Meet The People You Follow On Twitter With Conference Directory Lanyrd (YC W11)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/lanyrd/

by razin • 15 years ago

155 31 15 years ago

simonw7• 15 years ago

We're pretty excited to be the first YC company to launch following the big funding announcement. It will be interesting to see if it affects the amount of attention we get from the launch.

Isofarro• 15 years ago

How does being funded affect your long term goals of lanyrd being a lifestyle business rather than "the next facebook"(tm)? (cf. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/nov/04/lanyrd-twitt... )

Are the two activities mutually inclusive? Just curious really.

simonw7• 15 years ago

The funding means we have a much better chance of building a viable business, without having to go back to freelancing part time to support ourselves.

petervandijck3• 15 years ago

This quote had me laughing:

"Founded by Django creator Simon Willison and his wife Downe after finding themselves stuck on their honeymoon in Casablanca with nothing else to do".

:) Congrats on the launch!

ps: the site is pretty slow right now, can you crank up some instances or something?

simonw7• 15 years ago

Performance seems OK over here, and none of our monitoring is showing any issues. I'll keep an eye on it though.

natbat4• 15 years ago

hehe :)

It was a long term honeymoon - we gave up our flat in Brighton and just set off into the world with just our backpacks and laptops. We were also ill in Casablanca (and it was Ramadan so couldn't find any restaurants open) so we rented a flat for two weeks to cook for ourselves and built and launched the first version of Lanyrd.

drchronokatelyn• 15 years ago

love this quote!

drtse4• 15 years ago

Congratulations! As someone who lives in a country where conferences are quite rare and scarcely publicized a tool like lanyrd (increasingly used here(italy)) helps really a lot.

natbat4• 15 years ago

Thats wonderful to hear! we are getting quite a bit of traction in countries other than the UK and US which is fab

tonystubblebine• 15 years ago

Congrats Simon! Site already looked awesome--funding and YC backing are both amazing news.

vidar• 15 years ago

Cool! I have been following Lanyrd for a while but didn't realize they were with YC.

Swannie• 15 years ago

I guess a launch had to happen soon. What with photos of them (& others) at the YC Yuri event popping up on the web :-)

natbat4• 15 years ago

yeah I was so sure that someone would recognise me! I am the only girl in the front row in that photo, Simon is on my right

rriepe• 15 years ago

Started on a honeymoon. Great story. They say a co-founder is like a spouse and a startup is like a marriage, but you two are bringing it to a whole new level.

petervandijck3• 15 years ago

Time to update the blog Simon :) http://simonwillison.net/

spazmaster• 15 years ago

Is Lanyrd built using Django?

natbat4• 15 years ago

It is indeed, also uses all sorts of other exciting back-end moving parts - take a look at our colophon for more details: http://lanyrd.com/colophon

noodle2• 15 years ago

reimnds me of eventvue before it died.

simonw7• 15 years ago

We read the EventVue postmortem with interest: http://blog.eventvue.com/post/372936164/post-mortem

We're not really in the social-network-for-your-event market, though some of our functionality might address part of that problem space. Services like EventVue are limited in terms of growth because they need to convince conferences to sign up (and pay for the service) one at a time - it's a sales problem.

With Lanyrd, the event itself doesn't need to have anything to do with the site for a profile to be created - and the more events we have listed, the more valuable the service is to our users. We have over 5,000 events listed already, all entered by our community.

Thanks to Start Fund, we've got a healthy runway to figure out our business model. We have a bunch of options and we're confident we can find something that works for us.

noodle2• 15 years ago

it seemed that the pivot they were taking at the end was in a similar direction to what lanyrd is doing. just a thought, is all.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Any ideas how to memorize that name? Does it have a meaning I don't get (non-native speaker)?

kmort• 15 years ago

It's a "Web 2.0"-style dropped-vowel spelling of "lanyard". (Lanyards being commonly used at conferences to hold ID cards.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanyard

Tichy2• 15 years ago

Thanks - lanyard was a word I didn't know yet.

tesseract• 15 years ago

Any plans for some kind of barcodes-on-nametags feature that could be called "scanyrd"? ;)

kmfrk• 15 years ago

You've done a really great job with the site. Three things:

1) I reaaally hate the yellow buttons. Surely you can code or find some images that look better. :)

2) I'd love to be able to follow/track a person and the events s/he is arranging.

3) I'd also be interested to track events by some other measure - topic or location perhaps. A lot of things don't happen in my country outside the US, so I'd love to be able to monitor events in the capital without using RSS.

All in all a great job - there have been people before you to think of this, but none of them have made a site that was genuinely interesting and useful.

simonw7• 15 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

1) I'm rather fond of our yellow buttons myself.

2) You can track a person's events by following them on Twitter - at the moment the Lanyrd social graph and the Twitter graph are the same thing. We're going to add "follow" buttons on Lanyrd to make it easier to follow someone without having to go to Twitter to do it.

3) That's definitely coming. For the moment, you can use our RSS feeds for that (on the place pages, topic pages and even the topic-in-place pages) but it won't be an RSS-only feature forever.

Meet The People You Follow On Twitter With Conference Directory Lanyrd (YC W11)

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