Real-time assistants for Twitter
Do you find yourself overwhelmed by Twitter and unsure of how to find the most relevant tweets that meet your interests? Today’s featured startup, Chirpsy, is a Seattle-based startup that can save you a significant amount of time and effort in keeping your Twitter stream up to date.
Chirpsy assists its customers by researching, writing, and sending them relevant, engaging, and original drafts of tweets that link to interesting articles, videos, blog posts, and breaking news. It's like a virtual Twitter assistant!
Chirpsy is real-time and human powered and asks that you approve and edit everything before it is posted. It is the only 24x7 crowdsourced content curation that helps businesses keep their Twitter account relevant.
Learn more about how Chirpsy can help your Twitter stay up to date with relevant content while keeping you in control from Isaac Nichols, Founder & CEO.
What inspired you to start your company?
We needed help maintaining our Twitter account. My previous startup was a crowdsourcing consulting company and we frequently gained sales leads when we updated our Twitter status with the latest crowdsourcing news and trends. However, we struggled with keeping our Twitter status updated as often as we wanted, especially given the short shelf life of the content. Creating a few status updates every day sounds like it should be easy, but in reality it takes a lot of time, energy, and dedication to keep it going. It is especially hard when you have many other priorities to focus on, and as a startup, we had a lot of other priorities. In some instances we would sadly let several weeks slip by before getting around to posting another update. I’m sure we missed many business opportunities as a result.
This need for a constant stream of short content to help sustain our social media presence combined with our background with managing a crowdsourced workforce was the genesis of Chirpsy.
Tell us something unique about you and your co-founder(s)?
Our founders have some of the longest tenures in the crowdsourcing industry. Isaac was a Technical PM at Amazon responsible for launching the original microtask crowdsourcing platform, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in late 2005. Nathan launched CastingWords shortly after and was the first company outside of Amazon to build a business on top of Mechanical Turk. The word “crowdsourcing” was coined the next year in a June 2006 Wired article – meaning we’ve been doing crowdsourcing longer than the word for it existed.
Tell us about your product or service
We offer the only 24x7 crowdsourced content curation service that drafts tweets specifically for businesses who want to keep their Twitter account relevant in an era of short content with an even shorter shelf life.
Our goal at Chirpsy is to save you a significant amount of time and effort spent sustaining your microblog presence with new and relevant content while keeping you in control. We're like that intern with an endless amount of energy you asked to help research cool stories for your blog, and just like working with an intern, we ask that you approve (and edit!) everything before it’s scheduled to be posted online.
What problem does your product or service solve?
We help solve a challenge that many businesses face after embracing social media: Keeping it updated every day is time consuming and hard!
Our crowdsourced research and writing assistants are real humans that draft and send you original and relevant tweets about the latest news and blog articles. You save time and stay in control while we help you sustain your social media presence.
What are your startup's three biggest challenges to growth?
Marketing, business development, and access to capital. As a boot-strapped business that hasn’t taken any outside funding so far, we have had to be a creative to get to where we are today. We could focus our energy on obtaining capitol to help accelerate our business, or we could focus on marking and business development to continue to boot-strap. Which option should we focus on? Both, of course!
How has the Startup America Partnership helped you overcome these challenges to growth?
We have met some great people through Startup America who have become our clients and we plan to continually leverage the resources provided as well as give back to the community by helping spread the word via social media and Chirpsy!
What Startup America Member Benefits have you used?
Networking events.
Why should startups join Startup America?
In short, the people that are part of the community. Starting a business is not something that can be done in a vacuum, and the wealth of experience that you can learn from is invaluable!
What is the startup culture like in your City/State?
We are located in Fremont – the widely acknowledged center of the universe (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me)! We feel fortunate to be situated here and part of a vibrant startup community. Special shout-outs to Microsoft, Amazon, and the University of Washington computer science program. We don’t believe our startup ecosystem would exist if it wasn’t for their influence and ability to draw in and add world-class talent to the Seattle region. Needless to say, we’re planning on continuing to build our business right here in sunny Seattle.
What else should we highlight about your startup?
We were an MIT Enterprise Forum NW Demo finalists last fall, where we unveiled our Beta. We then launched Chirpsy in January of this year at the Emerging Media Conference in San Francisco.
Learn more and connect with Chirpsy here:
Chirpsy.com | facebook.com/Chirpsy | @Chirpsy
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