In a startup, every year feels like a decade: Dozens of new features implemented, hundreds of contacts made on startup events, thousands of lines of code written. Yet we had one single goal: to provide the best networking experience for our users with this one app.
We drank a whole lot of coffee in our basement, missed the sun over a hundred times, and got competitive at table soccer.
And we finally got our patent in the US, so that MoID is now protected in Germany and in the states.
Now is the time to say a big thank you to all our supporters, beta testers, people that helped us, taught us, connected us, made intros, listened to our pitches in numerous elevator trips, and last but not least to our friends and families, who missed us for most of the year.
We are really thankful to all of you. Keep it up like this. 2015 will be even better :-)
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 startup nowadays you need to have a vision. Something you can answer if people ask where you want to be in ten years. And it’s not just that answer - for a startup it's a perfect way to keep focused in the face of all these brilliant ideas of yourself, your team, customers, and friends you're getting everyday. „Wouldn’t it be cool if we….“ or „couldn’t you integrate…“ or „why don’t you just…“. Don’t get me wrong, we love to get feedback and we are taking everything into account, but we can’t integrate too much at the beginning.
At least feedback means that people understand what we are doing, and that is what we really care for. The more features you integrate in a novel, early stage product, the more confusing it is for your early adopters. However, it is essential that these early adopters understand what you are doing and, in addition, that they can repeat and reformulate it. The number of features needs to grow with the user base and not the other way around. Believe me, we tried it! ;-) Too many features, actually, cost growth.
New features need to be implemented hand in hand with a growing number of users. That way, existing users learn step by step and can become advocates who do not simply recommend the product, but can also show others how to use it.
So, in case you do not have as many users as Facebook yet, keep it as simple as possible.
