Israeli investor Yossi Vardi said list hosting site Top10's business plan might be a little complicated, but it seemed to get his attention with its first pitch: Lists have been around since the time of the Ten Commandments.
"The world's first PowerPoint — two slides, five bullet points each," Vardi said.
Top10 made the pitch and announced that it is launching today at the Launch conference in San Francisco.
The concept is pretty simple — users log in and create a list of their favorite parts of, well, anything. That can range from top 10 guitarists of all time to the best movies of the 80s. Whenever a user types in something into their list, the site automatically fetches an image from the Internet. Users then write a description for the piece of their list, fill it out and then publish it for their friends. They can share it through social networks as well.
When other users visit a list, they can enter a "remix" mode to publish their own version of the list. After clicking a button, they can move, delete and add new elements to the list and publish their own version. There is also a master list that aggregates every list among friends for each topic.
But there's a lot of competition in the list space, said Dave McClure, who leads the 500 Startups firm. The rest of the panel, which consisted of investors and experienced entrepreneurs, also said they weren't sure the Top10 application could blow past the competition. The Top10 team seemed convinced that they would win out in the space because they were focused solely on encouraging master list development.
"Top10 lists aren’t necessarily new," McClure said. "For any service like this to win, you have to have great game mechanics."
The site plans to make money by displaying elements of master lists on the site and linking to sites like Amazon. The site will also post deals from Amazon and other sites — capitalizing on the red-hot deal market that McClure said will have plenty of venture capitalists ready to write checks for the company.