In our latest pivot, we decided to focus on events as part of our go-to-market strategy. But why?
Well, first of all, events are the place where networking actually happens in a concentrated form. This makes them the perfect scenario for MoID. That is, if we can ease part of the pain that networking causes you on events, then we did something right.
Second, events allow us to establish an environment where networking gets efficient. While typically the main problem for networking apps is that both parties need to have the app, the advantage of events lies in their organization: The event organizer usually sends out pre-event notes to their future attendees, to facilitate their experience. We found that around 80% of attendees install MoID before an event, if told so by the organizer.
Third, we will soon be able to provide premium features to event organizers, such as generating event summaries and stats for their users, and creating recommendations for users who might be interested in future events.
Last but not least, MoID is the only networking app which works across all events. This is most handy for you, our users, because you do not need to install a new event app for every event you attend.
We are quite happy. So far, we were or will be the official networking app on most of the major startup events in the German-speaking area, including Spätschicht, Bits and Pretzels, and Goto Startups.
You are an event organizer? We integrate your event for free! Click here for more info.
The key to professional networking today is being able to find and connect online to people you already met in your real life. This has always been the basic idea behind MoID, ever since we first thought about it in 2011. But being a startup we've learned a lot since the early days, and our experience reflects in many incremental changes to our product. One of our latest learnings was about business cards, and it led to one of our biggest and most important changes.
Why do people still use business cards?
People exchange business cards, go back to their hotels, review the cards they collected, throw away some of them, and search for interesting people in social networks like LinkedIn. We learned that what people love about business cards (other than fancy layouts) is the possibility to delay the decision if a contact is valuable or not. However, people hate about business cards that they are hard to archive and there's a big gap to the social networks where the actual connection is made today.
Whereas unsuccessful apps like Bump or CardFlick only cloned the act of exchanging cards, we decided to focus completely on the result: Business cards are a chance to get in touch after the first meeting. As a consequence, we made a bunch of changes to MoID:
1. No contact information exchange, but connections on social networks
We got completely rid of contact information. Instead we focus on connecting people on social networks. The reason for this decision is twofold: First, handling contact information leads to privacy concerns among users. Second, eventually professionals want to connect on social networks anyway. With the new version, you can connect directly from within MoID on all major social networks, which is extremely handy.
2. No mutual friendships, but one-sided follows
Until now you needed to make mutual offers to get connected on MoID. But we found that this hindered our idea of allowing you to delay your decision if a contact was valuable or not. We therefore dropped this mechanism all together, so that you can now simply follow other people who might be interesting in the future.
3. Focus on events
MoID unfolds its great potential whenever many people are at the same place. We therefore decided to put a strong focus on events. MoID now automatically recognizes whenever you are attending an event organized on Eventbrite or Meetup, and automatically includes it in your MoID timeline. This facilitates your organization by keeping a visual diary of who you met where.
4. View social profiles of who you met
Whenever you encounter new people, you are interested in learning something about them. Typically this is among the first things professionals do, when they decide if a contact is valuable. Furthermore, the bigger the event, the more important it is to identify interesting people. The newMoID therefore allows you to view the social profiles of whoever you met in your real life. Trust me, you’ll love this feature :-)
I would summarize the changes we made as follows: Fast, lightweight, and efficient networking at your fingertips.
Wanna see it in action? Here is a short product video:
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.
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.
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.
