How would you describe NewsCurve in under 50 words?

NewsCurve is an analytics tool providing effectiveness metrics of online content in real-time. Using our measurement technology (“Pulse”), it will help you identify content, topics and authors that generate highest level of engagement at any moment, and promote ones that do well.

How and when did you come up with NewsCurve?

We’ve been in online publishing with our news CMS product – Vivvo since 2006. During that time we developed a deep understanding of the publishing industry, competitive landscape, key business drivers and market trends. We realized how much publishers and editors need a reliable helper, a side-kick analytics tool that doesn’t just measure page views and hits in real-time, but provides necessary support and big picture to content writers and editors in life cycle of an article. This led to NewsCurve draft in late 2010.

How do you split your time between NewsCurve, Spoonlabs and Vivvo?

Spoonlabs is the company behind Vivvo CMS and now our focus is on Newscurve. We have no other projects apart from this at the time being.

When is NewsCurve moving out of public beta?

I think in about a month. Don’t think that is the most important thing right now, especially to our users because Newscurve is free as long as we’re in Beta :)

How is work on NewsCurve split between you and Slobodan Utvic?

I’m responsible for something that’s lately usually referred to as “customer development”, in other words the sales/business aspect, while Slobodan handles product development. We also have a number of people helping out tremendously.

Has NewsCurve got the feedback and growth you expected since launch?

At this stage we’re not so interested in actual growth as in being positive that we reached perfect product-marketing fit. The growth from private alpha in January till now is remarkable, we’ve started with few early adopters who we’re very much interested in the tool, and now (in April) we got around 400 accounts, mostly SMB’s (small-medium businesses). And we’re still in private Beta.

Who is your biggest competitor?

At the moment, I think there are no real-time analytics tools for publishers in SMB market. Chartbeat is launching Newsbeat service, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they have come up with. It will be most interesting seeing how they tackled the problem of giving actionable insights to publishers.

What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing?

Finding the perfect product-market fit. Getting out of customer validation process as painlessly as possible.

What are you most excited about at the moment?

The answer would definitely be – playing with all facets of web analytics – measurement, reporting and insights. Looking into massive amounts of clickstream data we get every second, and trying to convert it into valuable insights to companies using Newscurve.

At the same time, it is immensely exciting getting out of the office, talking to potential clients, seeing how they react on the tool, and trying to figure out what usage take out of it and communicating with guys at the office about that. It is really great fun developing Newscurve and seeing how it grows.

Can you convince the reader to use NewsCurve in under 60 words?

For a content rich website with frequent updates, Newscurve will provide important ad-hoc decision support to publishers – editors, journalists, bloggers and decision makers. By measuring traffic, interaction and social sharing for each individual story, Newscurve will allow you to fail fast, react just in time, anticipate viral lift and identify & promote topics and authors that do well.