I’m excited to announce that I’m taking on the role of Interim Head of Product at Feedjit.

I’ve known Mark and Kerry for a while now and watched them turn Feedjit from an interesting side project into a fascinating business with a monster viral loop. It’s one of those magical businesses where (assuming the servers didn’t melt) that literally can’t help growing 10% every single month without a single ounce of effort. Right now, Feedjit is serving over a billion views per month.

As I mentioned in my previous post about evaluating startup ideas, I love businesses where there is a wide gulf between the cost of user/customer acquisition and the lifetime value of a customer. The thing that most people miss when they criticize businesses like Twitter and Facebook for not having business models is this: These businesses are adding hundreds of thousands of people per day…. for free. It doesn’t take many brain cycles by smart people to find clever ways to turn passionate users into a few pennies of revenue each. Twitter and Facebook could turn on meaningful revenue at will. Facebook already has. The trick is doing this in a way that doesn’t cost user happiness and doesn’t negatively effect their growth.

Feedjit is that style of company, with gobs of untapped potential. It has an enviably low burn rate and a ferocious growth curve. Brainstorming with Mark and Kerry (the Feedjit founders) has yielded several really interesting business models that we could layer on top of the automated growth engine that’s been built to date. But right now, I think the business has the luxury of focusing on deepening the value we provide the current userbase of long-tail bloggers and expanding the product line to start serving different types of publishers.

I’m personally really excited because Feedjit has never had someone with my skillset involved in the day-to-day product efforts at the company. The amount of opportunity to do needle-moving stuff is mind-boggling. The team is going to be digging in with stuff like:

• exploring the core design and value prop of the product (and tightening that up a big
• A/B testing aggressively to help that (already breathtaking) velocity of signups
• Exploring new publisher markets (from pro-bloggers to bigger blog networks
• Working on outreach. Feedjit has been purposefully flying under the radar for some time now. It’s time to start getting noisy!
• Helping flesh out the team with A-level developers and designers.
• Exerimenting with some wild/crazy ideas that are still coming together. The audience that Feedjit has makes experimentation like this easy.

I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments. What could YOU do with billions of impressions per month?