It's a shame to see there's so much spamming is going on in blog comments, and I have not had a chance to add spam prevention measures here, so I have to turn the comments off. If you have something to share, please email it to me at 'nasser at frucall dot com' for the time being.
As you can imagine, now that the service is up and running and we have had market validation and positive feedback from the industry and bloggers, one of our key focuses is to market the product and sign up more users. One may think that it's a free service and signing up users will be a piece of cake. Well, not exactly.
Getting heard in such cluttered environment is not easy at all. At the same time, messaging is very important: The users do not necessarily read and interpret the web site content the way authors expect. One has to be very clear and crisp with the messaging, to make sure that a visitor - who may spend just a few seconds to glance over and move on - understands the value of the service. And all that is assuming that the quality of the product or service is acceptable to the user.
Our simulations show that an organic curve of getting more than a million users will take at 1.5 to 2 years - obviously longer than what we want it to be. That's why you see some sad stories such as fold.com being deactivated. So the big question for younger services such as Frucall is how to ramp up the number of users. We have been lucky because of the support that we have, the company being in business for more than three years, and the marketing people we work with. Still, it's a challenge. I will write more on the topic and our approach. I am interested in hearing what you think.
Posted by nasser at June 6, 2006 10:29 PM