You just had dinner last night with someone that snapped up two of them :)
Hello from the month-old two-person design department at isocket! I'll try to help put the word out for you, love what you're building and how you're doing it.
Businesses that care about their customers / users / clients are the ones that will win in 2010 and beyond. I want to be apart of this future and it's the basis for why @danmartell and I founded Flowtown.
I can vouch for Ethan and say he has personally emailed me a few times to let me know how things are going (with regards to some of my suggestions) and I can tell you he generally cares.
I mean, I don't know him outside of a few email transactions but in any case, he either truly cares or is really good at faking his authenticity, I will go with the former. This would be the reason I recommended his service and the reason I am trying to utilize it at my current place of employment. (head office is not very quick on approvals)
Being completely bootstrapped we've been focused on revenue since day 1 and our "trick" of turning emails into social profiles is our minimum monetizable product.
The current iteration of Flowtown is nowhere close to our final vision: helping businesses scale caring.
We launched with an MVP that had even less features than today's iteration (product is just 9 weeks old).
Well, ok. This trick is the basis for the current version of your product, or perhaps "current business."
Is that fair? Or are you doing something other than, say, scraping http://www.facebook.com/search/?ref=ffs&q=farmerje@uchic... when I type in my email address? (At least WRT Facebook; other networks would naturally have different tactics.)
You don't need to be defensive. Every network is bootstrapped off another network. If you can get away with it, get away with it for as long as possible, but make sure you have an escape plan.
I assume that's what you're doing. Am I wrong?
That's not meant as a challenge, BTW. If I misunderstand your current product then the record should be corrected.
I'm not sure "trick" is a fair assessment, why do you think it's a trick? We don't scrape Facebook for data, but use a variety of data providers for most of our social information.
Sorry. Your original response made it sound like that's what you did do.
I knew, e.g., Facebook lets you search by email address to find a friend if you know their email. Since the data on Flowtown more-or-less matched that data I had assumed that was the source of the data.
You'd do the same for the other social networks, plus perhaps get data from Rapleaf and other social profile companies.
If you're saying that's not the case, I can't argue with that and apologize for implying otherwise.
As to whether it's a trick or not, what difference does it make? You can call it a tactic if you'd like.
Ah, ok, totally my bad. I had the wrong context around "trick" I thought you were referring to our business and not a potential method we used to uncover social data.
On an totally unrelated note Cassie says "Hi" - I was at her place for one of her roommates bday's and I was on his computer responding to this thread and she's like OMG jfarmer is that who you're talking with... such a small world.
Awesome case study. Totally what we did with our new pivot
(same market B2C Customers - Saas), that is now in the works (didn't do this first time around, and paid for it). Only difference, we told the customer that these were just high fidelity screen mockups for the product we will eventually be building.
Get your screens in front of customers before you ever code. It is mind BLOWING!
Wonder how well this would work for consumer web... thoughts?
