Disqus as an entrant into the growing market of blog comment managers. The company was founded by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan. I had an opportunity to chat with Daniel about Disqus and this is what he had to say.

Disqus

me: OK. Now for a real question. What separates Disqus from similar products like Intense Debate or SezWho?

Daniel Ha: I think the product that is most similar is ID, in that we do offer a comment system SezWho does not

me: Correct. I put SezWho in there because they take up commenting real estate in the same way that you do.

Daniel Ha: right. our focus is integrating well within existing blogs and publications so instead of a blog widget, it’s more of a functionality extension the fundamental difference though is that the comments are an extension of a full forum backend that we host it’s a simple way to get a forum up and going for your website and is directly connected to your blog comments in addition to that and the comment system, we help bloggers manage their discussions with very effective tools. full spam control is also in place

me: That’s great. Do you think that publishers that don’t get huge numbers of comments (the vast majority of them) can find value in this tool?

Daniel Ha: One of the main goals would to build a strong community around blog discussions since they are all connected, i think it’s less of a matter of isolated blogs it’s a strong point that we enable people to find new web content on the Disqus network and participate accordingly

me: Ideally, what is your vision for Disqus. What place does it have in the blogging landscape?

Daniel Ha: We think there’s a lot to be done with web discussions and we’d like Disqus to mold into that solution our front page is a glimpse into what we’re doing in regards to a destination. we want people to be able to discover web content that gets others talking

me: That is really interesting, so do you see yourself as something akin to Technorati but specifically for comments?

Daniel Ha: We haven’t talked about that much, but we’d like to be able to offer a whole new distribution channel for how discussions happen on websites concentrating solely on blog comments and web conversations

me: Lets switch gears a little bit. How are you going about getting the word out about Disqus?

Daniel Ha: a lot has been word of mouth since launching, new traffic has been coming from various places that we’ve been mentioned and subsequently audiences of blogs that are now participating

me: Once the initial storm of hype dies down, what are your plans to maintain growth?

Daniel Ha: that’s a good question, and to be honest we’re still figuring out how to let people discover us we have plenty of ideas but nothing has been settled yet

me: what are your current monetization strategies?

Daniel Ha: our focus is in providing a good product for users, but there a few revenue ideas in the works one immediate one is in offering additional features to the hosted forum we will offer publishers the ability to use their own domains while we host and power their forums they are also able to purchase the ability to serve their own ads

me: So tell me, what has been the hardest part of being a part of a startup?

Daniel Ha: there’s a lot of anxiety. well, it’s more like emphasized uncertainty. no matter how strongly i feel about what we’re doing, there’s no denying the fact that there’s no set path for us to follow. it’s a little scary. but i must say all of this also makes being part of a startup pretty damn fun.

Web 2.0 Roundup

If you want to try Disqus out, leave a comment here. For the foreseeable future, I will be testing the system out on this blog. Send me your feedback.

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