mob incentive

Mashable Write Up

mobincentive — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:48:27 +0000

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!

mobincentive — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:49:16 +0000

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…

mobincentive — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:42:31 +0000

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…

Friends and Family Alpha

mobincentive — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:20:51 +0000

We’re sitting in my condo, working on some minor site details (enhancing the FAQ, figuring out the proper privacy policy). We just sent out a bunch of emails inviting friends and family to start trying out the site.

I’m feeling a bit anxious about it – this will probably be the first time any of my friends or family have really seen something that I’ve worked on. In most of my time at Microsoft working on web platforms and servers, I didn’t really have a concrete, public entity to show to anyone.

Anyway, it’s pretty exciting to have some people other than ourselves using the site. Hopefully, we’ll get a lot of good constructive feedback.

Andrew

Greetings and Salutations

mobincentive — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:20:36 +0000

We’re working from Brian’s house, just getting our blog started. Brian is loading some data onto a test server so we can do some load testing. I am taking care of random administrative details (eg. starting this blog).

Things have been pretty fun so far – we’re hoping things will stay that way.