My favorite day at GigPark

…is new feature release day. It’s always the toughest, busiest day but there is nothing more satisfying than watching people use a feature you’ve just worked hard to create.

Today we launched a big one: You can now ask friends for a recommendation and post messages to friends to help them find what they’re looking for.

This came from an insight we had a few weeks back, that recommendations aren’t often volunteered, they ‘happen’ as part of a conversation between friends. It sounds obvious now, but it took this little realization for us understand that if we really want to make sharing recommendations easier for people we need to facilitate the conversation.

So far our wonderful beta users are telling us they like being able to ask and respond to questions and are sending through some great ideas for improvement – just the way we like it.

I’m already looking forward to my next favorite day at GigPark.

GigPark launches private beta

I’m extremely happy to let you all know that about 5 minutes ago we announced the launch of the GigPark private beta.

From the GigPark blog:

Pema, Paul, Tony and I are extremely excited to announce that we have a site ready. We’ve taken a page out of the brilliant book Getting Real by 37signals and kept it simple, but we think we have a fun and very useful application on our hands — a way for you and your friends to all receive great service by sharing recommendations.

Rather than start a publicity blitz, our plan is to introduce GigPark to a small group of people that we know and make it absolutely AMAZING for them. We are going to spend 100% of our time listening, building features the group asks for, and fixing problems they spot. We want to make a genuine difference in the lives of these people: hopefully giving them access to great new service people and allowing them to really help each other out.

The long term plan is that once this group is stoked on GigPark, we can take the walls down and get more people involved.

If you want to try GigPark, just ask and we’ll hook you up the next time we hand out beta codes.

And to our fantastic beta group, let the great service begin!

Joost

Anyone need an invite to join the Joost beta? I have one left.

Drop me a line at the email address on the right(——->).

UPDATE: All gone now I’m afraid. I’ll make sure I post when I have some more invites.

Introducing GigPark

Today I’m excited to tell you a little bit about the startup that Noah, Paul and I are busy building:

What’s it called?
GigPark

What will GigPark do?
GigPark will help you:
> recommend your favorite service providers to friends and family
> instantly get service recommendations from people you trust
> build your service business through word-of-mouth

Who will use GigPark?
You, we hope.

People like you and I will be able to quickly and easily tell all of our friends about our favorite service providers: our wonderful hairdresser, accountant or interior designer. And when we’re looking to hire a new service provider, we’ll be able to see if our friends recommend anyone. Better service recommendations from people we trust will mean we all receive better service.

If you are a service provider, GigPark will help you attract new customers by amplifying all of the great word of mouth already generated by your happy existing customers.

Why are we building GigPark?
Because we love great service and we believe great service providers should be celebrated and rewarded.

Why did we choose the name?
Well, a gig is a fun name for a job or a service you provide, and what better place than a park to share recommendations with your friends about great gigs? Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?


In the future you can check out the GigPark blog (looking a little sparse at the moment ;)) for more news and, in a few months, invitations to give GigPark a try before we release it to the public.

This is only the first step on a long road for GigPark but I’d like to thank everyone who has helped us so much already. Thanks for the advice, the thoughtful critiques and the encouragement.



Lessons about pricing

Spanning Sync, the calendar syncing tool I mentioned a while back, came out of beta today and announced they were going to start charging for their product. I think they’ve done a fantastic job developing a helpful little app and deserve to make some money. What’s interesting though is where they decided to set their fees and the instant reaction from their 18,000 current users.

Under the new pricing $25 gets you a one year account and $65 a permanent license. There is a 15 day free trial but no basic free option with a chance to upgrade later. The prices seem high to me. A one off payment of $20-25 is closer to what I was expecting, and what I would have paid.

So, first interesting thing is that they choose such high fees (keep in mind Apple iLife, with a whole host of complex applications, is only $79). Second interesting thing is the noise that their upset users have made. Check the comments here and here for the almost universal objection to the fees.

From a comment on the Unofficial Apple Weblog: “$65 once or $25 for a yearly subscription is well North of ridiculous. There’s no way I’ll even consider buying this product. The developer simply hasn’t built that kind of value into it.”

And from the Spanning Sync blog: “I have already uninstalled Spanning Sync. As lots of ppl say, price is outrageous. And I do think Apple will release some kind of Google sync service with Leopard, seeing that the collaboration between the two is becoming increasingly evident. Plus, what are the guarantees that the service won’t stop working next week?”

It will be interesting to see the response from Spanning Sync over the next couple of days. Maybe they will lower the price and try to win back the upset users. Or maybe they will conclude that these users will never pay them and decide to target a different kind of user who sees more value in the product.

As we get closer to launching our web application (still a few months away I’m afraid) we are beginning to think about how much value we will be creating for different users. In our case the value won’t be even. We expect many people will get great value from a free service but some will want to pay for premium features to access even more value.

One thing we will need to be very aware of, no matter what our pricing strategy, is the expectations of our users. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Spanning Sync example it is that you can never under deliver and over price in the eyes of your customers if you want them to stick around.

Is this how you kill interest in a public Beta?

I’ve loved the idea behind Spanning Sync since the day I read about it (essentially it’s a little application that syncs iCal with your Google Calendars – very handy!). So, I’ve been watching their blog daily looking for them to announce a public beta.

Yesterday my prayers were answered but then a few hours later (before I’d had a chance to register for my account) they closed the doors again. Having a customer chomping at the bit to get their hands on your product is a great thing. But making them wait, and wait, and wait – not so good. Hopefully I’ll get an account over the weekend, then I can post about how it was worth the wait ;)

I’ve been reading a lot about running a good beta test in the last few weeks. It’s something our little startup is planning for right now. Michael Arrington wrote a great post about it this time last year, but my best research has been just watching other sites launch their beta products. The way you announce your launch, which browsers you support and your responses to customer problems all say so much about your company. People form attitudes about you over this time that might never fade, so it’s an important thing to get right.