New York Times Article
I guess it is possible to get some press with out raising venture capital:
New York Times Irrational Design Case Study
Interesting to see how all of the experts disagree with us 
Archive for the ‘ Insightster ’ Category
A New Product
We’re considering building a new product. It would be our fourth product following TheMatchingGame.com, CharityBirthday.com, and Insightster.com.
Why Not?
Well for one, we already have three products, and all of them could use some attention. We’re also nervous that we’re simply doing this because it’s shiny and new and has infinite potential. It’s always easier to imagine a non-existent product becoming a hit than a product that has a track record deviating from that track much. We don’t want to be guilty of getting distracted too easily when we have products that are showing solid results that we can build on.
Why?
We feel that one more product can help round out what we are working on effectively. We also want to explore a site that is built around community with the potential to monetize through advertising, unlike our other sites, none of which have advertising on them. We know that it’s not easy to build a business off of advertising alone, but advertising is a very established and effective way of generating revenue and right now that is what we need, even if it’s not a huge revenue stream, it would go a long way to helping us keep the doors open long enough to make sure the other products have a chance to get going as well.
We are also thinking about an idea that may be an effective story in the press, helping us to get the word out about it, and may help a lot of people improve their lives, which we feel really good about.
How’s It Going?
We’re still debating it, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be building it soon. Will have some more info about the product once we’ve fleshed it out a bit more and can describe it effectively. Hopefully soon.
The Google Apps Marketplace
Launch Insightster.com in to the Google Apps Marketplace today, on App Tuesday (a Tuesday at the beginning of each month when Google does a press release about a few apps as a way of getting the word out about new apps available in the marketplace).
Why Not?
We’re not big fans of deadlines, so preparing for launch on App Tuesday was not ideal. We’ve had to put everything else down and focus on getting Insightster to a level of reasonable professionalism in order to launch today. This also meant that we had to step outside of our ideal level of iteration + feedback and just crank on the site without the help of feedback. I think we would have preferred to have another month or two to handle the development of Insightster in a more iterative fashion while also being able to pay attention to TheMatchingGame.com which is crying out for some attention now.
The development effort required to make the app work with the marketplace and single sign-on through Google Apps was not exactly a walk in the park and it means that we now have to be conscious of multiple flows for user experiences such as inviting other people to your organization. Also, since not all users of the site will be on Google Apps it means we’re developing some features that only a subset of our users will benefit from.
Why?
One of the primary reasons we built Insightster was to test out the Google Apps Marketplace. Mavenlink works out of the Pivotal Labs office with us and they have had good success with the marketplace. We knew we wanted this product, but did not like the prospects of having to advertise in order to achieve distribution. Especially with a product that is built to help you manage ideas, we weren’t even sure how to advertise it effectively. With the marketplace we’re hoping that we may be able to distribute the product without marketing.
Also, some of the integrations we were able to develop, such as our GMail widget for liking/rating/commenting on ideas, are really useful and would not be possible with doing the integration in to the marketplace. It’s too bad that we can’t enable it for 100% of our users, but we’re hoping that the marketplace will provide enough of a distribution channel that most of our users will benefit from it.
How’s It Going?
We’ll let you know. We launched in to the marketplace this morning. You can see our listing in the marketplace here.
Insightster.com
A tool meant to help encourage ideas within an organization, make it easy to discuss, critique, and promote ideas so that the best ideas rise to the top and are well thought-out, and makes sure that ideas don’t vanish if you’re too busy to deal with them right now. It’s also largely about making sure people feel listened to, even if their ideas are not executed.
Why Not?
Not sure if there’s a huge demand for a product like this. Obviously organizations want to encourage new ideas, but to get to the good ones you have to deal with a lot of bad ones, and we’re not sure organizations actually want to deal with that. We’re building the tool to help manage these ideas so that you don’t get bogged down all day listening to ideas, but it does require a little leap to even get started. In fact it requires having ideas to get started and a lot of organizations aren’t good at encouraging that yet, so the question is, will the site be useless for you for too long, will you just forget about using it?
Why?
We need it. We have a lot of ideas and we needed a place to keep them. We tried google docs, emailing them, Pivotal Tracker, etc. Nothing worked. So we decided to build a product that worked for us. In doing so and exploring the other available options we did discover that there does seem to be a growing market for this type of product. Innovation is very valuable these days and a lot of innovation comes from every corner of an organization. You just need to tap in to it effectively.
We also like the idea of helping companies listen to their employees. Jobs become much more fulfilling when you know your voice is heard and considered and you receive feedback on your ideas. Helping people feel more fulfilled in their jobs in a very worthy goal. This is obviously a very small step, but we think it’s worthwhile nonetheless.
How’s It Going?
Well we’ve just launched it in beta, so you tell us. You can sign up for the beta here.
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