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.