Progress!
September 23rd, 2008Thanks to everyone for the much needed and equally appreciated feedback we’ve received over the past couple of months. The more feedback we get, the better the product, and voila! — Here’s what we’ve added since our last update:
- Analytics for cards: track your cards, see who has clicked on what links and when they did it. Useful for seeing when people are actually interested in following up! The free version has a very basic analytics interface, but we’re working on a heavy-duty, full drill-down analytics interface for our premium users.
- Add a logo: this is the first step to truly customizing your card. We know we have a long way to go (ordering content, for one!), but we think this is a pretty solid step in the right direction. Any priorities for users?
- Multiple profiles: add more than one profile if you’re a Premium or Elite user! Useful for Dropcarders who have multiple careers, professions or even personal lives.
- Send to your address book: share your Dropcard with everyone in your Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and other address books. Good for you, and good for us ; )
- Manage your contacts: we’ve built a basic contacts management system, although we know we still have a long way to go. You can see to whom you’ve sent Dropcards, from whom you’ve received Dropcards, at what times and with what comments.
We appreciate the recent love shown by LifeHacker, jkOnTheRun and many others! Please let us know if you have any feedback.
One more thing — for the many Canadian users out there who have e-mailed us about Canadian service, we’re working hard to get there!
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Room for everyone
July 30th, 2008We’ve been keeping track of some excellent competition, all being different solutions for the same problem:
gLinxCard is a service to use if you’re comfortable telling someone “just text my name to 55358,” what we call pulling - a great concept.
PENSIEVE is a recent development by IBM to help you scan and track physical business cards - here the priority is to save your contacts business card rather than share your own.
211me is a highly stylish, graphical business card that can be shared by mobile phone - all about the impression you want to make.
And of course, business cards - the elephant in the room - our toughest competitor whose biggest drawbacks are that people will lose them, can’t save them, and can’t click on them. All this while using up our trees.
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Lots of feedback
July 18th, 2008We are so glad we put out our product sooner rather than later.
Of course, it happened a bit serendipitously, but we risked spending extra weeks adding features we could only guess people wanted.
Now we have plenty of extremely helpful feedback coming into our inboxes, and sorting through it all to prioritize what will help most of our Dropcard users the fastest.
Some of those features include logos, letting recipients respond with their contact info, vCard improvements, and send-from-the-web capability. There’s been many more suggestions that are all very practical and we thank everyone for sharing!
We answer and acknowledge nearly every email personally. Keep reaching out to us as we try to understand our own product better.
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The use case that found us
July 18th, 2008We’ve been getting very nice traffic and signups recently - and we’ve noticed some things about our users: Thanks to press from several real estate blogs, we’re happy to welcome many real estate agents who appear to find Dropcard very useful. Our goal is to learn as much as we can from the trend and understand what this means for the evolution of our product.
While signups are one statistic, our most important metric is “dropcards being sent.” That number has only been growing, but we’re interested in whether it lasts and who continues to use the service after the current buzz.
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Surprise attention
July 16th, 2008Welcome to our new visitors and CenterNetworks readers! We’re excited for the traffic. Our text messaging service has been spotty but should be up quickly.
Thanks to Allen Stern for the great writeup, and to Alex Hillman for the tweets.
We’re looking for advice and feedback from features you’d like to see. Keep in touch with us! (And send us your dropcards)
tal@mydropcard.com
Enjoy!
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What we’re learning
July 10th, 2008Wow. That’s a lot of feedback pouring in.
Responses range from tweaks to requests for fundamental features (from way out there geo-location to concrete “can I type in a phone number instead?”). We’re also learning that our front page could do a better job of explaining the service to the un-initiated.
But overall, the responses are very positive. And dropcards are being sent!
Last night at the Philly Startup Leaders happy hour, several members used DropCard to introduce themselves and came back with great feedback on how useful it was to them. PSL is a very warm community and a great place to start testing, with many patient entrepreneurs.
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Testing, round 1
July 8th, 2008Last night we sent out a bunch of emails asking each of our testers personally to go ahead and play with DropCard. The main goal this round of testing is to evaluate the real-life service, what it’s actually like to use the service in a networking situation.
We are trying to answer several questions and test assumptions:
Are people using in real life? (avg per user, avg per day)
Are they getting clicks on their emails?
Are those people registering?
Are they filling out profiles, using the service in real life?
And so on.
There are definitely very different types of people who we’ve sent it out to. Responses have varied from lukewarm to having already used it last night. Another dimension to this testing is who is using it, to narrow down our marketing ideas.
We’ll see!
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Dropcard crawls into the light
July 3rd, 2008Ariel, Anton, and I are (were in Anton’s case) students at penn. We started the summer in Dreamit Ventures, Philly’s brand new summer startup incubator, with an idea to make it easy for people to share contact information.
It’s a good starting idea, and we had a vision for the product, but we worried about a couple of questions from the start. Why is this a business not a feature? How would we make money? Who is our target user? How would they hear about it? Would Anton eventually get tired of Chewy bars and demand equity?
DreamIt itself has been a great choice for a home. After weeks of dinners, frisbee games, pranks, and oh yeah - seed funding and direct mentoring from area entrepreneurs - we’ve made a lot of progress on answering those questions (and finding new ones to occupy ourselves with).
To zip ahead (and five name changes later), we’ve decided our main goal is to get users - we need to prove individuals find this useful before we try to sell anything. We’ll market it by ramping up slowly - local community networking events, working and learning from “power networkers” who test for us, and using it ourselves on people.
We’re also preparing for some buzz marketing ideas, but that’s later.
Oh - and the product. Well, if you’re on this blog you’ve probably already seen DropCard and what it can do. Ariel’s crafted the backend, getting iPhone and text messaging to work impressively. Anton’s done a “beast of a job” on the user interface. And wait - both managed to do it while dealing with me.
We’re slowly crawling into the light now, stopping at our basic features, and testing and polishing details we never thought existed. Feel free to play around and share anything that comes to mind!
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