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Great feedback thus far - really candid honest feedback. Sometimes I forget how brutal people can be when you ask them for their feedback. No worries though, we’ve got a thick skin here at Event Seek and love the idea of getting good suggestions from our consumers.

I’ve culled the forums and emails and thus far, and it sounds like feedback (excluding obvious bugs) is centering around a few issues:

• Event invitations and tracking: Everyone would be interested in inviting other users, and then tracking their attendance status. Almost like a mashup between evite and an event calendar.
  • We’ve been toying with this idea for a bit now and really think it is an interesting concept. How do you know who is going to an event that you aren’t planning? Facebook and Evite have it down for when it is my event, but no one else seems to bridge that gap. This piece of the project is in the works and is largely designed. It is a bit tricky to implement however, so it might be a little while before you see this up and live. I know some of you have heard me say this would be coming sooner, but given that we’ve had two customers interested in the past three days, we’re gonna focus on the features that they need for the time being.
• Adding an event and how much data we need to capture: A couple of you seemed to have difficulty adding a new event, specifically with venues and the number of required fields. Overall the suggestions centered around making less information required, especially venues.
  • Believe it or not, we actually require very little information to create an event and venue. Basically with a title, time, and address you can complete the entire process. Obviously this isn’t laid as smoothly as it could be - maybe we should take some basic information up front and put secondary information in a second set of input fields. I do however recognize this is going to be a tougher question as we are striking a balance between making the process simple and wanting users to put in more information than other event calendars. Look for us to solicit additional feedback as we approach this issue.
• Event & Venue pictures and other user content: Users can not simply upload photos about an event or post anything other than comments.
  • Our next version of the product will increase the amount of user generated content possible. We’ll look to include event reviews, venue reviews, the ability to share photos, and other options as well. Certainly not in the two week plan (as it is a bit complicated), but it is on our radar.
• Enhancing the “obviousness” of the thumbs up and down abilities: Many users have commented on the difficulty they had in finding the thumbs and down for an event or venue. 
  • Believe it or not, but those thumbs have gone through more revisions than I want to count! For a long time they were too obvious and obnoxious and we took effort to reduce the amount that they jumped off the page. Well, guess what happens when you develop in a cave for a few months? We stepped too far back in the other direction! We’ll look to clean those little guys up ASAP so that you can find them much easier in the future.
• Improved search options: Seems like many of you would like to have more searching/sorting functionality. I’ve heard requests for the ability to filter by different metrics, search for different timelines, and search for some categories and not others to name a few.
  • We’ve actually been heads down on search for the past few days implementing some additional functionality that will likely not be obvious at first blush. These improvements are setting the stage for our ability to create advanced search and filtering of the results much like the things everyone seems to be requesting.

Wow, just barely three days into alpha and we’ve already got a huge list of to-dos! All of them are fantastic and things we want to do. As I read back over the requests I’m impressed both by the things we saw coming and the things we didn’t!

Now comes one of the tougher parts of our job, actually trying to prioritize those issues that are most critical and that we need to add/mend right now, and which ones can wait a few weeks/months as we hammer out some of the other needs. One thing that will certainly affect our priority set are customers. We have been in conversations for some time now to bring on beta customers who will work with us both to implement and improve the product. In the near term future, we’ll be focused on solidifying aspects of the back-end support and those features which are most critical to our customers and their decision making.

I’m not saying we’ll be ignoring your suggestions - quite the contrary - many of your suggestions will be critical to our customers. But if you don’t see a sudden change in something you asked about, don’t be surprised. I promise it’s not because we are slacking off…

Oh and an FYI - look for more of our team to be posting to the blog in the coming weeks. I’d like the production team to be keeping everyone abreast of what major issues they are working on. That way as improvements and changes get made, you all can hear it right from the source. I don’t know if their style will be quite as witty and charming as mine, but then again who’s is?

Event Seek was selected as a featured company for the most recent issue of Southeast Innovations! This a e-magazine delivered to a angels, VCs, and institutional investors throughout the Southeast.

It’s certainly not an article in the WSJ, the Economist, or the New Yorker, but it is press nonetheless. It is a brief review of our company, idea, management team, and market focus. It is always nice to be approached by someone who wants to talk about your company.

For those of you following the link, I apologize as it will only show you the header for our article - it is a subscription only publication.

As they say, any news is good news and we’ll continue to leverage any bit of PR we get to our advantage.

Alpha notes coming shortly…

Alpha is live.

I’m just going to let that settle in for a minute. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet.

Months of thought, discussion, debate, design, and iteration have all come down to this. Alpha is live.

Wow. I want to take a week off to catch up on sleep, friends, and my life. Nope, not gonna happen.

Time for beta, customers, investors, employees, and everything else. I think that might be the scariest and most exciting thing about building a startup. For every failure there are another 10 things you need to do. But for every success, there are a 100. 

For now, a good nights rest. For tomorrow we start on task 1. 99 to go.

Wikipedia defines an alpha release as “The alpha build of the software is the build delivered to the software testers, that is persons different from the software engineers, but usually internal to the organization or community that develops the software. In a rush to market, more and more companies are engaging external customers or value-chain partners in their alpha testing phase. This allows more extensive usability testing during the alpha phase.”

Say what you want about Wikipedia and whether or not it will ever make a valid source, but they are dead on here. Alpha is a chance for us as business owners to take the software out of the hands of the development team and have some of the QA department really take a look at the product. In many cases an alpha release is internal to the company - no one else is allowed to see or use it - especially given than an alpha release tends to be buggy and inconsistent.

No, we don’t have a formal QA department. Tristan and I do our best, but we’ve both got about 100 other jobs to do any given day, so we’re soliciting your help. Many of you’ve asked me for an invitation - and many of you haven’t. We want to see as many people using the product as possible and deep down I know you all want to play with it, so yes everyone will get an invitation. At least everyone who won’t go sharing our hard work with the press or our competitors.

It’s late Sunday night and we all still wish we had three more days to work on the product, but we’re sticking to schedule. We’ll deliver invites tomorrow morning and unleash a bevy of friends and supporters on Event Seek. Be kind, but be brutal. Tell us what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be fixed, and what needs to be added. Event Seek is a consumer driven application that is designed to help people discover and attend events - so tell us what we’re doing to support that and what we could be doing better.

Imagine you have an early pass to the development of facebook, MySpace, or Google. Think about how many times you’ve wished a website would do something differently or offer you different functionality - this is your chance. You have a great power, and with great power comes great responsibility - we need you to talk to us. Don’t just keep it to yourself when something doesn’t work right - tell us! Don’t mutter when you wish another feature existed - tell us! Links to the forums can be found in your alpha toolbar - don’t be shy.

This is our alpha launch of Event Seek, but this is your chance to shape a young product and a young company.

Our invitations to private alpha hit mailboxes monday morning. If you haven’t already signed up, send an email to MakeMeATester at event-seek.com and we’ll send an invite your way. It should be pretty cool to see all the neat things we’ve been working on. It’s time, as they say, to ship the product. We set a deadline for ourselves and have stuck to that deadline.

We will deliver alpha on time.

Is every last piece of functionality we dreamed up for alpha included? No.

Are their bugs that we don’t know about? Surely.

Are there bugs that we do know about? You betcha.

Are their portions of the website that could and probably should work better? Uh Huh.

Do I wish I had several more weeks to go back to the development team and get this thing right? More than you know.

It is time, however, to ship the product. It will inevitably have errors, minor bugs and things we wished we noticed before the launch, but that is okay. That is sort of the idea of an alpha launch - put a stake in the ground and push yourselves to deliver. We could spend the next three months building the product, getting it perfect and you know how we would feel three days before launch? Exactly the same we feel now - wishing we had  more time to go tweak.

There is another incredible benefit to a private alpha launch - customers. We get to see in a real live working environment what the consumers use, what they like, and what they find difficult. The best product design comes from customers and we want to harness that. Sure they’ll dream up ideas we’ll never be able to complete anytime soon, but I’ll bet more than anything else, they’ll want the very features we want and help us shape what those features should look like.

Is my development team wary of what people will say? Yeah. Should they be? Maybe a little. Am I? Of course. Do the vast benefits outweigh the risks? Damn straight. It’s time for Event Seek alpha.

We may not yet be ready for prime time, but much like “Magnum,” the preview is still pretty breathtaking.

Great series of articles from the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation on valuing a pre-revenue company. Not really exciting unless you are a startup or an angel, so take it for what it is worth.

Interesting take away message from the materials: seed stage investments generally range from $1M to $3M depending on the capability of management and their experience. Not sure what that says about Tristan and me…

In this month’s Technology Review published by MIT. The article is called Recommendation Nation and is written by Michael Schrage. You can find it online here. Please note you’ll have to sign up for a free membership to view it - takes about 1 min and is certainly worth reading.

Enjoy!

Financial projections in a startup are a bit of a catch 22. You can’t really make accurate estimations until you have interacted with customers and know what they are willing to pay, but you need investment (and therefore valid projections) before you can build the product and interact with those customers.

Working on our revenue model today has led me to the essential conundrum underlying a tech-based startup: (Please note, this assumes you aren’t a self funded millionaire)

1. Product development is expensive and requires significant expense. This expense usually comes from investment.
2. Customers tend to buy a dream, but want you to deliver a product. Therefore without a product, you cannot have customers.
3. Investors want to fund your company and help you succeed, but after the bubble, they are much more hesitant to invest in an early stage company. Investors want to see a product and usually customers before they are willing to invest.
4. See point one.

I often liken starting a company to playing with dominos. Not actually playing dominoes, but playing with them - little kid style. Remember when you used to set a whole bunch of dominos in a row and knock over the first one to watch the chain reaction? Starting a company is a lot like sitting in a room full of dominos. With the right flick, you will start a chain reaction that will unleash the most amazing and exciting spectacle you’ve ever seen.

However, unlike real dominos, our metaphorical dominos require significant effort to knock over. You could easily invest months of effort and pain into trying to knock over one domino. Then, there is the other problem - the room may be full of dominos, but it is also full of holes. Knocking over one domino does not ensure the chain reaction. You may even need to knock over multiple dominos before you can reach the one that will start the reaction. In a room full of real dominos, this wouldn’t be that difficult - you would study the situation from above and decide where to unleash your catastrophic flick. However, the metaphorical dominos span many floors making it impossible to know which one is the critical lynchpin.

What is an entrepreneur to do? Weigh his options, decide which dominos he thinks will be the most effective, and make strides towards knocking down many of them. If you’re good and really lucky, you might just be part of an incredible display of force.

And remember, no matter how hard you try, you can’t see above the dominos. Just in case you’re thinking about blowing off that meeting, remember this: that contact you don’t think is very important, just might be the best friend of your next big investor.