Card.ly: Lightweight Personal Microsites from Three Guys with Three Weeks and Five Hundred Bucks

Written by Jolie O'Dell / July 20, 2009 6:19 PM / 7 Comments

This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is a resource and guide for first-time entrepreneurs and startups. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.

We've all seen a great deal lately of two trends: Personal website creation made simple (here's our favorite four resources of the moment) and social media aggregation services that pool all a user's streams and networking information.

Today, TinyChat creator Dan Blake along with cohorts Oliver Turbis and Joshua Gigg have announced the launch of a new freemium-model service that combines good-looking personal sites with users' existing social media data, and all in a mercifully lightweight format that's as easy to digest as it is quick to set up. Although the service, called Card.ly, is reminiscent of Retaggr or Chi.mp, it humbles the competition by delivering a simpler, more focused result. Blake et al. apparently understand the old adage, "Less is more."

The team took about three weeks and spent $500 to create Card.ly, according to an email from Turbis this evening. The monetization strategy is simple enough: Free users are given an array of incentives to upgrade to reasonably priced premium accounts. For $24.99 a year, users have access to more/better "skins" or page themes, analytics and SEO features, and an unlimited number of networks and RSS feeds in each profile.

The Card.ly team is also appealing to designers/developers by asking for skin submissions; each skin can then become a source of revenue for the designers as users select and purchase their skins.

Creating this "card," in reality a four-page microsite, took about ten minutes:

The pages are small and simple, and the range of free skins is appealing:

Turbis told us soon, users will be able to create their own skins for their pages from the ground up without having to submit them to the community. Also coming soon is an embeddable widget:

As far as startups go, this team definitely kept it small and simple - a lesson other companies should learn well. We hope they're able to see great results for this effort.

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Comments

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1) The misuse of the .ly domain needs to stop.

2) Your current profile doesn't work with JavaScript disabled.

3) Why do I need this?

Posted by: anon | July 20, 2009 7:08 PM

1) Agreed

2) Who disables JavaScript? Go back to 1995 and grow a pair.

3) Think about who uses business cards to begin with. Those people (the ones who aren't developers) want business card websites too.

Posted by: Steven Walling | July 20, 2009 7:44 PM

Yes, it's a trend that we noticed as well lately. A lot of our customers register their personal domain name and point it to one of the simple website builder or blogging / lifestreaming tools. Card.ly seems like another perfect home for your online identity in combination with a domain. Well done!

Posted by: Timo Reitnauer | July 20, 2009 7:44 PM

@anon Then there is a lot of misuses with .net, .org,...

Posted by: Olivier Turbis | July 20, 2009 8:06 PM

"Who disables JavaScript? Go back to 1995 and grow a pair."

LOL. Can't argue with that. Though, it would be trivial to add a display for non-js users alerting them that js is required for the website to function properly.

And Olivier, two wrongs don't make a right. I'm not saying it's the worst thing ever, but I think that domain hacks, particularly the .ly variant, need to stop.

Posted by: anon | July 20, 2009 9:09 PM

I've built my card - it's a nice little service

Posted by: James | July 20, 2009 11:32 PM

I find it really cool. I'll definitely have a go because unfortunately I'm not able to do my own website (yet!).
:)

Posted by: julieta | July 21, 2009 3:08 AM