Trying to keep up with the endless firehose of news can sometimes feel like a fool's errand. Even just finding the stories you want to read can often take more time than you have to spend. When Gillis Baxter was at Georgetown University, the constant peppering of questions about current events by his friends inspired him to look into how to make news consumption faster and easier. The result is Vizo News, an iOS and Android app that curates and packages news in small packages, easily digested by those accustomed to the new world of social media.
"All my friends in finance would ask me what the news was before they had interviews because they wanted to seem knowledgable," Baxter said. "They didn't have time to read The Wall Street Journal. They just wanted the highlights."
Baxter and co-founder Evan Bloomberg, a Georgetown alumnus, built Vizo as something reminiscent of social media, with a prominent image and a short summary, just 400-600 characters long. These "Glances" are curated based on how much they are trending in prominent news sources. At least a few dozen respectable sources need to be writing about a subject before one of the staff writers will turn it into a Glance. Links are included with each Glance as well, since the point of the app isn't to be a final destination for current events.
"We're not trying to replace the Journal or The New York Times," Baxter said. "We're like the first news springboard that you come to. I think of them more as our partners, not our competitors"
"We're like the first news springboard that you come to."
The idea of cutting up the news into bite-size pieces isn't unique of course. Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies offer something like it as part of their larger packages. An app that's narrowly targeted for news, curated and condensed individually, is not as common.
"That niche is strong enough for us to stand out," Baxter said. "We have a very different product from the news on social media sites."
Not that Vizo is the the first news aggregator to attempt something like this. Circa was one of the more memorable attempts to make an idea like this work, but it ultimately failed to attract enough interest and build up enough revenue to keep going. Vizo, according to Baxter, will be different partly because of an early focus on monetization—of making sure that a revenue stream can be built and maintained as quickly as possible.
"Circa's stories were short: they were similar to the length of a tweet," Baxter said. "Vizo's Glances are around 100 words and our writers are producing content of capital worth."
Emphasis on design, flexibility
Baxter also pointed to Vizo's more transparent design to avoid misleading people into clicking on stories that they are not what they seem, and which ensures that they can drive actually engaged readers to publishers. But it's really in how flexible the platform can be that Vizo will make its mark according to Baxter.
"Vizo's flexible platform opens doors to introduce partners, like bloggers.," Baxter said. "We can also partner with publishers that mesh with Vizo's model and audience can be easily integrated as their own category or page."
Once Baxter started working on the idea of Vizo, he found it harder and harder to keep up with the demands of founding a startup and going to school full-time. He dropped out of Georgetown last year, after the fall semester of his junior year, to focus full time on Vizo.
"I wasn't able to focus on class and this at the same time," he said. "And I realized that this was so much more fun than class."
"I realized that this was so much more fun than class."
Baxter's hard work has already made an impression on some investors. He and Bloomberg have raised $1.175 million in three rounds of investment, a combination of family and friends investment and angel investors. The latest round of $750,000 was mainly from angel investors Baxter said, which will give Vizo the kick to get off the ground.
Vizo has also made a deal with Huawei, a major Chinese cell phone manufacturer, to have Vizo pre-installed on all of the phones it sells in Israel. That deal is part of why Vizo has some of its 23 employees in Israel, writing and translating Glances into Hebrew, as well as in D.C. and New York.
"Vizo is now in multiple thousands of Israeli cell phones," Baxter said. "And we have several Israeli investors."
While the company is focusing on growing its user base right now, Baxter said he has plenty of ideas for monetization including leveraging data from users into sponsored Glances and other native advertising.
"I think getting news up front, getting it this fast, is something Millennials really want," Baxter said. "And Vizo is the perfect format for it."
