Soft Launching a Community Website

Last few weeks were very busy weeks. We were busy mostly discussing the launch of our first community.
We have a full featured live functioning community and the decisions we had to make were whether we should start testing it ,which will take couple of months, or decide on which features we deduct and narrow the testing period to just few weeks.
We decided to narrow the community and launch it as a thin version for several reasons:
1. Our customers are not used to using complex systems we and think they better adapt to a simple system before we expose them to all our new cool features.
2. We at iGiza decided that we better have a living ,feature thin community, instead of a rich and empty one. It looks better to the investors, It will feel better to ourselves and I guess we will know sooner how good is our idea by the amount of registered users and not by our estimations.

In his blog, Josh Kopelman once wrote a post called “failing cheaper” . This post talked about the concept of taking large amounts of money from investors in order to keep the startup alive longer. He said that this is wrong not only for the founders but it is also wrong for the employees and everyone else involved that have great expectations. We found that other then taking a lot of money from investors, a company should do its best to put their product to out the test as soon as they can even if it comes with the price of deducting complicated features and postponing it to next version.
VC’s that we met, mentioned more then once, that they would be interested if we prove a “wild fire” effect. In the past, we thought they are not into taking ANY chances but today I say this is the best way to show what your company is made of.
We decided to go live with limited features and a sleek design. We will offer our members a home for their business, a home which is not the largest villa in town but it is sure located I the best location and most important, It will go live on the right time!

TWS2007

On April 10th 2007 we presented at the TWS2007 startup event.
This was the first of its kind conference in Israel, putting 10 young startups ,Which were carefully chosen out of 70, in front of investors, giving us the stage to present our ventures in short 7 minutes.
As you can see in this video, it looks and sounds great. (That's if you understand Hebrew :) ).
This video was taken from the TWS2007 website which is starting a SMS voting contest for the favorite startup.
The videos are presenting in Flix and everyone can vote through the site and send SMS for its favorite Startup. iGiza’s number is of course 1 so you can just send SMS with the number 1 to 6106 from every cell phone in Israel.

Credits for the event goes to Yaron Orenstein and Yami Glick from the.co.ils

The very Beginning

As for any beginning, this post is rather exciting. We’ve been working on this venture for over 8 months now and it seems to turn out much as we expected. Everyone here is very excited and we are working around the clock in order to go live on time. The features are coming along very nicely. iGiza’s goal , To change the way MLM distributors worldwide manage their business and their community lives is just pure exciting. How many times you looked for information regarding a product or for a testimonial and got to it just a bit too late? How many distributors wants to share information and just don’t know how to get it out of their local networks? Maybe it’s because they aren’t in their business long enough, maybe it’s because they just don’t know how to look for it or how to spread it right. Whether they are challenged in using email or don’t know how to get to so many people and publish their material or maybe they don’t know how to upload a video testimonial, managing your MLM business must become easier! Want an example? There you go: put your webcam in front of your face, press record on the testimonials page, start speaking and there you go, you have it under your profile so everyone can see it. Saw a useful testimonial? Want to share it with your friend? Or maybe leave a comment? Just do it right from within the community instead of copying, pasting, sending to various mail contacts and wait to see if they got it through at all.
And everything is just done right. From the point of view of MLM distributors for MLM distributors just for the good of their business.
Think looking for crossline support abroad, upline/donline consulting member searches, skype calls and everything from a centralized home for a unique community with special needs that are taken care of one by one