Since its launch last year, BackType has continued to attract attention as one of the ways to track comments within the blogosphere, follow people making comments.

At PodCamp in Toronto last month, I had a chance to talk to co-founder Chris Golda, who mentioned that the company had introduced some new tools and raised another round of seed capital. So, I fired off a few questions to get an update.

1. Talk about how BackType is evolving and how BackTweets and BackType connect fit into the strategic vision?

Everything we do aligns in some way with the long-term vision Michael Montano and I have for BackType. The tools we build for comment authors and publishers promote more conversation online. We believe that the thoughts and insights people share through comments are incredibly valuable. An individual comment may seem to hold little worth, but when you look at millions in aggregate there’s the potential to unlock a lot of value. That’s what BackType is all about.

Lately we’ve been focused on extending our support beyond blogs to other platforms and services. For example, we recently added FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and others. BackType Connect has always been an interest of ours, but it became really compelling after adding FriendFeed and Twitter. Connecting conversations is something a lot of publishers are interested in, and we were in a great position to do it. We built BackTweets to solve a specific problem we were having while using Twitter — we wanted an easy way to track who was tweeting comments from BackType. It’s also very complementary to BackType Connect. After seeing the tweets about a particular article or post, it’s natural to want to see conversations happening elsewhere, on blogs and other social media.

2. How much are you gleaning from how people are using BackType? How is that impacting product development?

We read everything people say about BackType — feedback and support e-mails, as well as tweets and, of course, comments. It’s very time consuming, but it’s definitely one of the most important things we do. BackType Subscriptions was something we built purely based on feedback. Understanding how people use BackType has played a big role in what we’ve been releasing and our plans for the future.

3. Can you talk about the funding you’ve received?

We raised a $300,000 seed round of financing from True Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley with $155 under management. They’re known for their investments in Meebo, Sphere, Automattic (creators of WordPress), and many others, but what really drew us to them is that they really understand the needs of early-stage start-ups and fully support our vision and direction for the company.

4. What kind of business model are you working on? Are investors looking for revenue sources before they commit?

BackType is primarily used as a toolset for comment authors, but it’s also used by companies for customer support, public relations, etc. It follows that our business model will revolve around the latter. Online conversations are an extremely valuable subset of information online that we’re organizing better than anyone else. We think there are plenty of ways to make money helping publishers and marketing professionals be more effective at what they do. We also want to help consumers understand what people are saying about the companies, products, services, and other things they’re interested in. That’s helpful in many ways, especially for those making purchase decisions.

While start-ups with early revenues are becoming increasingly attractive these days, I don’t think revenue is crucial this early. I’m sure there are other things professional investors look at more seriously — more important questions that they want answered. At seed stage, the main reason someone invests in you won’t be the fact that you’re making a relatively insignificant amount of revenue early on.

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