Feed.us is a startup with a new approach to content management that uses a cloud-based content management solution to make managing content across multiple locations and properties easier.
We sat down for a Skype interview with co-founder Rick Stratton in order to gain a better understanding of how Feed.Us works, and to talk about the future of content management. We also discussed how he was able to leverage a cease and desist letter from Facebook in order to get press for Feed.Us.
(Note: At the time of writing, Rick informed us that Facebook had reached out and resolved the problem)
How Feed.Us Works
In today’s digital world, content is distributed across multiple properties — the most common being mobile apps and websites. Managing content across multiple properties can be challenging and time-consuming, with the current approaches to content management.
Feed.Us helps to solve this problem by providing a cloud-based content management system that doesn’t require the use of specialized software for each property. Instead, Feed.Us programmatically serves content by having users insert code snippets across corresponding properties.
With Feed.Us, users can manage their content across an unlimited number of properties from one central location. When a company wants to update content — for example, its “About Us” — across multiple web properties and mobile apps, it can become very time-consuming. With Feed.Us, however, a company would only need to edit its “About Us” page once, and all of the manifestations of the “About Us” page across all of their properties would also be updated, saving considerable time and hassle.
Turning Bad News Into Good Publicity
After receiving a cease and desist order from Facebook for the Chrome application, Defacable, in which he claims to have no role in developing, Stratton decided to share his misfortune with the startup community.
He wrote a blog post about the cease and desist letter, recounting his initial experience in dealing with Facebook’s lawyers, and then shared the post on Hacker News.
Stratton’s post quickly became one of the day’s most popular topics on Hacker News. This resulted in a huge influx in traffic to his blog and to Feed.Us. Soon after, news sites such as Tech Crunch began to pick up the story.
Prior to this event, Feed.Us had received very little attention and had never been featured on a site like Tech Crunch. When asked how they were able to get the word out before the Facebook incident, Rick shared that Business Insider’s guest contributor program was the only way they had been able to get covered.
One final point worth noting: Stratton said that the traffic they received from Hacker News and Tech Crunch was pretty much the same.