How New Pinterest Rival Juxtapost Is Successfully Growing in a Crowded Marketplace

Monika Jansen Jan 12, 2012 Tweet

Pinterest is extremely addicting – maybe moreso than Facebook for some people.  But if you use it regularly, I bet you are frustrated by at least one of the following problems: frequent 502 errors, show-stopping bugs, lack of privacy settings, and inability to use it on your iPad.

Meet Juxtapost, a simple-to-use social discovery website founded (and self-funded) by a team of web developers and designers in Irvine, CA who knew they could do social discovery and bookmarking better.  As co-founder Monir Boktor told me,

“We spent extensive development time targeting what could make us stand out in an overly crowded field of similar-use websites. In addition to the must-have features of a standard vision board, we’ve included things we knew would make the user experience greater: nearly one-click Facebook sign-ups, privacy settings, automatic color indexing, automatic bookmark descriptions, ability to export all your bookmarked data, and a streamlined user interface. “

As an avid but frustrated Pinterest user, Boktor’s wife was very helpful during development.  She pointed out one problem with existing social discovery tools: posting items can become tedious when you have to add a description to each item, hence the aforementioned intelligent ‘auto description’ feature was added to save users the hassle.

Juxtapost’s careful research is paying off: They launched 29 days ago and now have just under 3500 members, growing by using Facebook, word-of-mouth and grassroots conversations with DIY/craft/culinary bloggers. One thing that has surprised them is the demographics of their users:

“We initially speculated that our key demographic would be women 18-45 years old based on our research of who was using existing social discovery websites,” Boktor said.  “However, as we begin to aggregate the breakdown of people signing up we see a pretty significant portion are indeed men, so the target market is fairly distributed accross the general public.”

As they’ve started growing, Boktor told me that the team has been discussing revenue streams to help propel that growth, like aggregating the massive amount of marketing intelligence generated by members to connect them with products and services in an unobstrusive way.  “For example, a member has posted items with keywords that heavily oritented toward ‘wedding,’ so we would take that intel and generate a single small recommended wedding service in their approximate area when they’re browsing our wedding posts.  A small commission on click-through would be generated, hopefully allowing all parties to win. “

Check out Juxtapost for yourself and let us know what you think of the service – leave a comment below!