Sam Hellawell launches Outerground.com, a grass roots media blogging platform from the UK

They are both young founders whittling away at their social news startup. The interface is really professional looking, and the teams gotten really far. Sam’s a rockstar developer, and he’s currently working on a 3D isometric game. 

Our show provides great information for viewers interested in startup. There are so many general directions, and many specifics for different industries and strategies as well. You can see how design and development strategies are implemented. This is a great interview for people thinking about moving in this direction, showing the day to day grind.

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Sam Hellawells been programming since ten, always done web development, always loved it. They spend a few months developing a sketching application, where you can sketch something and post it, but then changed direction because they didn’t feel it would go far. 

Very small segment of people actually contributing to content, most people consuming it. 

They’re planning to get a lot of feedback of viewers from Google Analytics. 

20:25 They have all sorts of projects they want to go through, such as games, Sam created his own fully game engine a while ago. They all want to go towards building games, and becoming self sufficient. They want their programs and developments to be interesting and engaging for their users. They also want to focus on this, but are lacking the funding. Amul thinks that this site can be grown organically, by just listening to what people want and adding the features, and keeping the feedback loop tight. 

Right now their time is limited, because they have freelance work as well. They’re thinking outburst, and want the adwords to be integrated instead of annoying and everything. They feel the ads should be integrated in the stream. 

24:10 Their facebook feed was working before. It was a bit annoying for some of their users, but they felt it was still important. Jeff adds that an application called GoCarrot (24:35) does all the open graphing for you, when someone favorites or replies, you can have it automatically on the backend. Their site is built off their API (application programming interface), so they have the same level of access as anyone. HGDP, the backend is PHP, html, css, javascript. Sam is the coder. The logo was designed mainly by Oliver. 

27:54 Little experience in marketing, but he’s been working on it. He’s been going through the dummies books to pick up some basics in marketing. He’s mainly been privately messaging individual people, but hasn’t yet moved to mass emails. 

Amul recommends watching the show for tips, as well as considering gearing towards a niche for the site, like going after a certain category and adding more content based on that. Oliver has a few ideas for categorizing, so that you can target the fields you want to see. Oliver and Sam were looking for illustrators, so that they could get more cool visuals. 

Jeff thinks focusing on a group of early adopters, the ones who have retention is a good idea for growing their base. Amul agrees, and think it’s important to build a lot of content. Oliver and Sam tell them they receive negative feedback on one poster posting a lot of content. 

Sam emailed a Youtuber, who signed up for a partnership. A lot of it is about hitting a small niche and just really building from there. 

34:00 Outerground isn’t motivated by money, but Smoking Hot Coffee does recommend still reaching out to the bigger bases, because it will really help the process of the project. 

Jeff says to make sure the content of Outerground can be shared to other networks, because worries of many people are seeing what kind of community it is, and wondering if their friends are connected, or considering making new friends.

Outerground is gearing towards creating a more stranger to stranger community, not necessarily for just socializing, but more for seeing the different contents.