Say you are a fashion blogger. Wouldn’t it be great if people around you could actually see and follow you on Instagram? Look no further! With MoID people can directly see your Instagram feed when you are nearby. They do not need to know your username or search for any tags. Yeah, it’s really that easy.
2. You can see Instagram pics of people around you
You are sitting in a lecture and want to browse the Instagram pics of people around you? Easy as pie. Open MoID and you’ll see a list of people around you. Tap on a person to see their Instagram feed.
Catch me if you can
Actually MoID and Instagram fit so well together, that we are really thinking about making a standalone app just for Instagram. We’d call it “Catch me if you can”, and it would focus entirely on browsing Instagram users around you.
So here’s an open question to you: what are your thoughts about such an app? Would you use it? Which features would you want to see? We’d love to get your thoughts on that in the comments!
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 :-)
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.
