Elevator Pitch
Listaurus is a collection of Top X themed lists.
Concept
Searching the web for the keywords “minimalist site design” yields Top X lists for the first 5 results… I wanted to aggregate these lists in the one place and present them for easy consumption.
I didn’t want to spend too much time on building a site – since I was working on something else at the time – but I did want to save these lists somewhere. Why not bookmarks? Possible – in fact, I built a site for searching over the content of your bookmarks. I didn’t go the bookmark route as I wanted to include content that wasn’t necessarily my taste.
Research
Sure – just do another search for the keywords “Top 10 Lists”… The research wasn’t very re-assuring. I could’ve gone the list creation route like Listverse, who probably do very well, but that wasn’t the idea. I wanted to bookmark lists – but on a site which could be shared.
Outcome
Let’s firstly talk about the tech: Listaurus is WordPress. That’s right, wordpress turned out to be the ideal technology for the site (I launched Listaurus in 3 days). I also used Yahoo Pipes for collating the data and a bunch of WordPress plugins to help me publish the lists.
My biggest problem was the list data. I didn’t want to go out and search for it – I wanted it to come to me. And it does. I use Yahoo Pipes to collect the data from multiple sources, parse out the non list data, and pipe it directly me. I collect it, massage it, find an image for the it and publish it. :) Easy!
Monetization
Google Ads fitted directly in the sidebar, and WOW, did they look good. In fact I even started making a little bit of money having them on the site – until my wife clicked on the Ads thinking she was helping. The rest is history. No more Google Ads! :(
Lessons
There are a couple of lessons to learn from my experiences with, as I call it, this “mainstream” app.
1. Explain to your family, that under no circumstances should they click on your site’s ads. They’re not helping.
2. Don’t burn out. I found that I was trying to post too many lists a day. It’s a simple process but it’s time consuming and it burnt me out. Make sure the work load is something you can handle – especially when it’s repetitive.
Again?
It was thought of on monday, soft launched on wednesday and seen by you today. Of course I’d do it again.
You can check out listaurus at http://www.listaurus.com