Jason’s Put a $5K Bounty on His Dream Chrome Extension | E2338

0:00All right, it's time, Lon, for us to reveal round one of our bounty program for annotated.com. I own the domain name annotated.com. I had literally bought this for 30 or 40 grand after I sold my second company, Weblogs, Inc., to AOL. And I said, my next startup is going to annotate the web. And my idea is you could highlight any piece of text and then you could dispute that piece of text or give additional content. Right. Because I had been hit with a lot of copyright issues and because we were doing blogs and gadget or autoblog, joystick, all these great blogs. Shout out to Peter Rojas and Ryan and Sean Gold and, of course, Brian Alvey.

0:47Very successful business. I said, this could be my next business because I don't have to do the content. But there'll be a story in the Wall Street Journal. You highlight two sentences and then you give your opinion on it. And then other people can go to that page and give their opinion. And I just thought, this is going to be my billion-dollar startup. Well, here we are. It's 20 years later. I forgot I had the domain name. I forgot I had bought it. And then vibe coding happens. And I said, you know what I want to do? I want to put out a$5 ,000 bounty for people to make me find only my Chrome extension.

1:16Now, this would normally have cost, 20 years ago,$500 ,000 to build. Maybe five years ago, I could have done it with an offshore group for$250 ,000. Maybe two years ago, I could have done it for$50 ,000. But right now, just putting out a$5 ,000 bounty, I think you can get, this is my premise, vibe coding folks, people using these tools, to build it in a week or two. And then at least I would get, let's say the$5 ,000 doesn't result in a final product, at least I get ideas. Yeah. And we get some show content. Sure. And that's really my goal here. That's what annotated.com is. I see it as a Chrome sidebar, as you can see here on the website, premium domain.

1:54And I said, just for this contest, we want somebody to execute my idea, as explained on the website, and then make a Chrome extension. Now, if you could, Lon, be so kind, to explain the broad strokes of this. This is a$5 ,000 bounty. You're going to have to pay tax. You're going to have to submit your stuff. If you don't want the money, donate it to somebody. I don't know. But I own whatever code you write is open source is, I guess, the rule. And I have complete control of the contest. I can cancel it if everything sucks. I can give two prizes. I can split the prize. I can do whatever I want is the idea here.

2:36Basically. So caveat, caveat, caveat. Ship it, win, 5K. Tell us what we got. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get$240 in free credits when they go to Sentry.io slash twist and use the code twist Northwest Registered Agent. Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist domain. Every. For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io.

3:18All right. So we've got three entries to go through today. Hard to distinguish between them. I'll just use the creator names because they're all called annotated or variations of it. Our first one comes from Robert. He did not give us a last name. It's annotated.wtf. This works with X. It works with YouTube videos. It works with articles, though with articles, you were saying your dream version was you could just take a little bit of the article, highlight it, and then discuss just that segment. The way Roberts works, you could share the article. So we haven't yet drilled it down into share just this quote.

3:54You could share the article and give your thoughts. And then you could say, of course, the author says this one sentence, and I disagree with that. So we do have a demo prepped and ready to go. So this is annotated.wtf. We'll call this Submission 1. Submission 1. This is officially Submission 1. Let's take a look here at what they built, and you can sportscast it. I will be happy to. Let's roll Robert's demo. So as you can see, we're on this CNN article about the Six Flags roller coaster that, oh, I read about this. There was a roller coaster that they're saying over the years, X2, I believe it's called, And it was knocking people around that they were actually developing brain injuries that were requiring medical attention over the years.

4:38So that is the article that we have found here. We are annotating that article. And as you can see, we've pulled it up. It's in the sidebar. And now we're on the annotated page. And we're leaving a comment. I can't believe people are getting injured by roller coasters in 2026. And now the demo is even progressing. And we can see you can also edit a. So it created a page at annotated.wtf for the handle at twistartups.com slash, and then a slug on dash six dash flags, roller coaster, yada, yada. And here they said the annotation is at the top. I cannot believe people are still getting injured by roller coasters.

5:19How is this still living in 2026? That's the comment from the individual. And then below it is an image from the page. And then when he scrolls down, it has a link to that source. On the top left, we see the person can hit the edit button. And very nicely done. And I like the sidebar. The sidebar and the design of this is very appealing to me. And it actually used a highlighter metaphor. I like this branding idea. This was actually my original idea, was to use a yellow highlighter as the iconography of it. And so this person picked up on that, which I'll say is a somewhat obvious idea, Lon. Sure.

5:56And he's highlighted and he has the marker there annotated at WTF. And on the side, you know, he says, hey, select 30 to 1 ,000 characters on the page. The quote will appear here, yada, yada. Very well constructed, easy to use. Yes. I would have put a screenshot of the web page and then the quote underneath it. But I never thought putting the quote up top and then the screenshot below it. Interesting design choice. I guess that's something we could A-B test. let's go on to the next piece and look at clipping a video this is a very controversial one you know if you clip a video some people might be like hey that's my video of course there is fair use so you get to clip a little bit of a video these days i actually feel like this it's a generational thing they are our era the idea of taking a piece of someone else's video and then resharing it was like oh i don't know that makes me a little uncomfortable you should just link back to them.

6:52But today, clipping has become such an art form unto itself and maybe arguably the best way to share content to make it get wider attention. I feel like people have less of an issue with it now. I feel like you can clip people's things. And as long as you're giving them credit, it's not more than a few minutes of the original content. I think that's okay. I think you're right. If it's a percentage of the original that doesn't preclude somebody from watching the original and it's clear you're not the owner as it would be on a website called annotated. And if you're doing fair use, the four part test for fair use, you can look up.

7:26But one of them is you're doing criticism here. So taking the whole episode, no bueno. I would say taking, you know, I don't know, two minutes would be just fine with any podcaster. Let's see what we got. So here and show on the sidebar, nice and slow, what the person's doing. Sure. I would also note you there is a file a claim button at the bottom if you feel like somebody has clipped too much of your original work and you're a little salty about. OK, so, yeah, like take a look. We're in the sidebar. Let's get it playing again. And you can see that they're they're now leaving a comment. I thought Puneet's demo was super sick on this episode.

8:03Now they are marking the source. And there it is. It's live. And you can go visit the page and see the segment of the video that they clipped. It's processing right now. There's the headline. Once again, I thought Puneet's demo was super sick. There's the content right underneath it. And then a comment thread where other people. I think this is really the magic of your concept and how we could see it going and becoming like a destination to itself. is that almost like old school aggregation sites, your digs, your fark.coms, your Reddits, one person's annotation and comment on this video could then lead you into a whole discussion thread, a vibrant community of people talking about each other's links.

8:47Yes, very nicely done. And I saw, if we scroll back a little bit, he did give the starting time and the closing time, if you go back to when he's first clipping it. There you go. And he's just picking. He wants 42 minutes and 51 seconds to 44. So he set the start, he set the end, and he clipped it. I love that part. Yeah, this one actually, a lot of the annotated, a lot of the annotated that we saw had this clipping feature. And sometimes it was awkward to navigate. This one, very clean, as you can see. Okay. Yeah. Wow. This is great. Yeah. He did a really nice job. This one is pretty slick. So now we're on X.com, the everything app.

9:34This is a post from Jason with a chart. And again, we're doing the same thing. They're going to add their comment. What's your take on the tweet? More men need to lock TF in. TF in. Yeah. And now that's it. Super fast. I mean, you can see. And I like that, too. If you go back a little bit. the post to X. You can take your comment and post your comment as a new post to X. So it's sort of integrating X workflow within annotated without ever leaving. You could just keep the conversation going. That's very nice. Starting a company is hard enough. You need to focus on running your business and building a great product.

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10:58So head over to Evry.io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's E-V-E-R-Y.io. Evry.io. This is kind of the vision. This would have taken 20 years ago, six months to build. Five years ago, it would have taken three months to build and to get the 1.0 out. And now it takes but two weeks or less. Well done. And there's a feed at the top. So obviously, if things were trending or were today or maybe an AI-based algorithm, maybe just take the Twitter algorithm. the x.com algorithm is now open source. You could just go to the feed. Oh, interesting. But here you have people going to the feed.

11:44And I'm wondering if it takes a screenshot of the tweet so it's preserved forever, because that's one of the problems. Oh, interesting, you're right. I think that's an image, or it might, maybe they're just embedding the image. Are you on the live site right now? This is a prerecorded demo that you're seeing. Oh. No, no, I think he moved to the live site. Oh, well, there you go. Okay, so your producer, Jacob, is on the live site. If you right mouse click on that, Is that an embed from, yeah, that's an embed from Twitter. So that's an interesting way to do it. It's an embed from Twitter because you're hitting the lights.

12:15Yeah, it's active, yeah. What I would do here, I'm just going to give a little punch up. I would give the user the ability to embed Twitter, do a screenshot, or both. Maybe a little too advanced, but absolutely fantastic. Well, the screenshot idea, because so many things get pulled off of Twitter, deleted, people think better of it. that's why you would be a screenshot would be a savvy move there because then you can correct and it would be your way of preserving a hot tweet that you think might get pulled all right yeah i'm going to give this one um on a score eight and a half out of ten it's very i mean it feels close to production ready i i have a tiny couple of little things i mean i guess we have to test it but my lord you're logged in with the this week in startups accounting using it my lord this is fantastic i want to give it an 8.5 of 10 let's go to our next demo all right our Our next demo comes to us from Alan Shifflett, number two.

13:09It's another take. There he is. There's Alan. It's another take on annotated. Beautiful landing page. And as you can see, he also, I was going to say this before, but I figured I'd say it. He also did come up with the highlighter branding. As you can see right here, published the annotation. So we're going to log in here. We're going to, it's a CNN page about Dolly Paul. Poor Dolly Part. It's about her. Her health struggle highlights a crisis that faces millions of American caregivers. They're leaving our comment. Dolly Parton's legacy includes an unfortunate reality of caregiving, not taking care of oneself.

13:43Oh, that's just they're pulling that in from CNN. That's the article headline. Yes. So then we're moving down here. And they write a snarky comment. I guess I'm too young to know who this is. And we get to the article page, like the permalink page. I said, OK, go a little bit. Decent. Let's go back here to the - To this page. Well, no, go back one. This is the feed page of all of them. The permalink page is this one. So here, the issue with this one is it just gives you the headline there. Then you have the comment, a bit confusing what's going on. I think a better way to do this would to take a screenshot of the CNN page and put that there.

14:25And then underneath it, put the comment. and then you have the picture of the person, Jacob there, producer Jacob. I guess I'm too young to know who it is. And I like the fact that it has on the right hand who annotated it, how many annotations they have, how many followers they have. That's part of this. So what this one got right is the social media profile on the right and the follower count and all that great stuff. The left, I would have put an actual screenshot of the CNN page or like a thumbnail of it or something. I have to say this also makes kind of the argument for putting the comment up top because it's hard to know just from looking at this.

15:02It looks like what's going on. Yeah. It looks like this page is just a link to this CNN article and then a comment thread underneath it. Whereas. So work to be done. A little. A little. I think that I like the other, the annotated dot WTF approach of making the comment. The annotation is the star. The link is here's what I'm talking about is the context. So this is submission two. Let's go ahead and see what's next. This is you talking about the mosquito laser iron dome for mosquitoes to protect your backyard. And then leaving a comment. Need one of these. But for hornets, please. Jacob's having some hornet troubles, I guess.

15:39So he got it. OK, so here we go. Taking and annotating a tweet. Oh, I like this. Hang on. Pause. Go back a little bit, Jacob. I want to highlight something on that screen I didn't notice. I like this. Did you see there's you could categorize? You're leaving a hot take. It's a fact check. You're steel manning the argument. You found receipts. It's an explainer. I like that very much that you can tag. Here's the kind. Plus one for that. Here's the kind of annotation that I'm leaving. That's a nice feature. Yeah, plus one for that. All right, you can keep going. The page is a little bit kludgy on the left.

16:09And there's your main feed. I like the idea of a main feed, but yeah, it needs to be better. What is that 21 in parentheses before your at name? I don't even know what that is. I think they're just pulling the tweet, like metadata, and some stuff's getting pulled in. Okay, yeah, because that does not look great. That looks a little weird. Hey, listen, this is like a V1, so that should be cleaned up a bit. But I do like ideas, multiply when they're shared on the bottom left. I like invite to annotated. I would have made that put in somebody's email, and you can just invite them. Sure. I like people worth following on the top right, trending topics on the right-hand bar.

16:49All of this is somebody who understands that this is supposed to be a social network of sorts for people annotating stuff. So very well done. I also, if you look at the very top left, the plans for a for you algorithmic feed, like annotated with learn over time, the kinds of topics and stories that interest you, that's very promising that this could be another way to just source and discover what's going on in my feed. Fantastic. Well done. We have our third submission here, Annotated.com, with just one N to set it apart. It's by Chirag Azarpoda. He bought the domain. He actually bought this domain, Jason, annotated with one N in case people misspell it and still want to access the site.

17:33Great. Hijack my traffic. There you go. So, yeah, you've got it. Nice to meet you, Chirag. You're learning something. Yeah. All right. So he's on another CNN article. Trump's ambassador to Italy is cruising the Mediterranean on a$450 million yacht. That lucky so-and-so. Fair enough. Well, you buy ambassadorships. That's how it works. When you get an ambassadorship, it usually goes to people who have donated a lot, but then you're responsible for funding. I have a friend who did this. You have to fund the actual embassy yourself personally, is my understanding. Wait, really? So if you get Italy or you get Japan, look it up.

18:06But you've got to pay for the maintenance of the embassy and the staff and the food and everything. So it costs you five or 10 million bucks out of pocket, out of pocket or to your partners or whatever. So it's not a there's nothing free. That's a crazy system. You would assume the government is taking it. Anyway, so back to annotated. We could talk about that all day. I'm fascinated. But the building, maintenance, security and salaries are taken care of by the sending country's government. But ambassadors are expected to host receptions, dinners and other events and budgets don't usually cover that.

18:41So you are right. The ambassadors are paying a lot for like when they have state dinners or whatever. And anyway, anyway, let's get back to annotated. So as you can see, they've got the sidebar up. They're leaving a comment, a thoughtful comment about this Italy cruise. It's taking one last look. It gives them, you know, like sort of a moment to, hey, check up on what we're doing. Now it prompts signing in to the annotated.com service. That's something new. We haven't seen any of the others. And then here we go. Here's how the annotated page, like kind of a, kind of an X.com Twitter formulation on this one.

19:15Looks good. It does. It looks smart. I kind of like this one best so far. Again, for the CNN, if we go back, you know, you have the comment up top. It's very clear who. What you see here is, you know, it's from Jacob because it's his icon. underneath it. You kind of know that's his comment. Then you have the quote from the page, Trump ambassadors, yada, yada. So when you do this demo, the fact that it's just highlighting the headline, poorly done demo, what you would want to do is pick a paragraph and comment on a paragraph. Then it would be more clear what was going on here, but that's the fault of the user.

19:50Then below it, you have in the box, the CNN story. I would have made that CNN box have a thumbnail of the page, which you can do. There's many services that will do that. And then you can have a little more about the story there. But otherwise, great. And it has the date and the time and everything. You have trending sources on the road. Yeah, I like that. You have Home Explorer profile saved. I mean, and you can join the conversations. Absolutely solid effort, solid effort. Regular listeners already know that if you've got a great idea for a new business, our friends at Northwest Registered Agent want to help you bring it to life.

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21:08Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist domain. The problem here, Lon, is with these demos generally is that the examples are bad. And this is a good lesson to just highlight for founders. When you do a demo of your product, if you do a janky example, it's hard for people to understand it. So what you want to do here is say, hey, this article has the third paragraph. There's a really important point to be made that the ambassadors, let's say, have to pay for the parties. You highlight that portion, and then you say, I didn't know that ambassador. There's a really interesting concept here going on.

21:49So whoever made the demo, it's great that you made a smooth list demo. It shows everything. But you've got to remember my rule of startup founders presenting a product. Examples matter. Examples matter. Examples matter. Yeah. Like that Dwarkesh article about agent civilizations. A lot of people were doing this with that, where they were pulling out, oh, see how he phrased this one sentence in here? That makes it anthropomorphized or whatever. That's a good example of how people are really using services and platforms like this. Yes. Like that would be a better one to do. We're going to do a video one.

22:24So they picked this week in startups. Yeah. This is a recent VC roundtable. That's Shiel Minogue. Okay. Oh, you mark the part you want in the actual. Yeah. You put in the, you put the timestamp in yourself. Yeah. It's a, it's a, this one, I remember this now. This one, it's a lit. This is one of the more kludgy ones I was talking about where that other one, the original when we looked at WTF, it's very neat. It's like this little app and you just drag and drag and it is like using quick time or something. It's very intuitive. This one less. So you got to really exactly find the time code you want.

22:55It's a little, it's two extra steps. Correct. Okay. Good enough though. Let's see what happens when you actually hit continue. When you actually do it, what happens? And that's when you, you type in your reaction. Sheil is, Oh, I missed it. Something about Sheil. Yeah. Note is live. And you notice like when the note's live, you have to go view the note. It should just take you to view the note. Like this is like a little UX thing. Why are we making the person do another click? It should say your note's posted. This is the permalink for it. Invite people to it. That's an opportunity to move on to the next step.

23:32Here we go. You can share this note. Let's scroll up a little bit. Oh, and here's file a claim. If we were like, hey, they stole our episode of, oh, there we go. Sheil is an absolute God on X. Great. Awesome. All right. So the first one's like an eight and a half. The second one's like an eight. And this one's like a six, just in terms of refinement, design, et cetera. So I don't know if anybody else is going to submit to this, but if you want to beat these three, we're going to do a round two in two weeks. So two weeks from whenever this is published, you got 15 days or so, whatever the next episode is.

24:08And then we'll review round two. After round two, I might do a round three, but I'll probably just pick at that point. Right now, if I was going to pick, I would probably give right now, before round two, I probably would have given 80 % to number one and 20 % to number two, just in terms of a lot of good ideas there. Maybe I would give 70, 30, 60, 40. I'm not sure. But that's where my gut is right now. Lon, what did you think? Do you have a ranking here? Oh, I absolutely agree. The number one WTF Roberts submission, it's been my favorite all along. Like we've been looking at these and vetting them as they come in for, I would say, a few weeks now, close to a month.

24:45And that was one of the first ones I saw. And all along, I was like, this is the one. The Chrome extension is so easy. Everything is just intuitive. It's really pretty. Like it really looks like, it doesn't look vibe coded. It looks like a real professional website. So that's always been consistently, unless somebody is out there ready to top it. I'm ready to give the prize to Robert. Well, now here's the next thing. I would like you to maybe when we get past round two and we get the last round of feedback, I actually want somebody to talk to the founders. See if anybody, I think what I want to do is take this and incubate it inside of our venture firm and see if we can make it into a startup.

25:31I think that's going to be my next step is maybe we could actually build this as a startup, start using it. And venture capital firms in their documents can incubate a company. You can actually form a company. And like Saks did that with his was a glue, his AI based version of Saks. You know, so you can put a couple of million bucks in a 300 million dollar fund, let's say, towards an internally baked company. In fact, I think Snowflake was an internally baked company inside of a venture firm, which is incredible. And then how does it work? Well, the founder of the venture firm might take 50 % ownership.