Interview: Talking with Disqus

Last week I had a chance to catchup with Daniel the co-Founder of Disqus and we chatted for quite a while about some of the feedback I had from using the service and suggestions on new features that were pretty important for TechWinter and the near future.

It was Daniel who suggested that we go forward with the questions anyway because he was happy to do so even if we did not have time right now. That was great because neither of us had anymore time and this week was going to be hard for me and besides it would give his co-Founder a chance to participate too.

Well here are and here is the latest from one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley (we think).

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Interview with Disqus Team

Tell us a bit about yourself Daniel:

I’ve lived in the Silicon Valley my entire life. I’m 22 years old. I’m a big fan of the Internet.

What is your role(s) at the company?

I’m one of the co-founders, alongside Jason Yan. We both play many roles. For the actual product, I do the front end development while Jason works on the back end code. Also, he scales the servers while I do interviews.

How did you and your co-founder come up with the idea?

Disqus was a few different products before it became what it is today. Initially, the concept dealt with providing better tools around forums. Jason and I were heavily involved with forum communities while in school. We had the idea of bridging forum communities together and introducing the notion of a portable reputation. We toyed around with this for a while and eventually decided to focus entirely on blogs conversations. A lot of discussion was happening on blogs and, although I wasn’t an avid blogger, I was a frequent commenter. We figured out what we thought blog comments were missing and created today’s Disqus.

How challenging was it raise money? Was age a factor? Any tips?

We are incredibly lucky to be supported by great people. Paul Graham and the Y Combinator network have been incredible for us. It helped us attain second glances from people we spoke to, whether they were potential users, investors, or partners. Fred Wilson was one of our early blogger users before becoming an investor. He’s been amazingly helpful from the start and when Disqus began looking for some money, it was natural that we talked about working together.

Can you tell us a bit Disqus?

Disqus is a service for blog comments. It helps you manage the discussions on your blog, build a community through the comments, and connect these conversations with other blogs.

What are the features you have that you feel make your service a must have? Killer features?

Users of Disqus often tell us that we make the discussion on their website more lively. We make it easy for people to participate in the comments via email or through their phone.

How do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors?

We don’t. We’re building the service for bloggers and publishers, not to differentiate ourselves. I know that competitors exist, but I cannot speak to how much we may overlap in purpose or functionality. From what I can recall of the other services, we’ve been quite the “inspiration” to them.

How do you promote Disqus?

I don’t do much beyond paying attention to how people are using the service.

Did you use social media as a promotional tool?

Not really for promotion. I’ve been using Twitter since before Disqus and I do tweet often about what we’re up to, since that’s what Twitter is for. It has, however, been amazing for keeping up with what people are saying about Disqus and finding out how I can help them.

If so how did you use social media?

Were there any websites in particular that had a significant impact on Disqus adoption or traction in the market?

Yes. In the very early days, we received buzz from being adopted on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog and Dave Winer’s Scripting News. This helped gain us exposure to the web/early adopter crowd.

How did you approach those sites to consider using your service? Are there any tips or approaches you recommend for other startups?

Mostly just by dropping them a note through email. I learned a lot from Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit. His advice was to be tenacious, personable, and genuine. We didn’t, and still don’t, have a huge budget for marketing or business development. In place, we just sent out real, personal emails letting people know what we were working on. It worked.

How do you see your service, disruptive or complementary to existing practices?

I don’t really know how to use those terms when talking about Disqus. To me, we’re building something pretty cool and providing a service bloggers find useful. At the same time, we’re really attempting to change conversation on blogs.

Do you feel living in such a hot bed of talent and entrepreneurship that it was a benefit or made the environment more competitive?

Definitely a benefit. I grew up in the Silicon Valley and I’ve always been fascinated with technology, the web, and startups. Moving up to San Francisco was, I think, a great decision for us because we’re close to many prolific bloggers and other web personalities. Disqus has benefitted greatly from us building real life relationships with our users.

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I just want to say thank you to the Disqus team for taking the time to respond and giving us insight into the heart of their startup.

We wish them all the best in their future.