Mashable Write Up

Well, we just got a writeup on Mashable.  Woo hoo! Here’s a link:

http://mashable.com/2007/06/20/mobincentive-social-fundraising-for-getting-things-done/

It’s been an interesting experience trying to drum up traffic so far.  We have very little experience in doing this, so it’s hard to tell if we’re doing the right stuff.  We sent out email to several people yesterday and far less than half of them have gotten back to us.  I’d assume most startups have a similar problem.

The two bigs things on our plate right now are increasing traffic (and registrations) to the site and developing some Facebook integration.

In other news, there’s a great Ron Paul challenge up on the site today: http://mobincentive.com/The_Ron_Paul_video_challenge.aspx

Ready, Set, Launch!

Today’s the day we start the soft launch.  We’ve spent the last week getting the site in order (final bug fixes, test pass, and perf / load runs) and we’re ready to show the site to a broader audience.  We’re starting small with friends, family, and online communities that we’re a part of (my WoW guild, Seattle  Tech Startups etc.).  We’re creating incentives relevant to those groups and are sending out initiations now.

As you could probably guess opening the site to the world is incredibly exciting and a little nerve-wracking at the same time.  We’ll be keeping a close watch on traffic as well as the inflow of new ideas over the next few weeks to see how things take off.

One Week Later…

We’re sitting in my condo again and we just propped a bunch of changes (based on user feedback) up to the website.   The list includes:

• Adding tooltips
• Allowing anonymous comments and contributions (very small ones)
• Email preferences
• Pledges/Payment tracking for completed ideas
• Letting users enter birthdays instead of entering their age (duh!)
• Fame points refill/bleed (250 at the end of the week if you logged in, -10 if you didn’t)
• Accepted solutions are now inline with the idea
• And of course, various bug fixes

We’ve really been enjoying all the feedback from our users – there have been lots of good suggestions!  Hopefully, everyone will continue to use the site.

Since I’m a stats geek, I thought I’d share a little (from Google Analytics):

• 333 visits
• 104 absolute unique visitors
• 6857 page views
• 20.59 avg pageviews per visit
• 10:29 avg time on site
• 75% IE, 22% Firefox
• 96% Windows, 1.5% Mac, 1.5% Linux

Next steps – writing a press release, planning a public launch, etc…