Disqus provides an online service for managing comments and enhancing the discussion on blogs, websites, and applications.  The system provides bloggers and publishers with a threaded conversation and a more defined discussion community, and also provides moderation and spam filtering tools.  On the flip side, readers and commenters can track, manage, and verify their comments across all sites that use Disqus, and can create a profile which includes a “comment blog” with all comments they’ve contributed.  Bloggers and readers can comment and reply on-the-go via email or phone, and since Disqus is hosted separately, comments are unaffected if a website experiences downtime. For more on what Disqus has to offer, check out this list.

In this interview, I had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Ha, Co-Founder & CEO of Disqus, who shares details on the company’s product, back-end, monetization strategy, and scalability (utilizing Twitter to quantify the impact of downtime!), as well as their techniques for establishing a large user base, which now includes 38,000 websites and 600,000 user profiles.

In addition to the Disqus product, the company is known for their incredible focus on providing support to customers and incorporating their feedback into the product feature set. LouisGray.com has a great post about this.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting Part 2 of this interview, where Daniel talks about his experience as part of the Y Combinator community, and shares his secrets to success with the application process, so be sure to check back for more.

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