Commentto Joins the Host of Startups Making the Web “Writable”

Kira M. Newman Mar 31, 2012 Tweet

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about the host of startups that let you edit, comment on, tag, and categorize the web. In the words of entrepreneur Terry Jones of Fluidinfo – AKA the most interesting guy I’ve ever interviewed – this type of startups are making the web “writable” where it used to be only, passively readable.

Another company joining the mix is commentto, a Las Vegas startup founded by Kandarp Dave (yes, Dave is his last name). The commentto bookmarklet lets you highlight and save text from a webpage, with a comment. From there, it works a bit like a social network because you can subscribe to other users’ comments. If you prefer to keep your opinions to yourself, just mark comments “only me” and organize snippets into folders for research. The platform has processed over 14,000 excerpts so far.

But unlike the teams at Fluidinfo and Scrible, Dave is working alone – with all the challenges that come from being a “solopreneur”:

“Oh, where do I even begin,” he says, in response to my question. “It’s extremely difficult being a solo founder, and being the only person in the team. One thing (kind of an advice) I can say is: be extremely careful in the decisions you make, whether it is technology wise or whatever. Something that hurt me big time is making a decision that I thought was really good, but actually after, say, a month I realize it wasn’t a good decision. Now, I’ve just wasted a month coding stuff that I’d have to delete.”

“Another thing is motivation – being the only person in a team, there’s really no one to give you motivation to keep working. Of course, family members praise you for hard work and all, but it’s still difficult to keep moving forward. Sometimes focus gets lost, but you still have to keep going. So, yeah, it’s difficult.”

As Dave keeps chugging away, we’ll keep an eye on this space to see if any big players emerge.