks for the video. That's awesome transparency — totally on brand! :)

@chrismessina you're welcome. Thanks for the great question, you zeroed right in on it!

EDIT - @bentossell, TL;DR to make up for my book below. Two things: 1. Different purposes and core functionality. We believe private/public conversations are to Rushline what Page Rank was to Google, or disappearing photos were to Snapchat. 2. Our experience in the knowledge sharing space, which will be useful in bringing a new behavior online. --------------------------------- @bentossell We've watched Talkshow and Talkk from afar, as we've spent the last 2.5 years working on and testing our platform. I believe Rushline has fundamental differences in both purpose and value relative to either, and these differences are what make Rushline valuable to users. Regarding purpose, Rushline is deliberately dedicated to knowledge sharing through shared interest conversations among friends, and is based on deep understanding in knowledge sharing systems. Over the 12 years I ran ITtoolbox and since, one of the things I learned is most people prefer to seek and share insights among trusted friends rather than strangers. The primary reasons are because conversations among friends are trusted, safe, and private. People don't want the reputation risk inherent with openly sharing views online. Central to how Rushline works is a patented method for allowing people to have conversations among their friends, while making those conversations anonymous available to the public. This creates the level of safety and privacy necessary to make Rushline work. While people prefer to have these conversations among their friends for the reasons above, they also universally recognize the best insights might have come from people they don't know, which is the reason why having them in public is of value to them. We have many other features unique to Rushline that focus on safely bringing high quality insights into these private conversations to unlock this value. These features alone won't make Rushline succeed. Ultimately, I see the biggest challenge in front of us for the next 18-24 months will be onboarding people to a new behavior, taking conversations they already have inefficiently offline or through a mixture of various tools, and having them efficiently on Rushline with substantial added value for doing so. This will be a gradual process not unlike what we experienced when I first started working on ITtoolbox in 1997. Back then people couldn't understand why anyone would ever post or answer questions among strangers online. We methodically found ways to reveal this value to users, and through Rushline's beta testing, we've seen signs pointing us in the direction of how we'll go about doing this same thing with this platform.