I saw the news today that ImindI, after giving away 1000 invites to their beta on TechCrunch, accidentally deleted all user accounts. Whoops. ImindI’s CEO Adam Lindemann sent out an apology email:

Dear Friends of Imindi,

Yesterday, we were featured on Techcrunch and many of you were kind enough to sign up to the service. Unfortunately, we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers and then with some human error we accidently deleted all the user accounts. Darn.

We would ask that you forgive us and sign up one more time as members of Imindi. We will set you up with a clean account which we hope you will enjoy using to collect your thoughts and share them with like-minded people.

We are extremely embarrassed by this mistake and we have purchased more capacity and instituted safer backup processes to handle the increased demand to prevent a recurrence of this incident. It’s a private beta, and it will be a while before this service is ready to be launched in public but we hope that you will be kind to Imindi as she grows.

When I see an invite-only beta and sign up, I assume that there are going to be problems. There will be bugs. There will be weirdness. I don’t assume that all the user accounts will be deleted, but I do expect that things won’t be perfect.

That’s just the nature of betas. If a company were to wait until everything worked perfectly, they’d never ship a product. And shipping something buggy but solid is a great way to get user feedback, feature requests, etc.

I think the ImindI situation is a different animal altogether, as it wasn’t the product that was buggy. It was a lapse in preparation for scale along with some human error. But again, it’s a beta, so you can’t be too upset. Instead, I think the interesting question is: Do you only have one chance to get the launch right? Will people invest the time to start over?

I know that there were only 1000 accounts, so the scope of the problem is super-small. But looking at TechCrunch readers, these are the early adopters, the evangelists, the influencers. Whatever title you wish to apply, these are the people that either make something popular or they’re the people that tell their friends not to bother.

With only 1000 accounts and probably triple that number on the waiting list for an account, I’m guessing this won’t be a problem for ImindI at all. But I want to ask you:

• How much leeway to you give to betas?
• If your account was deleted, would you start over again?
• Or….does it really depend on how much time you spent on the app in the first place?

Today, telonu launched the public beta of their service, a community site where users can talk about their employer anonymously. The site mixes reviews and ratings of companies with networking features. From their press release:

Telonu Inc. today announced the beta launch of its free user generated content community website, www.telonu.com focused on the workplace. Users gain valuable insight to what insiders are saying about a company. In turn, they can share what’s on their mind regarding the workplace, the people they work with and other important things in their lives, such as schools, brands purchased, and even what’s hot for lunch!

The Upside

When looking for a new job, it’s hard to find out what a prospective employer is actually all about. Every company talks about their “culture”, but how can you get an objective opinion about working at a company until you actually work there? Telonu tries to tackle this problem by having employees anonymously post opinions about their employer.

Taking a look at a review of Citigroup I see this:

Go to an ivy league undergrad — work on the Street — Go back to a top tier Business School — get lured into Citi bank thinking that you will climb up the corporate ladder faster as you have a combination of people savyy and financial engineering smarts picked up at B School — and then get laid off. This is the story of hot shots at Citi and others — not to mention our friends at Bear and Lehman … this is a white color top tier recession — that we have never seen

On the other end of the spectrum there are posts like this one about myspace:

I was at a party recently in the bay Area and there were some facebook employees there. I was just amazed at the fact that they believed that Facebook was larger than MySpace. We are far better than facebook, have a lot more users and also make tons more $ — guys — get over it!

The Downside

While it’s easy to see that there could be value in a site that gives a real, insider’s look at a company, there are some drawbacks:

1. Authentication- Since the foundation of telonu is built on anonymity, there’s nothing to prevent a user from signing on to the service and pretending to be an employee of a company. For instance, if I have a competitor I don’t like, I could post a negative review and say I work at the company.

2. Spam- On the other hand, employees of companies can use telonu to talk about how great they are, using it as a spam vehicle.

3. Motivation- The one question that comes to mind is: why would someone take the time to review a company unless they’re extremely unsatisfied (as can be seen with people posting layoff notices) or are using the service as a marketing channel.

4. Anonymous Slander- Aside from rating companies, users can also rate and comment on individual employees. And since the users are anonymous and are not authenticated, anyone can say they work with anyone else and call them a big fat jerk.

Have a look at the site here and let me know what you think. Would you use telonu when researching a company? Is the system too open to manipulation?

WebNotes, the web annotation service covered here in November, has launched their invite-only public beta. Since I last covered their closed beta, the service has made several upgrades and feature changes, though most have taken place under the hood:

• UI changes have been made to the highligter functionality
• Security enhancements have been made
• Changes have been made to the underlying technology to make the entire service more stable.

But, chances are you won’t notice any changes to the service because you probably haven’t tried out the beta yet! So, if you want to check out the beta, I have invites. Just leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to send you an invite.

After my last post on getting a startup noticed, I started getting emails and comments that were all hinting at one question:

Sure, using these tools might get me some attention or a quick burst of traffic, but how do I make it sustainable?

Well, that’s a great question I pretended to just ask myself.

I think it’s important to take a few steps back from my previous post and look at promotion in context. I’ve always been repeating the same mantra since I started working with startups. I’ve said it so many times that people must be sick of me saying it, but I’ll do it one more time. You need to separate goals, strategies, tools and execution. It’s incredibly easy to jump right in and use every one of the 10 tips from the previous post, but if you haven’t done the groundwork, you won’t have steady, residual traffic.

So, let’s break the startup into phases and look at which promotional methods could work to get you going. These are completely arbitrary, off-the-top-of-my-head phases, so if I’m missing something, I apologize.

Phase One: The Idea

In this phase, you’re kicking around an idea that could materialize into a startup. You’re rightfully paranoid and don’t really want to give away your idea yet. Your goals:

1. Test the viability of your idea
2. Find out what others have done to get started
3. Find out what competitors are out there and how you can stand out

In this phase, your main strategy is to get out there and do as much research as possible. Google is your friend, but there are plenty of other resources that can help you.

Tools:

1. HackerNews- This is very quickly becoming my favorite site. It’s a social news site focused primarily on tech startups and entrepreneurs. It’s very tech-heavy and most of the contributors are entrepreneurial people with extreme tech saavy. You’ll find many Ask HN posts where would be entrepreneurs ask the community questions about their startups. It’s an indispensable resource for any tech entrepreneur, but DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT abuse it. If you try to use HackerNews to promote something irrelevant, it WILL backfire.

2. SitePoint Forums- Back when I was writing code, I basically learned everything I know about PHP/MySQL from the experts at Sitepoint. Sitepoint has a community of developers, entrepreneurs, etc. and a very active forum with experts willing to assist annoying newbies like I was. Additionally, sitepoint has forums for blogging, content, planning your site, promotion, etc. If you’re looking for advice or feedback, this is a great resource.

3. Mashable, Centernetworks, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, etc.- Go to these sites and search around to see what other startups have launched that are similar to what you want to offer. Keep a list of competitors and search them to find out what they’re up to. This will give you a good starting point to find out who you’ll be competing with.

Phase Two: The Super-Secret Alpha Product

Yep, I’ve skipped quite a bit of time, but let’s now pretend we’ve got something. Code has been written, and the product actually does something. Maybe we’re calling at a POC, maybe an alpha. Either way, something’s working, but it’s not ready for the masses. At this point, your goals are:

1. Get people to try it out
2. Solicit feedback to find out what works, what doesn’t, and what else is needed
3. Start growing an exclusive community of users that care

Right now you want people to use your stuff and let you know what they think about it. You’ve tested it yourself many times, but you’re just too close to the code to be objective. Since you eventually want many people to be your users, you need to let people hammer away at what you have and give you feedback from someone that is new.

Tools:

1. Friends and family- It’s a hell of a lot easier to apologize to your uncle Frank when a feature fails than a complete stranger that feels like they’re wasting their time when there’s a hiccup. I always like to email all of my friends and family and set their expectations, letting them know this is a project I’m working on that isn’t quite ready for the world yet. I tell them there are going to be problems, so please let me know when something isn’t quite right. Your friends and family are much more apt to take the time to beta test what you’re working on, and they’ll tell you when something is busted.

2. Evangelists- It’s not hard to see that I’m a beta addict and that I’ll test out just about anything that is new. I’m a perfect person for this. Look around online and find the people that are blogging about the topic your service/product targets, and ask them if they’d like to try it out. Let them know that it’s in an early stage and that you’re opening up to an exclusive group of alpha testers. It’s a great way to build a small, vocal community of users that feel ownership in what you’re doing. You can’t beat that.

Phase Three: Invite-Only Beta

You’re ready for people to sign up. Congratulations. Nice job. (Again, I’m skipping WAAAAY ahead) You’re not quite ready for the entire world to join, but you’re open for new users. A couple of strategies:

1. Offer invites to bloggers- I’m a huge sucker for this over at blogstring. Whenever someone says “I have 50 invites for your readers if you want to post about us”, I almost always jump at the offer.
2. Offer exclusives to bloggers- I’m not big on this one, but I see a lot of people doing this. Offering a coverage exclusive to one blogger may be incentive enough to get coverage you might not normally get.
3. Offer invites to your alpha users- They’ve brought you this far. Give them invites in case they want their friends to join the fun, and do it in conjunction with an email message thanking them for getting you to this point.

In this phase, your tools are your email list and database of users. This stage is really all about extending the personal relationships you’ve already formed in the prior phases.

Phase Four: Public Beta

Now you’re ready for the big time. But simply adding a join button on your home page isn’t going to bring excited crowds to your door. Now it’s time to go into promo mode. Some strategies:

1. Reach out to bloggers- If someone has covered you before, regardless of how big they are, let them know that you’re entering public beta. thank them for what they’ve done for you so far, and let them know any new features you’ve added since the private beta.
2. Talk about it- Talk about your service on your blog, on your employees blogs, twitter, etc. Let people know you’re open for business and that you have feedback mechanisms in place to handle what users are saying.
3. Let your users know- Let your users know that the service is now open to the world and let them know how much you appreciate what they’ve done for you.

Tools:

1. Your blog- You’ve already been blogging about what you’re doing. Post there about the public beta.
2. Twitter- Let everyone on twitter know that you’ve opened your doors
3. Other bloggers- Reach out to everyone that covers what you do, and let them know about your public launch. Search google blog search and find everyone that has covered you and let them know that you’re about to launch publicly.
4. Analysts- You’ve done research on analysts that cover your industry. Now let them know you’re open for business
5. Events- Go to events like the Web Innovators Group and present your company there. Find events that cater to your crowd and either sponsor or present what you have.

It’s at this phase (and not earlier) that you really want the world to know about you. You’ve ironed out all the kinks (within reason) and you already have a respectable userbase. That part is huge. One of the biggest problems in having any “social” online service is the classic: “I don’t want to join. No one is there.”

Think of any forum you’ve ever visited. Even if the content is good, if there’s a very small user base, odds are you won’t join. It’s the biggest problem in having a community site: You can’t get new users because you don’t have any current users. No one wants to go to an empty restaurant.

It’s because of this that you really want to nurture your early adopters. The activity and content they produce will help you immensely when you’re ready for public beta.

Summary

This article is so basic and overly simplistic that it’s almost embarassing. But hey, it’s a start. There’s no real way to fully cover the entire life cycle of a startup and the associated promotional methods in one blog post. If it were that easy, everyone would have a startup and I’d be out of a job.

But I think it’s important to segment your promotional phases based on where you are right now. Jumping ahead will make people think you’re an amateur. Lagging behind will leave you ready to launch with no users.

I’d love to hear what you think.

It’s a terrible day here in Boston, and I’ve run out of shows on my DVR. So, I thought I’d actually get back to the keyboard and do something productive. As you probably already know, the mashable Open Web Awards nominees have been named, and voting goes until Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008.

Here are the nominees for the category: Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks

dotblu- I’d never heard of dotblu, and when I checked out the site, it was like being blindfolded and dropped off at a carnival midway. There’s just so much going on everywhere that I have no idea what’s going on. But here’s what the about page says:

dotblu is a community dedicated to friendly competitive online gaming.

Our members compete in a variety of different online games, like prediction questions, quizzes and online flash games. They compete against friends in a fun and friendly atmosphere for BluBucks, our virtual currency, and use their profile to keep up with their friends and show off the wealth of BluBucks they’ve accumulated.

Odds of winning: 37-1

Facebook- Yes, I’ve heard of facebook. It won last year’s Judges Choice award in this category, and I don’t see why it won’t win this year. But the people’s choice last year went to Netlog (a European social network with over 30 million users), so who knows.

Odds of winning: 3-1

Fast Pitch! – Fast Pitch is a little bit like LinkedIn, as the goal of the network is to help professionals enhance their online presence.

Odds of winning: 70-1

FriendFeed – friendfeed isn’t really a social network in my mind. Rather, it’s more of a social aggregator that bridges connections between other social networks.

Odds of winning: 10-1

koornk – koornk is a “personal shouting place” that seems to be exactly like twitter, but in another language.

Odds of winning: 7-1

Multiply – Multiply is a social network for families, with the tagline “Multiply makes it easy to create, share and discuss your blog, photos, and videos with more of the people you know, and fewer of the people you don’t.”

Odds of winning: 13-1

MyHeritage – A family network that combines your family tree with social components. I’d never used MyHeritage before, and I love it. Most genealogy sites make sharing very clumsy and often associate a cost with even basic functionality. Not this one.

Odds of winning: 15-1

MySpace – We all know about myspace, but I think that its popularity is in decline with the mashable-aged audience.

Odds of winning- 8-1

Netlog – This was last year’s People’s Choice winner, and I’m not sure why. So hey, it must be a top contender again this year.

Odds of winning- 2-1

Platinum Lounge Just don’t. Don’t click that link. Don’t go to the Platinum Lounge. Unless this site is a brilliant parody, I’d suggest you just move along.

Odds of winning- 9999-1

ShareNow Another social network focused on sharing photos, videos, etc. They seem to focus more on meeting new friends based on shared interests.

Odds of winning- 5-1

sMeet – A social network where you create an avatar, and communicate with friends in a secondlife-like 3D environment.

Odds of winning- 23-1

Squidoo – Basically a modern-day geocities. You build a page called a “lens”, slap some ads on it, etc.

Odds of winning- 14-1

Twitter – See, this is a weird one. Twitter won the Judges Choice Award for best mobile app last year, and this year it’s up for an award in the mainstream & large scale social network category. And since people that use twitter LOVE twitter, I have a feeling it will win.

Odds of winning- 2-1

So, there we have it. I’m calling this one for twitter. You can vote for your favorite using the widget embedded below:

Last night I got an email from a old co-worker inviting me to check out SocialMinder, which said:

SocialMinder is an online assistant that helps you maintain relationships with your LinkedIn network.

I thought that you might appreciate a free invitation to the “closed” alpha test of SocialMinder.

SociaMinder:
* Scans your email headers and maps them to your LinkedIn network
* Identifies relationships that need strengthening
* Helps identify recent business news to discuss with each contact, no matter how out of touch you are
* You get weekly updates identifying top opportunities to build a better network

I have arranged for you to get a priority account;
1) Go to http://www.SocialMinder.com , and
2) Click on the green button (‘sign me up’)

You are on the priority list, but your space is only held for 3 days.

And the price is FREE…

Hope that it works for you!

Since this came from someone I knew (and someone that has sent me beta invites in the past), I decided to go check it out. You enter your gmail username and password, and SocialMinder tells you how long it’s been since you’ve contacted everyone in your gmail address book.

I then was brought to this screen:

If you can’t read what’s in the yellow box, it says:

Click here to upgrade to full version for free – just answer a few questions in our Alpha phase questionnaire. The full version helps you manage all of your contacts, and checks for contact updates regularly.

Oh, cool. I can get an upgrade to the full version just by answering a few questions in the Alpha phase questionnaire, right? I can answer a few questions. No biggie.

So I click. And here’s what I see:

No problem. This one’s easy. For some reason I see the following at the top:

Free Trial Upgrade- Step One of Two

But that’s okay.

So I answer the questions and click OK. Here’s what I get:

Yup, you read that right. Here’s the line:

To get your free full trial upgrade, you must select 15 friends to be sent a pre-approved invitation to try SocialMinder.

So the third step- which wasn’t mentioned at the beginning- is spamming 15 of your friends.

My Point:

I have no problem with services trying to get users to spread the word. It not only makes sense, it’s essential. But in user acquisition as with everything else, you have to manage expectations. And as someone who just ran through this process, I’m left feeling cheated. I feel like I wasted my time, and I’ll never go back to the service again.

Harsh? Probably. But I’m just pointing out how easy it is to make someone feel cheated and angry when promising one thing and giving them another.

Steve Rubel is the man. I’ve been thinking of just how exhausting it is to keep track of all the new betas, web 2.0 startups and the like, and once again, he said it best:

We’re a million monkeys running on treadmills, chasing the latest banana.

He’s exactly right. Right now the web seems absolutely chaotic with a million monkeys creating blogs, tools, and companies, and they’re all doing so at the speed of light (or at least the fastest speed possible for a monkey).

In one sense, this is great. People are excited about the possibilities new technologies are creating, and the entrepreneurial spirit is spreading like a virus. On the other hand, there are just too many services out there competing for attention. Every time one app or service stands out, new competitors pop up as the next _____ killer or _____ clone. Every myspace has a facebook. Every twitter, a pownce.

The one thing that really stands out to me is the duration of attention and the speed of change (okay, maybe that’s two things). What’s hot today will be stale next week, and a footnote next month. Things like myspace follow a curve of 1) beloved 2) something that will completely change the game 3) a target 4) passe 5) a dinosaur.

And that’s in the space of a few months.

In his article, Steve points to Brian Reich’s idea of Shiny Object Syndrome- the idea that we aren’t focused on how we’re using technology and for what purpose, but instead, we are interested in whatever is new.

He also says something that makes me smile:

The most interesting action is in sociology. In other words, how does technology change our culture and how we interact with media, the web and each other – and to what end?

Finally. Someone makes me believe that my sociology degree was worthwhile.

One final gem from Steve’s post deals with how the business monkeys are trying to leverage the new shiny objects, and how they often miss the point:

In fact, I advise marketers not to invest too much time in creating “a Facebook strategy” as much as they don’t have “an NBC strategy” or “a New York Times strategy.” Instead, I encourage them to people watch, learn and then plan based on their audience and the big picture.

Excellent post, Steve.