Local news at your local site with Big Trust
A marketplace for trusted, high-privacy, content discovery
Jim Dyer Our founder.
www.Linkedin.com/in/jimdyer
Duties: find advisors, build a team.
Founded 5 companies, 4 in tech, 3 in recommendation tech.
A generalist – small business and nonprofit leader.
Content recommendation startups, 5 years
Respect for the engineering and politics of finding trusted information.
Elected to 4 nonprofit roles. North Calif board of global UN issues nonprofit, 11 years.
5 years, fulltime, as writer. (Started a history of animal and human psychology.)
BA from U.C. Berkeley
A generalist – small business and nonprofit leader
A listener – respect for the engineering and politics of finding trusted information
If we win deep trust, it gives us a barrier to entry. We will win the trust of site editors and site users. Then ask some of them to donate their time and trust us with very rich data.
Many sites have failed to get users to take surveys. Recommendation sites “watch over your shoulder” – they gather data with little or no user choice. There is talk of data sparsity – too little, too much noise based on family-sharing of movies, social media tools, hiding from each other, boredom, anger at being watched. (Such lists of grumbles and anger are famous now.)
We will seek to get more emotional trust than most – starting with being a partner to a site they know.
And will ask them to play a game, answer a short list of questions (is half a minute useful here?), and donate to making their “site community” wiser and more useful.
As a partner, we can pull on heartstrings, we can be a good and kind neighbor.
Rivals will have to convince users to give them more data, and this will take user time. There is a first mover possibility here – becoming the first source of trusted content on small sites gives us a chance to add switching costs (a known barrier to entry).
Site owners and site users will tell friends.
Some will share content, using our branded tools.
When users like us enough, they may want to add us to other sites. This could start a strong network effect. “Portable profiles” add switching costs to many existing rivals – some will need to talk each site and user into switching, which adds a lot of work. (“Portable” means - what a user tells us at one site, may be used to sort content at other sites, with user permission.)
User trust starts with winning trust from our first site partners. A first step is asking for editors’ data, and using that as a first basis for sorting.
Expert syndication and personalization are expensive, hard to brand, and used well by under half the giant media firms. And still fewer of the smaller media firms. Big media, especially big social media sites, often sell targeted ads – this is tech heavy, often uses dozens of support firms, and much sharing of user data.
We hope to recruit a top team.
A respected, wise and sweet goal helps us see each other with respect.
Our brand and our happy staff will help us grow.
A tough market, a valuable mission.
