@BlendahTom Hey Tom, thanks for the comment. I totally agree. We considered social logins, but we don't want to create any confusion over what account is connected where. We may switch back to a simple version in the coming weeks.

@gonewandering It's more confusing in it's current state as it's not entirely clear to someone logging in for the first time what to do.. especially if it's a person managing a sold brand. If you somehow got people to connect their social accounts right away.. you could always add additional tiers when they wanted to add more accounts under a different brand.

@BlendahTom Yeah. Totally agree. It's one of our biggest improvement areas. You'll probably see changes to this in the coming week :). Thanks for the feedback—I really appreciate it.

@utekkare Pranay, yeah. I'm that kind of narcissistic too. Tracking follows is easy. Our system does that, it's just not in the UI yet. Unfollows is bit trickier bc both Twitter and FB require that you "uncache" any info related to unfollowed/unfriended users and deleted posts. We're working on how to represent that though, maybe by just caching the number. It's great feedback! Thanks.

@radikaalanssi Thanks Anssi. I will. Actually setting up a big event later this fall in NYC. Let's discuss.

@gonewandering Very nice - we've got a massive amount of talent and also team on-site NYC. Always glad to help other startups

@Percival Hi Sean, I led engineering at Chute and at CGC, a women's social marketing agency, and at both, our clients constantly asked, "How do I track this?", "How do I value it?". This is the lynchpin in social marketing and is a huge problem in the industry.

And I really like the challenge of normalizing and quantifying data across the myriad of platforms out there. No one is doing that well, yet.

@gonewandering Oh great, I know Greg over at Chute.

@Percival Greg and Ranvir are great and Chute's system is really cool. They're focused on the F500 enterprise set. I left to chase the longer tail—I think there's a huge op right now to quantify value in social among mid-size co's.

We launched our first public beta last week (Thursday), were featured on PH and on the front page of HN. Got picked up by the German tech blog t3n, and have added just over 400 registered users. Hoping for our 500th today :).

We're launching a small business feature-set next week based on the feedback we've received. ~$5/mo/account for Facebook Business Pages, API access, and content exports.

@gonewandering Are these users who are actively using the product? Or just registrations?

@Percival yeah, it's really cool! Our visits are roughly 30% returning since we launched last week, if you take out days with big features, it's above 55%. Average time on site is around 5 min—above 7 minutes for returning users—and pages per visit is 4.5. Maybe more importantly, people are linking roughly 2.6 social accounts per signup, with very view disconnections.

@Percival There're several reasons. We have a great technical foundation for a potentially disruptive product, but we're just starting out. I believe that 500 startups will provide us: 1.) Marketing and operations guidance and advice: How do we tell our story? Who do we tell it too? Being able to bounce this off leaders in the tech space will be invaluable. 2.) Experienced product advisors: I really believe that user experience and product design set us apart, and to do this we need to connect with the best product thinkers in the tech industry. 500 Startups can help us with that 3.) Investors: We are close to the "jump-off" point in terms of scaling our infrastructure and making our entrance. We need to raise a medium-sized seed round to do this. 500 Startups can help us tell this story, and find the people who're interested in it. Aside from those things, it's hard being a solo founder, and I'm excited about being a part of 500 Startups' awesome ecosystem.

@Percival Yeah, definitely. I have dozens, but we'll start with two: 1.) Ignoring funding and network/contacts. What are the two most valuable things that you think 500 Startups contributes to it participant companies? 2.) If, in the coming months / years, the investment landscape for startups changes ("winter" comes, stupid phrase), how will 500 startups react and adjust?

@gonewandering 1) I would say the first is marketing and distribution. It's all I've done for 12 years so we spend a lot of time of this. The majority of the program really is spent on growth. That's what our founders ask for more than anything. We bring in lots of training, get our hands dirty and give you several unfair advantages with regard to marketing. 2) Oh man pulling the tough questions out :) I haven't been a VC long enough to understand the boom/bust cycles like others. However we invest only at the very early stage and much of that talk is focused on those monsterly over funded late stage cos. We do run some risk of our companies not being able to secure downstream capital but we're fairly resilient. We'll adapt to the market as needed but startups aren't going away. The amount of great founders out there is only increasing. We'll just keep trying to find and fund+help them.

@Percival Awesome. From what I've heard 500 Startups is great at distribution, and that would be really valuable to us. Agreed also on the bubble discussion centering on later stage cos. Not as worried about it from a personal standpoint as from a prospective investor standpoint. Adaptability is the name of the game.

@Percival We're early in this now, but our biggest differentiator is our ability to take data from these very different platforms, normalize it, and make searching it, aggregating it, analyzing it, and comparing easy, fast, and simple. The solutions out there now don't tell you that for your business, one retweet == three Facebook likes, and our system does.