Online Journalism News

New financial news community launches after just one month of development

Posted: 20/10/08 By: Judith Townend

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Tip'd.com, the new financial tipping website launched in beta last Tuesday, is scheduled to go officially live in November. Journalism.co.uk spoke to its founder, Andy Hagans.

So, in a nutshell, what's the site and what does it do?
[Andy Hagans] Tip'd is a community for financial news, ideas, and tips. It operates as a social media platform, meaning that the Tip'd users decide which news stories and investing tips should be published on our homepage. Users vote on stories they like by clicking the 'Tip it' button that appears next to each story, and if a story gets enough tips within 24 hours, it gets promoted to the homepage.

How do you make your money?
We plan to have unobtrusive ads on Tip'd in the future. Right now, the site is ad-free, and we're operating at a loss.

We saw Tip'd referred to as the 'Financial Digg', is that how you would describe it?
Well, in the sense that Digg is the largest social media site, you could say "Reddit is the 'Digg for politics'", "Tip'd is the 'Digg for finance'", and we don't take it as insult - it's just an easy way to explain what we are to someone who is familiar with Digg.

The difference between us and Digg is pretty simple - they're mainly focused on technology although they have a business and finance category. At Tip'd, we're wholly focused on finance and business.

What's the site's background? How long have you been in development?
We've been working on the site for less than a month. It took less than three weeks from me thinking of the idea to the official beta launch. That's mainly due to our great team, Chris Pearson our designer, Jimmy our webmaster, Mu our community director, and Damon our developer, for working so hard, so quickly, to get us where we are.

And your background? Is this full-time for you now?
I am a serial entrepreneur who runs another internet business. This is a side project for me, though certainly a major one.

How do you think the initial launch has gone so far?
It has been fantastic. I was hoping we'd have 100 members at this point. After three days we had over 600 members, and it's growing hour by hour. The launch week surpassed my expectations by far.

Where do you see yourselves going in terms of technology and content?
Technology-wise, we believe in incremental improvements. If we can do one feature, bug fix, or tweak per day which makes the site one per cent better, in a few months, we'll be pretty polished. Content-wise the community is doing a fantastic job submitting and tipping good content for our frontpage, so the future direction is up to them.

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