Showing posts with label startup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label startup. Show all posts

This was our 2014

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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.

2014 has been an incredible year for us. We made phenomenal progress, have been featured in TechCrunch, exhibited at the Collision conference in Las Vegas and the WebSummit in Dublin.
We attended the Society3 accelerator in San Francisco and won the GotoStartups pitch contest. We refined and improved our application, focused on traction and our user community, and got tens of thousands of new users.
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 :-)




CTO @ MoID

Why we focus on events.

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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.




Networking made easy: This is the new MoID

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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:


CTO @ MoID

The next „Facebook“ will be from Munich!

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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

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

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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

From paper prototype to UI - the resource friendly way

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The notion "lean startup" has become a buzz word by now. Yet, embracing change and being able to react quickly is for sure one of the most important characteristics of a startup. You start your day with several hypotheses regarding your target audience and their pains, needs, and expectations, and in the evening, you'll already need to sort out quite a lot of them. In the following, I will briefly give you an impression on why changes happen so often in the startup area, and show you a quick example of how to consistently handle a change of the UI with a lightweight tool.

Why does change happen?

Especially in the kind of greenfield projects startups typically operate in, little is known about what the prospective user is going to think about the product you're building. And even though there are methods like questionnaires, focus groups, and the likes, it is very difficult to foresee the necessities of all the different kinds of users - especially in the current software market. Obviously, you should know your audience well, but it so happens that you will sketch your target group too fuzzy, and you will need to rely on feedback to know what is really going to work. Naturally, I am not talking about revolutionary changes to your idea, but more about small improvements of its realization and refinements of your target audience.
There will usually also be numerous other triggers for change, including time to market, opinions of external stakeholders (e.g. business angels or VCs), competitors' products, resource shortage, better ideas, and so on and so forth...

How to handle a change to the UI of my product?

We first sketch changes to our UIs on paper - no stencils, no rulers, no color, just plain pencil and paper. This allows us to quickly show one or several new designs to the whole team and selected beta users. It literally takes only minutes to come up with something understandable, while the lack of sophisticated graphics and color helps to concentrate on the most important: the content. On Figure 1 below, you see a sketch of one of our views, proudly hand-drawn by myself.
Figure 1. Paper sketch of a new view.
We wanted to create a view that resembles the typical badge that you get on an event. It should only contain your picture, your name, your company and links to your social networks.

The next step we perform is to enrich the sketches to form a preliminary prototype. To this end, we use a tool called POP (Prototyping on paper), which allows us to visualize changes to several UIs and transitions between them in a cheap, quick, and yet very vivid way. POP is just awesome, it is really easy to use, has practically no learning curve, and no unnecessary features that distract from the main use case. We can really only recommend it. Above all, it's free.
With POP we can create a shallow prototype of an application in mere minutes. Of course, there is no functionality whatsoever - but we can investigate interactions and concentrate on a consistent interface. This allows us to find errors and wrong assumptions even before spending hours to develop the real UI.

The last step of course, is to take the sketch from the drawing board to the interface builder. This is typically the most time intensive part of the game. Not always will the pencil design work on the real screen. Sometimes the metaphor needs more work, sometimes it just doesn't seem right. In any case you should consider taking the design one step back and trying out other realizations before spending days with the interface builder - the right level of abstraction for the right task. In our case, we went back and forth for some 2-3 iterations. Figure 2 below shows the result we are working with in our current dev version.
Figure 2. Current dev version of the new view.

When to use what?

In the end, a startup is a project with few resources, so choose your weapon wisely. Drawing on paper is the fastest way to go. POP will allow you to try interactions and observe people using your app before writing a single line of code. Starting to build the real UI only with a clear picture in mind, will help you to survive longer.

Dennis Pagano
CTO of MoID

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Additional features cost growth. We tried it! ;-)

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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.

Phillip Bellé - CEO of MoID
Follow me on Twitter
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