Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Hayes Davis, Founder and CEO of Appozite.

Q: Give us the elevator pitch for your company.

Appozite is the company behind CheapTweet.com, a social deals search engine that indexes the deals people are talking about on Twitter. Coupons and deals sites are a big category but since they’re based on the affiliate sales model, their selections are limited to what’s available on the affiliate networks. They also aren’t very good at responding to deals in real-time. This is a problem for shoppers who are looking to save money on something unique or want to be clued into a time sensitive deal.

We’ve built a search engine that uses specialized algorithms to automatically find Twitter messages related to deals. Since we’re mining the Twitter conversation, we can help you discover deals that literally can’t be found anywhere else – and we can do it in real-time. From the “Saturday Night Special” offered by an Etsy artisan to Twitter-only specials from big brands to friends sharing a good deal on a book at Amazon, we find it all. Then, we take it a step further and filter out the best deals based on user votes and algorithms that monitor how much a particular deal is talked about on Twitter.

Q: How did the company get started? Who had the idea? Was there an “A Ha!” moment?

Appozite was founded by four of us with fairly diverse backgrounds in software engineering, e-commerce, business development and organizational communication. This was in May of 2008. At the time we had more of a theme than a concrete business plan. All of us saw huge potential in finding appropriate ways to integrate e-commerce and social software. Most online sellers at that time were (and still are) just waking up to the huge changes taking place in how people use the web – especially with the rise of social networks, real-time communication and location-based services. We wanted to help e-commerce play well with these innovations. From there we worked through a few prototypes of different ideas. We released some of them and got some feedback. CheapTweet was one of these prototypes and it really struck a chord.

Q: What was your first indication that you really had something interesting here?

We launched CheapTweet on the Tuesday before Black Friday in 2008. By Black Friday we were featured in an article on MSNBC.com. That experience definitely helped us feel like we were on to something.

After that we begin to spread by word of mouth among all the small sellers on Twitter – the artisans and merchants running small e-commerce shops. They were so happy we were automatically giving them more exposure for their offers since they were under-served by the traditional coupons & deals model. They gave us great feedback and encouragement and really helped us get started.

Q: How has customer adoption been so far?

Customer adoption as been great. There are really two parts to our business, the consumer side and the seller side. For consumers, CheapTweet is a free service for discovering great deals. We’ve seen traffic to the site grow 600% so far this year.

The seller side is where our revenue model comes into play. I think the Yellow Pages is the best metaphor for what we do. In the same way the Yellow Pages harvest all business phone numbers and then sell more exposure via a free-to-consumer service, we algorithmically find deals and sell services to online sellers to get more exposure to our user base. We do this through advertising and our CheapTweet Stores program that we launched in late June. We’re working with companies like Barnes & Noble, Toys “R” Us, Overstock.com, Drugstore.com, Jockey, VacationRentals.com (part of Austin-based HomeAway) and quite a few others. The response has been really positive.

Q: How has the company been financed so far? Are you looking for additional capital?

We’re in the seed stage right now. That said, at this point we’re growing organically through revenue generated by sales of our advertising and CheapTweet Stores services. We are, however, considering our options for raising additional capital that could help us grow faster.

Q: What can we expect to see in the future from your company?

There’s a world of information out there about great deals. We’re implementing some big ideas about how we can use what we’ve done so far with our technology at CheapTweet to find and organize deals that are flowing in more areas of the web. We also believe that like online news, social connections and e-commerce, the coupons and deals space can benefit from personalization and smarter algorithms. Aside from the technology, we plan to continue announcing partnerships and growing the seller-side of our business. As we continue to progress, we’ll be making all announcements on the CheapTweet blog (http://cheaptweet.com/blog) so subscribe to that to stay in the loop.