It's been almost a year now since buddystumbler (beta) went live. The original design of the site was in many ways inspired by Craigslist and Google - minimalist, purpose-driven, and simple. Boy have things changed one year later! In the end, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. We set out to solve a core problem to help people make new friends and I know we've done it.
I thought it would be constructive to talk about what went well and what didn't as a retrospective. Since I'd like to call myself a bit of a realist, let's start with what did not go well.
1. Beta launch contest
The beta launch contest turned out to be a major mistake. The vast majority of the users gained through that effort did not stay on the site and had no intention to use the site for what it was intended. The contest rewarded those users who invited and cajoled the most users to join to get a cash prize. In retrospect, that cash prize could have yielded the same number of users by 10x or more through search-engine advertising.
2. Lowering the bar for profile quality
During this same exploratory phase, we decided to lower the number of characters people needed to submit for their description as well as the number of keywords. While this helped our overall visibility rate, it diluted the quality of our user base and attracted looky-loos of various types.
On the positive side, there were a number of things that went very well.
1. Getting the help to fill in the gaps
Amit was an extremely talented developer, however, he needed to exit the project due to his studies. While Yim and I could hold the fort down on the development side, we needed help in other areas. This became patently obvious when Yim and I were invited to meet the members of a certain IM aggregator company. The two of us were like deer in headlights - star struck and speechless. Speaking for myself strictly, I'm not one to brag about what's been done or to sell things. I tend to call things like I see it and in the end that makes me a very poor marketing person.
In time, Yim and I were fortunate enough to meet KopyKat who's overseen all of our Craigslist posting efforts and who's search engine advertising efforts resulted in the acquisition of most of the users we have today, and Drizzle who fields the public relations requests, meets with the bloggers and journalists, and does the leg work for our business development efforts. In an effort to reduce our cash burn, we've since stopped advertising using search engines and have relied on SEO optimization entirely which is a key component to keeping the site up today and we have Drizzle to thank for this.
The combination of these efforts by Drizzle and KopyKat have allowed the site to stay up when it very well would have shuttered a long time ago. My realization here was that building a site is just the first step in keeping a site alive. I have never questioned how great an idea buddystumbler is, but without the right people to execute on it, it would have gone nowhere.
2. User feedback
When the site first began, we thought we had a clear picture of what our users valued. We didn't. While we do show a prominent contact us link on every page - it soon became obvious that few users actually use that facility. The use of polling to garner user feedback turned out to be a huge boon for us. That feedback allowed us to make incremental changes to the beta while we secretly began tooling away at the launch version of buddystumbler you see today.
3. Finding yourself
Speaking strictly on a more personal level, I've never had a shortage of ideas. What I have had, is a shortage of execution. Looking back, I could make an argument for why I didn't do anything about my ideas. Some are obvious: lack of time, lack of energy, prior commitments, someone else is doing something similar, and so forth. Through buddystumbler, I've come to realize what the true reason is for the lack of execution that plagues so many would-be entrepreneurs.
The real cause of inaction is fear. This fear is not the cliched fear of failure, but rather, it is a fear of finding out who you really are. When an idea resides in the realm of possibility, we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that the person we have in our mind is the person we are meant to be. To the extent you don't act on it, it becomes easy to seduce yourself into thinking that you were a victim of circumstance. The truth is, only in acting upon your idea will you find out if you were meant to be the person you envisioned. That action becomes a mirror and every moment you are acting you begin to see yourself for who you are. Invariably, you will find limitations and I think ultimately that's what scares people and that's what scared me.
Everyday I see people who dream about doing something but fail to because of some "reason." The truth is, there is no time like the present. Action takes courage, but through action you will know yourself and having crossed over I can tell you that it is much better to live in reality versus fantasy.
A close friend of mine once told me, "The things we regret are not the risks we took, but the risks we didn't take."
A couple of folks have asked what's coming up next? I'm a big fan of flickr and I've been waiting on a commercial API key but sadly I think flickr's business development people are completely out to lunch. As a result, I'm determined to add some form of Flickr integration this month; albeit in a slightly unconventional way. Once we have flickr integration, flickr users will be able to stream their pictures to their profile as they upload pictures to flickr. if you have other ideas for enhancements, please let us know!
Happy stumbling!
