A good friend of mine up in maple leaf country asked us to put together a sports blog for him. This is the type of site where wordpress really shines. A straight forward blog with multiple authors, basic navigation, and content sorted by team/author.
Be sure to follow sportstalkbuzz.com for all your sports blogging needs. Expect big things from this site very soon.
The movie was awesome, but this post is about a milestone we reached with our party ideas and party planning website bestypartyever.com.
As of today, 25 days since we launched the ALL new (v3) website, our 300th user just registered. The velocity of user sign-ups is increasing . I think it took over 15 days to get the first 100. While of course we are aiming for 100k users in the next few months, we’ll take the first 300 and be dang happy about it.
Takeaway:
Build it and they will come.. Um, No.
Ponder this: How are people going to find your new website? When they get there, is there enough to keep them around? Will they tell their friends about it? Are you offering the user enough as a trade for their time investment in registering and providing contact/user information? How deep are your pockets for marketing and promotion? Are people talking about your new product or service. Is it buzzworthy?
These are just a few of the many questions you should have answers for when contemplating a new website/community. We addressed many of these prior to launching the website. We already had great search engine rankings (learn about our search engine optimization services) for the v2 site which carried over and are improving. We have worked diligently to give the user some great tools and resources to make it worth their time to register. Sally did some interviews to get the word out, and we have leveraged other social networks (BPE on: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, UstreamTV, Squidoo) to bring people into the fold. And finally we gave users of bestpartyever.com this simple option of inviting their friends.
As an example I spoke with a potential client the other day about building them a new social utility, the $50k estimate for development I gave them did not seem to phase them, but the $50k in marketing/promotional budget I suggested for the first 6 months was met with silence on the other end of the phone. Wake up, this is what it takes folks. While the idea of bootstrapping a company from nothing to Internet stardom is valid, and has been done more than once, in practice the odds are not stacked in your favor.
In the future we are planning more seamless integration into other websites and services to make it even easier for our users to interact and share. Your website is not (and should not be) an island. In todays marketplace: it MUST be connected.
It has been a long few weeks with the launch and the frenetic pace of development. Sally and I are heading to Mexico for a few days, You are invited.
Linda VandeVrede over at ValleyPRBlog.com shared her thoughts on Sally’s PR style.
“Sally Strebel (aka Bizgirl on Twitter) has some of the best PR advice I’ve ever heard for new businesses: “Whoever is biggest and baddest in the room, don’t be afraid to go up to them.”
Sally is VP here at Obuweb, and Founder and CEO of BestPartyEver.com, a party planning social network.
Technorati Tags: best party ever, public relations, sally strebel, prLinda VandeVrede over at ValleyPRBlog.com shared her thoughts on Sally’s PR style.
“Sally Strebel (aka Bizgirl on Twitter) has some of the best PR advice I’ve ever heard for new businesses: “Whoever is biggest and baddest in the room, don’t be afraid to go up to them.”
Sally is VP here at Obuweb, and Founder and CEO of BestPartyEver.com, a party planning social network.
Technorati Tags: best party ever, public relations, sally strebel, prPlaying in the website design space is fun, but not always. If you are not a web designer than you probably know little about the work that goes into making a website “look” great. There are at least 5 major web browsers that the majority of people use. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (6 and 7/Win) being the most common, Firefox (Win/Mac), and then finally Safari (Mac).
Each one the browsers on each platform render a given website in different ways. What looks great in Safari may look terrible in IE 7. Rather then go into all the details of why and how, I am going to skip right to the point of this post. Web Designers spend hours, lots of additional hours working on websites that look great in all browsers, but look terrible in Internet Explorer 6. Unfortunately IE6 still commands a very large % of browser usage and therefore designers are forced to “hack” the code that looks great and renders “to standard” in other browsers. These hacks take time, and are necessary due to IE6’s non support of these official standards.
Dear Users, PLEASE get a copy of Firefox or upgrade to IE7 (still crummy but better), your web experience will be greatly enhanced, we promise.
Okay now really to the point. Microsoft, Pay up. It’s time to reimburse us for all the hours spent hacking flawless markup to make it work in your browser. Here is the invoice for time spent by our staff over the last 5 years “fixing” compliant markup to render correctly in IE6. We appreciate your prompt payment. Thank you.
We have been tinkering on a few internal projects: web applications such as flare9.com and bestpartyever.com. We also have a few more in the works as well. The idea, and code is the easy part. Deploying the finished product to market is an entirey different beast.
Launching your product or service is an ongoing process, not a 1 time event, as said to me by my friend and product launch consultant, David Daniels. We learned quite a bit about launching a product or service to market with David’s help, and we encourage everyone to check out his website and blog at http://launchclinic.com/blog. Yes we designed and host his website as barter for his services.. yet I would have happily paid through the nose for his valuable insight.
We have a major release of bestpartyever.com coming up, and it makes it all the sweeter when you have the experts in your corner.
Best of luck on your next endeavor.
Technorati Tags: david daniels, launch clinic, launch consulting, product launch
Obu Web Co-Founder and VP Sally Boldt-Strebel needed a new blog to post her thoughts on business, marketing, party ideas, etc. Sally is also Founder and CEO of BestPartyEver.com a party planning social network site that we (obu) are doing the design and development work on. We used design queues from the upcoming release of BestPartyEver.com do create a custom skin for Wordpress. Check out her blog at http://sally.bestpartyever.com
Sean Tierney over at grid7.com invited obuweb.com founder Joshua Strebel in for a conversation on entrepreneurship. Listen to the podcast here. The Venturecast series focuses on conversations between Sean and other local entrepreneurs covering tips, tricks, and lessons of starting a business. A thank you to Sean for having me over.
Technorati Tags: grid7, joshua strebel, obuweb, podcast, sean tierney, small business, entrepreneur
We have been plugging away for about 5 months on our new website builder application, Flare9.com.
Flare9.com is a simple and easy to use website builder that will allow you to create your own website without hassle. Built upon Wordpress 2.1, flare9 has automated the hosting, domain registration, site install and setup process, to create a website in a matter of minutes. And the best part is, We (obu) have designed the website templates so it is virtually impossible for the customer to build an ugly website. Well almost impossible.
The go to market strategy of flare9.com is thus: Medium and large web design agencies simply cannot serve low cost clients (-$3000) effectively. Therefore the client leaves unhappy and the firm looses out on potential revenue. We are targeting these web design agencies as affiliate partners to refer these low-yield clients to flare9.com for a referral fee. The agency makes money, flare9.com makes money, and the client gets a great professional website they can edit themselves within their budget. Everybody wins.
Flare9.com is entering beta this week for a 2 week final testing cycle before an official launch early March.
Everyone who owns a business does what they do for different reasons and motives. You may sell cars, build houses or provide professional services. Whatever you’re doing, there’s this common belief that your business must compete in a pre-defined space and that others in this same space have to be beaten. You’re supposed to out-smart, out-sell, out-position or otherwise destroy others who share your same market.
I beg to differ and will use my own company as an example. We provide professional level web design, development and search engine optimization services and what do you know? There are thousands of other companies claiming to do just the same. Are they my competition? I say “no”. This company has no competition.
This company…
Does this sound like a company that has competitors? These are my statements and thoughts of how I perceive this company. This perception does not allow room for comparison.
Do you think that if you thought of your company this way as well, whether you sell cars or build pools, that in your mind a comparison could ever be made between your company and another? Of course not. I suggest you stop worrying about your “competition? as they only exist in your own mind. There are always going to be people doing the same work as you and even doing it better in some aspect. Only you decide if you are going to fear, envy, or compete against them. Don’t try to be like them; create your own vision and be the one and only company like it.
This company does not have competition and neither does yours. The perceived notion of competition is that you are just like them, or in fact worse - because they are doing it better than you. Are they better than you? Who says: them or you?
Technorati Tags: competition, entrepreneur, market share, phoenix, refreshphoenix, search engine optimization, web design, web development, business
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