'Referenced' Members: Seeking Your Input

My last post was largely about seeking customer feedback to improve our product. But I think you’ll see that the way we do this is very different than the way most Internet companies operate.

Part of our ‘credo’ is to solicit public feedback to changes we make to our service before we make them.

Here’s the first major change, and it’s pretty significant:

MeetMoi intends to introduce the concept of a “Referenced” Member.

Rules for Referenced Members:

MeetMoi would create two classes of membership: Referenced and Unreferenced. Nothing in our current registration process changes for “Unreferenced” Members.

Everything described below is for “Referenced” Members.

Below are the rules and benefits of becoming a Referenced member.

How to Become a Referenced Member:

• Register for MeetMoi and upload a picture
• Provide one or more email addresses (you can list people that are not currently MeetMoi members). At least one person you list needs to be willing to provide a written reference on you.
• References must be of the gender that you are looking to date.
• Once you list what gender you are looking for, you can not change your preference until thirty days following registration.
• You may never change the gender you list for yourself in registration.
• A reference must confirm the accuracy of the listed profile. In addition, the Reference must provide a testimonial that answers the question, “So what’s so great about ?”
• Any party who validates a new member in an untruthful way will forever be banned from our system.

Benefits of being a Referenced Member

• MeetMoi would deliver the profile of a Referenced Member with a Referenced stamp and link to the reference.
• MeetMoi would modify its algorithms to give preference in the delivery of Referenced profiles over Unreferenced profiles.

Comments encouraged and appreciated. If you prefer to keep them private, please email me at andrew@meetmoi.com.

Press, Financing and Refining the Service

Plodding is the word that comes to mind for a company before it raises capital. Plodding to get development done. Plodding to build your brand. Plodding to market. Plodding to hire.

And then the financing arrives. In our case, it was a $1.5 million raise from a respected venture group in New York. The pace immediately changes. It doesn’t just quicken – you begin to move at light speed.

Last week we issued a press release announcing that we had closed our first round of venture financing. But even before that, we received some tremendous press coverage. We hit the cover of the Wall Street Journal (and I mean page one), had a great piece on Fox News, and made our unofficial entrance into the blogosphere.

With all this press, we have to admit, we were a little taken by surprise. We weren’t expecting such a rush, and to address the bugs you discovered, we scrambled into the early mornings to address problems as they arose. We heard on blogs about improvements we needed to our registration and our chat. And we heard the excitement about the introduction of our service. Many of you told us you believed that networking, socializing and dating would change forever because of mobile services like ours.

In the next few days, you’ll see significant changes on the site. First the changes will be to the way search works; then to registration; and finally to chat.

From the beginning we had two notions of focus groups – the first a group of people we brought in who could answer specific questions we had about usability. The second focus group (and certainly the more important) would be our user base. Releasing an Internet service is a far different process than releasing a software product. The release times in software products are usually measured in years or months. At MeetMoi we release changes to code weekly. From a user-experience perspective, we are quite literally testing in public. That’s why I’m asking you to be vocal in what you like and what you don’t.

I literally read every single email that comes in to suggestions@meetmoi.com. Your response has been terrific. In the next week, we’ll be posting some significant changes we plan to make to our definition of a ‘Member’ which is likely to make membership more exclusive. I’ll post here: first, soliciting feedback; and then based on the feedback that we receive both formally and informally, implement these changes.

Stay tuned and thank you.