In the second part of Whispurr’s Diary of a Start Up, co-founder Conor Devine outlines the progress of the Irish social networking site over the past few months. Missed Part 1? Catch-up here.
By November 2009 Whispurr had assembled an experienced online team – most of us thrived in social networks and those that did not were very technically astute. We were also blessed with a very interactive community of initial users who continue to provide feedback on bugs and improvements to the site. Safe in the knowledge that we had enough feedback on Whispurr, we were also certain of our core principles, namely privacy, security and creating realistic relationships online.
It is one thing to know yourself but in a saturated market such as social networking it is imperative to see what your competitors are doing, and then to make sure if you are doing the same thing that you are doing it better. Either that or you’re doing something different for which there is a demand.
In order to understand what social networks are out there it is necessary to use these networks. Google News and Twitter can provide instant news but a lot of the press releases put out by social networks are manipulated. So to really understand what a website can offer you need to use it yourself.
This meant that we all researched the competition. This moves beyond basic Facebook and Twitter and into the realm of the lesser known social networks. There are hundreds of these: did you know there is a social network specifically for cats – www.mycatspace.com!
Obviously we were not going after the ‘cat space’ but nonetheless curiosity made me register to see the functionality involved. Having analysed network creating websites such as Ning.com, grouply.com socialgo.com, we concluded that these were our real competition, especially as we wanted people to make different private networks for different groups they interact with. Whispurr would need to meet the standard of these websites if we were to compete and that is a huge challenge.
Q. Could we create a sophisticated network building system that would make people leave the already well established network creating websites like Ning.com?
A. Nope!
At least not within our timeframe and budget, that kind of growth would take a lot more developers, CPU and time. We had to understand what we could deliver to people.
By this stage Stefano Rocco had not only developed a code which would allow a Whispurr user to send an SMS text message from the Whispurr.com website but also one that would allow users to send an SMS text message from the email they used to register on Whispurr. Armed with this we thus changed our value proposition by offering users a free SMS text facility in a unique manner which would afford us the time to bring the other functions up to date on the website.
We had thus changed direction. In the initial launching of the Whispurr vessel it seemed nothing could veer us off course, however maps are a secondary source to a start-up and the ability to adapt to change is primary. We wanted to give users public and private networks however we gave them private text messages via SMS.
Our next task was to seamlessly present our new product to our online community – and this can always be shielded under that internet start-up word ‘beta’ mode.
For more on Whispurr, read Conor Devine’s first diary piece here, or check out the website there.
Next week on Diary of a Start Up, we hear once more from Conor Lynch and Connector.
