Thoughts in Time

Now this is what I’m talking about. Johannes has created two pikle pikums on German football… and I’ve won both of them. I guess I know more about Bundesliga football than I thought.

Actually, what I’ve really been enjoying is the feedback we’re getting on Pikum! It’s not the nice notes (”Pikum looks great, lots of fun”), but the notes, twits, and blog posts where we’re learning what people think we can improve. There’s a lot to the Pikum! product and getting into private beta gives us the opportunity to learn how we can best refine and simplify the interface, user paths, and help content to make it really easy for users to understand the game, get started, and start competing… so they can Pikum and win too!

Yesterday we decided to release Pikum! into invite only beta.  The core site processes are working, and we felt the best way to go from here (a good product) to a great product is to get users into the site so we can get feedback.  It’s all about getting feedback and iterating.

It’s been great to see people getting in, entering pikums (we already have a couple with double digit entrants), and sending out invites.  We’re also accomplishing what we wanted in that we’re finding the key issues and pushing them to the top of our list to fix (for instance, we’re finding that we still have a lot of work to do on email deliverability - something we thought needed work, and realize we REALLY want to focus on!).  I was also the first person to win a Pikle Pikum on the live site (Johanne’s “German Quickie”) … We’ll see who the first winner of a real money Pikum is.

We’re going to be blogging ongoing at blog.pikum.com  as we find issues, implement updates, etc.  Stay tuned!

I’ve been a little silent on the blogging front, and it’s not just because I finally got my furniture from IKEA.  I had a trip to the U.S. last week and have been working like crazy as we are focusing on launch (or P-day as we are affectionately calling it). It’s amazing all the different things that you want to come together for a launch of a product like ours.  Here’s a short list, but not necessarily exhaustive:

• Product functionality
• Product design and branding
• back office functionality
• regulatory approval (needed in our case)
• PR preparation (release(s), media list, any events, quotes from outside parties, etc)
• Marketing planning
• Partner and affiliate preparation and operations
• customer service training
• operations training / prep
• hardware / managed hosting prep
• patent composition / filing

It’s coming together nicely and although our team is working amazingly long hours and pushing to get every last bit done, I think we’re all going to be proud of what we’ve built so far, and know that although it’ll still definitely be beta, we’ll continue working hard to improve and provide a great entertainment product that people really enjoy!

Entrepreneur magazines Hot 100 Company Rankings - Higher One

Great to see that Higher One has gotten onto another hot company ranking list… this time - the #12 fastest growing private company in the U.S. according to Entrepreneur magazine. Recently, the company signed it’s 100th university client. Glad to see that things continue to go so well. The great thing about Higher One is that because it’s business serves colleges and students, it’s actually counter cyclical, meaning that if the U.S. does head into a recession, the business should do better, rather than worse.

The business is also growing inorganically, having just purchased EduCard and setup a major partnership with Evisions (http://www.higherone.com/media/2008/acquire_educard.shtml). This will make it easier for 900 Evisions clients to get up and running with Higher One. It’s pretty amazing that something that Miles, Mark, and I founded in 2000 now serves 5% of US college students and has managed over $4 Billion in payments.

I read Mike Butcher’s post on Zemanta (at Techcrunch UK) and thought I’d give it a try.  Installation was a snap.  Now, it’s telling me it will update and provide suggestions in 110 characters (make that 96).

Something I setup yesterday for Pikum was a twitter profile that will be focused on twittering about sports.  Twitsports.  Twitter is an interesting platform for discussion of sports as things happen during a game, day, etc… Check it out.

An interesting thing about Zemanta.. It tells you when the next update will be, but it doesn’t tell you that you can click on that area and it will update immediately. If they changed the text to “Update in 275 characters or click to update now” - it would increase usability.

Overall, I really like the product. I know it will help me increase the number of relavent links in my blog posts.  Great product guys.

I’ve mellowed a little since my rant at IKEA. I did setup a facebook group (not everyone shares my feelings - only 4 members so far), and I did actually setup an ad campaign as well. They say that a disgruntled customer will tell ten people… So far I’ve told over 10,000. That’s how many impressions my “IKEA customer service Sucks” facebook ad has had so far.

On a kinder and gentler note, the “Help Launch Pikum” group is nearing 100 members. I’m going to send out a cool pikum pen to one of the first 100 members as soon as we hit 100, so if you read this and want to help us by joining the group - don’t hesitate to do so.

Other Pikum stuff…. Quite a few blog pickups of our funding announcement. In addition to TechCrunch UK, it’s been featured on several other tech blogs such as SiliconBowery.blogspot.com (thanks Mike), MidasOracle, and Tech Crunch US. I also just added Pikum to Crunchbase, helping to make Crunch Coverage easier in the future …I almost immediately got an email from someone at Techcrunch applying for our private beta. We traded emails and I look forward to getting his feedback once we open up later this spring…