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iTwit.in – John Chow sponsored my start up!

By Mohnish On March 18, 2009 Under Sensonize, Social Networking

A new Short URL Service launched by Sensonize.com. Its simple, neat and clean. The best thing about the site is that John Chow has funded it (Yes he did!). This service is believed to be extremely simple, neat and clean. Absolute NO ADS! No letters in your Short URL, only numbers – That keeps it clean! But, you can select the tags you like in alphanumeric.

How does this service help you on Twitter?
If you were on Twitter, you would have noticed that people use TinyURL.com which is pretty slow these days and is having alot of errors. I thought of making my own short url service, exclusively for Twitter which would be short, pronounceable and worked 4x faster than TinyURL. The page weights less than 3KB and has rich features like social bookmarking, sign up, login and tracking the clicks on your URL. iTwit is an amazing way to hide your affiliate links and tweet them 😉 You can also use iTwit on your blog/website – Its 100% FREE! Its not only free, its also SEO/Search friendly! If anyone searches for “Twit” which I believe has many searches on Twitter search, your tweet will come up in the search results – Thats an evil way to use iTwit and gain followers! 😀

How did I get in touch with John?
I was confused with the domain(s) I should use for this website. I had 2 domains in mind, actually 3.
1) iTwit.in – I bought this
2) iTweet.in
3) Tweet.in (Actually taken, had to buy from the owner)

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The domain costs $14 each and I was short of funds since I needed hosting + domain + had some fixes to be done in the script. After the fixes were done I tweeted John asking him which domain would suit my tinyurl website since he had more experience than me and was on a holiday in China. John told me to buy iTwit and iTweet and I was like – WTF lol .. I was confused. I asked many other people about which domain should I go with, I got many tweets saying that I should go with iTwit.in since it was short by a letter and made some sense for a tinyurl service. Now what happens is, I tell John that I am financially ripped on my paypal balance since I transferred my funds just 2 days back and I have hosting bill coming up + money only for a domain and I can’t buy both the domains unless he pays for one of them as a gift (Evil Grin). He offered me $50 to start my venture and I was confused. I offered him 9 CN domains with 200+ days value, but he declined. We are only Twitter friends, why would he give me $50 just because I wanted to start this shorturl website yadda yadda. Ok after a few exchanges of tweets, he told me when/If I make profit out of that site I should give him a cut. I was fine with that 🙂 But will a TinyURL website made exclusively for Twitter make ANY profit? I highly doubt that. But I have offered John 12 months of free advertising on the site, whenever he wants it. If the site grows big its probably going to be a money plant – ahaha! John tested the service too! He made a tinyurl to a post on his blog iTwit.in/footer and tweeted his followers to check it out.

I feel honored to be sponsored by the wonderful man himself – John Chow. This is another way Twitter could help you make it big! Even if you don’t get a startup like I did, you will probably build more contacts and find the right people for your business. Make sure you are following @JohnChow on Twitter and do head over to John Chow dot com and subscribe to his RSS!

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7 Comments Add yours

  1. Luca Di Nicola
    March 19, 2009
    2:06 pm #comment-1

    Wow, that’s fantastic congratulations. The service looks great too.
    I’ll be using it

  2. Brian D. Hawkins
    March 21, 2009
    12:17 pm #comment-2

    Hi Monty. That’s very cool that John Chow helped you out that way. I’m not surprissed, he’s helped others before and it’s nice to see that the successs hasn’t gone to his head.

    I run an ad tracking and short URL site too and I do make a nice profit from it. Mine is an all paid membership site so it’s a little different.

    I see you use TweetDeck. I recommend you try to get your new short URL service added to programs like that. In case you hadn’t noticed (it’s easy to miss) when you send a tweet using TweetDeck the ‘shorten’ URL feature by default uses bit.ly but it’s actually a drop down menu with about a dozen choices. It would be nice if you could get them to add iTwit.in to the list. I bet there are dozens of opportunities like that using such third party applications.

    You could also promote iTwit.in for use with FriendFeed and other services that combine their services with Twitter.

    One note of caution, by prepared in the future when the site becomes popular to move to a dedicated server. All the re-direction is a strain on servers and once it becomes too much your hosting company will probably insist you upgrade servers. I had to move to a dedicated server that is running me $174/month which is actually a great deal. If it helps any, you should be earning enough through the site to afford the hosting.

    By the way, I just started following you as ExtremeEzine on Twitter. Looking forward to future tweets 🙂

  3. Twurlo
    March 21, 2009
    1:56 pm #comment-3

    Thta’s cool.

  4. Monty
    March 22, 2009
    7:50 am #comment-4

    Hi Brain – Thanks for your comment and suggestions. We are working hard on the coding and features. We have not yet added the API, once its done we will contact TweetDeck and FriendFeed 🙂 and as far as the load is concerned we are working on it and optimizing the script to as small as 3 KB in size(with images) and also displaying a page before the user is redirected(waiting time of 1 second) so that there is not much of a load on the SQL Database. This method reduces the SQL load because every redirection has a gap of atleast “1” second 🙂

  5. News Blog
    March 24, 2009
    3:16 am #comment-5

    John chow is a tech guy, he looks tech stuff. John chow is not evil, he understands what it means to need capital, I presume.

  6. Monty
    March 24, 2009
    4:27 am #comment-6

    P.S I haven’t said that John Chow is evil lol

  7. HOST MACRO
    December 3, 2009
    10:11 am #comment-7

    Really Nice.

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