Intralist Is A Site For Everyone Who Just Can’t Get Enough Top Five Lists

Lists! Everybody loves ’em, right? I mean, even if you pretend that you don’t, I’m guessing you find yourself furtively clicking on “top five” or “top 10” articles every once in a while. So what about a site that’s built entirely around lists? That’s Intralist, in a nutshell.

John Jaxheimer (formerly creative director at Sports Illustrated) said that he and his co-founders Stuart Schwartz and Alex Ressi saw a problem where there’s “no way for consumers to effectively compare things.” In their view, lists are a great format for those comparisons, and of course magazines and websites release lists all the time, but the team sees Intralist as a way to give users a part in the conversation.

“Publishers have been creating list content for decades, but these days everybody is a content creator,” Jaxheimer said. “Why limit it to a one-way dialogue from publisher to consumer?”

On Intralist, anyone can create a top five list (yes, they’re limited to five entries). Users can start a list from scratch, or they can take an existing one and create their own version. As you’re building a list, the service also helps you find relevant images and links.

Results from different lists around a given subject can also be aggregated into a “definitive” Intralist. For example, you can see individual lists of the best burgers in New York City (including one created by Jaxheimer himself), or you can click on the red “i” icon and see the aggregated results.

The Intralist team is also hoping to work with editorial teams and publishers — Made already used Intralist to post photo lists from New York Fashion Week. Ressi suggested that these lists can help drive traffic, particularly if the list contains more than five items — the Intralist post then becomes a preview of the longer list on your own website. And since every account gets a profile page highlighting all the lists they’ve created, users can still find a list long after it was first posted.

“I’m very aware of the sensitivities that content providers have around their content and also the amount of time they put into creating that content,” Jaxheimer added. Rather than scraping publisher content, he said his aim is to “work with them to drive users back to their sites more effectively.”

Intralist is currently available as a responsive website that works on mobile, with plans to launch a mobile app early next year.