The next „Facebook“ will be from Munich!

As a German founder you are in a dilemma. Of course you start your business to disrupt a market or at least to slightly change the world. Otherwise you shouldn’t build a company in the first place. If you create a new social network, you are going to aim for more than just 20,000 users one day. If you create an online shop, you will want to sell more than just books for the next 10 years. You are going for millions of users. You want to change the way people do online shopping.

For a founder it is absolutely essential to have concrete visions and to communicate them. But compared to the US, in Germany it is hard to do so.

Although there is a German saying „Bescheidenheit ist eine Zier, doch weiter kommt man ohne ihr“ (meaning modesty is good, but you will be more successful without it), being moderate is really well respected. Of course, at the first glance nothing is bad about it and to be honest, I do really prefer moderate people in my private surrounding.

But as a startup the story is different. A typical startup has too little money, too little manpower, and too few users using a product which is not yet ready. So as a founder, what can you do to change that?

Should you tell potential investors that most likely you are going to fail like most startups? Should you tell potential staff that they could earn more money in an established business? Or should you tell the few users you have that you will probably never reach the critical mass needed for your buggy product?
No, no, and no!

You have to tell investors that you will succeed in any case, with or without them. You have to convince employees that it is the chance of their lifetime to become part of something huge. And of course you have to congratulate your early adopters on being first using the next big thing. 
You are the founder. If you do not believe in your baby, who else should? Besides the problem that many people in Germany will call you babbler, freak, or something like that (I don't care), the biggest challenge is to make your new users believe that they are on the next big thing. And they have to believe it! Otherwise, why should they tell their friends about it?

Convincing new users of a product’s potential seems to be a bit easier in the US. Americans love to try out new things and they love to be the first ones using a new service. 
Unfortunately the situation in Germany is quite a bit different. People here start using apps like MoID when they are perfect and when at least 5 friends told them to use them. 
However, there are also positive examples: Two startups that overcame this dilemma are XING and ResearchGate.


So we are totally positive that MoID can perform like this! 
Deal with it, Germany, MoID will be the next Facebook.

Phillip Bellé CEO of MoID

Follow me on Twitter

Help us spreading the word!

Download the MoID app right here.

Social Media Campaign: Berlin, Munich, or San Francisco? Promote your City!

MoID is growing rapidly in 2014, but we still need to get more traction. Our early adopters can’t always use the full potential of MoID yet, because there are too few people in their surrounding who use the app. That's why we have now decided to put all our social marketing efforts on one single city at first. We hope that this is going to help us to turn around network effects to our favor and to the favor of all our users. And that is why we need your help!

Most of our current users are from Berlin, Munich, and San Francisco, which makes these cities the best candidates.
We see the traction we gained in these cities as a big plus, and this is why we have decided to pick one of them to kick off our campaign.

Berlin is the the tech capital of Germany. The most influential German tech blogs like Gründerszene and deutsche startups are located here, and people are really open minded. In addition, it is a beautiful city where our team would love to spend some more time to boost our social media campaign.

Munich has one big advantage: we are based in Munich and a large part of our network is based here. Munich is smaller than Berlin and San Francisco (Bay Area), but we have about the same number of users here, so Munich has some advantages in terms of market share.

San Francisco. What should I say about San Francisco? Of course we would love to accompany our campaign right in the heart of Silicon Valley! We have as many users in San Francisco as in Munich and Berlin. People there are really open minded and love to try out new apps and technologies, but unfortunately our network is smaller over there.

     

MoID in Berlin

MoID in Munich

MoID in San Francisco

So we really need your feedback, guys! Let us know which city you would choose, why, and of course if you could help us out with intros to local blogs, radio / tv stations, celebrities, or anything else that could help us spread the word.


Thanks a lot!

Phillip Bellé CEO of MoID

Follow me on Twitter

Help us spreading the word!

Download the MoID app right here.

Why is the new MoID on Android much better?

A new version of our Android version is out! It has many improvements but they're not visible for the user, that's why I'm writing this post!

First of all, this version is yet technologically in 2014: it means that we removed the old libraries and softwares to take only the best (for our great users, of course)! So, we moved to Gradle, we write now code with Android Studio and we make our exchange between client and server with Google Volley. From a developer side, it's day and night: the IDE is much more stable and the build process much more customizable!
But it brings also cool aspects to the users: Volley is much faster than LoopJ and also a bit more secured (I have to admit that our implementation of the old library, LoopJ, was not perfect...).

Also, the current version is so stable and reliable that it gave us the possibility to find a tiny bug in the MoID Server API, a thing which was totally impossible with the old one.

In the new version, you'll find a new Panel which demonstrates one of our new directions: gamification! It's called "Leaderboard" and you'll see there the best MoID users on the Earth (the goal is that you become #1).
To be #1 on Android, it will be a bit more complicated than on iOS because you cannot drop your ID (not yet, but it's the next step and it will come fast!) but I'm sure that the Android users are much better than the iOS users (yeah, I'm an Android user :P) so it's the perfect place to demonstrate this: invite friends, exchange contacts and be at the top!

Yes, I designed the "?", beautiful, isn't it ? ;)

Laurent Meyer
Android (what else?) Developer
@laurent_m_meyer
+Laurent Meyer

Proximity in social networks: Find, don’t explore.

Few months ago, Natasha Lomas  @riptar wrote on TechCrunch: “Proximity social networking has often been a tough sell to consumers”. Apart from proximity services related to dating I totally agree with that. In my opinion there are actually two success factors for proximity in social networks.

First, its style and UI have to fit to its purpose. For example, the “hot or not” design of Tinder obviously is a perfect fit for the dating area. It’s easy to make ten decisions within five seconds, and even if one of them was “wrong” - no problem, it’s just for fun. In a business context, it is risky to dismiss someone just because of a quick glimpse when they are nearby. That is probably the main reason why the traditional business card is still doing a good job. It is extremely helpful to be able to quickly exchange cards at the first meeting, but still having the chance to decide if the contact might be valuable or not - maybe even with the help of additional tools such as LinkedIn. In any case, there will be no problem to get in touch with these contacts in the future. Even if you had first decided to ignore someone, you can still contact them, for instance if your professional environment has changed.

The second success factor is that users really have to benefit from their proximity to other users. Recalling the dating example, it totally makes sense to recommend persons nearby, rather than from the other end of the country. People would not be interested in these guys anyway. 

From the business perspective, proximity between social network users is nice to have, but it isn’t essential. It might be a little factor, but to be honest, experience, introductions, and past success count way more when people decide whom to get in touch with. If you are looking for an expert in any field, why should you limit yourself to people nearby? 

In my opinion, proximity or location services should be used the other way around. It’s not about finding people online to get in touch with them later. The key to professional networking is being able to find and connect to people you’ve already met in your real life.

Our app is pretty good at that, but we now came to the conclusion that decisions about the relevance of a contact do not have to be mutual. Therefore, in our next major update, you will be able to simply follow or favorite people you’ve met, so that you can easily find them on the major social networks later on. No mutual contact exchange and no social network friend request are needed anymore, but you will still be able to keep track of important people from your real life. 

Phillip Bellé CEO of MoID

Follow me on Twitter

Help us spreading the word.

Download the MoID app right here.

What makes a successful event?

Everybody who attended an event such as a tech meet up, a fair, or a conference, wonders about the same: Was this event worth attending? Was it successful? It’s not only about how much money you spend, but also about the time you invest in relation to the outcome. Probably the best result for us is to get in touch with people who can help us - no matter if they are potential new clients, press contacts, investors, or simply people who like what we are doing.

But why are some events more successful than others?

Probably the most essential success factor for event organizers - besides from finding helpful sponsors - is to find awesome speakers. Speakers are not just important to obtain high quality content for the prospective audience, but also to get attention for an event in advance. Moreover, their announcement helps to form a big and likeminded audience, so that event organizers can select their attendees in the best case or simply adjust the ticket pricing ;-)  All organizers of successful events look for these three components: great speakers, a homogeneous audience, and sponsors to keep ticket prices on a moderate level. 

But there are more possibilities to maximize the outcome for the attendees. 

The most helpful organizers know their attendees in advance and proactively help to build an effective network, so that everybody has the chance to contact people that matter to them. In addition, and this is probably best practice, organizers should know what every single attendee is doing, in what they are good at, and what they are looking for. Providing all this information in advance might seem time consuming to the regular attendee, but it can be a great chance to connect with likeminded people, for instance in speed networking or discussion rounds out of the limelight. 

For us, the event with the best outcome yet was the Collision conference 2014 in Las Vegas, which was organized by the same guys who run the Summit in Dublin every year. We can’t wait to attend the Summit in November and we can only highly recommend it! These guys really know how to organize events. 

But since you will still miss interesting people on a big event, we decided to modify our app: it will soon be possible to directly access the social media profiles of the people around you. Like, “hey this press guy could be a good contact, let’s add him on LinkedIn”. Our users told us that it would be extremely helpful to identify interesting people around them. We totally agree.

MoID at the Collision conference 2014 in Las Vegas.

Phillip Bellé CEO of MoID
Follow me on Twitter

Help us to spread the word!

Download the MoID app right here.

New Android version online

Hey guys! Did you try our new Android version? After 6 months struggling with thousands of Android devices and their respective problems, we finally did it. Our new version (Android 4.0 and above) actually works pretty well and is quite close to MoID on iOS. 

A side note to other startups: If you think about starting any project on both platforms at the same time: Forget it. Really, concentrate on a single platform only. Although we are proud to have MoID working cross platform, from a startup perspective we would never start with two versions again!

Get our new version here: MoID on GooglePlay