Changing the World of MLM

iGiza says goodbye

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel Shalgi-Shira) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:05:00 +0000

Hello all,

We would like to inform all of you that iGiza (http://www.igiza.com/) is going to close its business in the very near future.

Although we got very good responses to our pilot service (http://www.uniknet.net/) and great feedback to our presentation at TWS2007 event, we had no success in raising money. Unfortunately, After 14 months of full time self funds operation we have reached the point where we can no longer continue to work on our personal funds.

As much as it is sad for us to say goodbye we know that every end is the beginning of a new journey in life.

We learned a lot, the last year and so was a real roller coaster for us and we had great fun.

We will keep this site alive for a few more weeks but I guess you should not expect any news here.

We thank you for being here with us, and we hope to meet you in our future ventures.

Farewell.

Did we touch a sensitive spot? Or is it something disruptive?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomer Greenbaum) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:45:00 +0000

In my last post I wrote about the wide spread of population using our community around the world.
I guess it looked so spread to us because we did not notice the deceleration of registration amongst the north American population.
This week is becoming a very hard but interesting week for us…

Investigating the reasons of this deceleration led us to find out that several key players in our target market feel the change in the air and apparently they don’t like the taste of it.
Ok. Let’s start from the beginning with a little bit of order in the chronological events:
January 2007: iGiza launched its first buzz campaign. A map of the world where members of a specific MLM company (our first pilot market) could put their name and picture on their physical location.

February 2007: few hundreds of users are already registered to that buzz campaign which along with the map, tells our new members what are we planning to start soon…
Following that, came few emails from key players in the industry saying “We want to talk!”. We did not hesitate and called them. One call was a conference call with two leaders from our pilot market and it was very positive; they asked questions - we answered and explained what we plan for the future.
The second call was with another key player, only this one was not positive at all… she explained to us that she is afraid of the internet and wouldn’t want anyone else to “mess with her team”… (Our community comprises on people that sell through the MLM Method and therefore some of its members have business connections between them) In other words she said that sharing is good, but not for her!

June 2007: we launched our first beta community for that same pilot market established from the users that were registered to the buzz campaign.
Registration rates were more than satisfying, but… American users, and currently Israelis as well, are refraining from using our system. Spoookkkyyyy.
In order to find out what is going on we sent some emails to other key players - but no one is answering.
Last Sunday we got an email from a phantom address (or you can call it a troll if you want) that was a forward of an email addressed from one key player in the pilot market to another.
In this email the writer toughly demands from the other leader to stop using our service and to stop endorsing it as well. This looks like a PANIC.
Our guess is that key players in this pilot’s small community might be afraid of the unknown, the big change. Maybe they believe they can stop the progress at their doorsill. As if someone has ever succeeded in that… it’s a fact that some key players are NOT afraid. So what differentiates between those who participate and those who resist?
Well… We all know where the world is heading to. Anyone who uses the internet is exposed or will be exposed to information that others want or don’t want him to see.

The million dollar question is: “Are we ahead of our time or can we make this change happen in the MLM industry as well?”

Reaching the far end of the world

noreply@blogger.com (Tomer Greenbaum) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:48:00 +0000

One of the most exciting things in building a community website is that you can never know where are you going to set your footprints at.
You start by sending few emails to your contacts in the US and in your local mainland and somehow after few weeks you start getting support emails written in Spanish, Finnish French and more.
Since we launched our first buzz campaign on January we created a network of several hundreds of potential users for our first community around the world. We sent invitation to the US and Israel only and we saw how the “wild fire” spreads out to Europe Asia and the far east.
Few weeks ago we launched our first beta community. The growth percentage looks really good and from the US we span now all over the world.
These days we are facing issues that we never thought we will face so soon. It looks like most of our members are excited having a lobby to submit their testimonials and read others posts. Now they can discuss their issues with their colleagues in a forum and I wonder if the language barrier will stand between them or will it be the connecting glue.
Last week we got a very nice email from a lady in Berlin. She signed up to uNikNet and couldn’t resist to email us encouraging us to keep up the good work. Another lady from Israel found us on the internet and requested to be invited, we sent her an invitation and apparently she has a very good influence on our future members in turkey and all over the world. It is so fun to know that people you don’t even know, want to use what you created and endorse others to use it as well.

I am a dedicated reader of blogs, especially VS's blogs. following Mazen Arabi's post called The most common mistake entrepreneurs make about entrepreneurs wanting to start a business instead of wanting to solve a problem, came the article by Kevin Efrusy from Accel talking about consumers based website and the way to "Catch and Keep" like Josh Kopelman once said in his blog. I now strongly believe we are changing peoples habits and by that we make them stay!

P.S
At the TWS post I posted a while ago, I mentioned the contest for the people’s favorite’s startup. We won a Google refrigerator (See pic) and a voucher for Google Adwords. Thanks Google guys and Yami and Yaron

Two Great Announcements

noreply@blogger.com (Tomer Greenbaum) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:18:00 +0000

I Started writing this post on Sunday and by then we had two proud announcements to make.
For some reason I couldn’t find the right words and I guess I now know the reason.
The situation now is that there are actually three GREAT announcements but I decided to leave the post’s title as it originally was.
I will start with the last news but maybe the most important one:

First of all, Nira Oliver, a co-founder of iGiza, just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl last Tuesday. So I guess our team has grown with fresh blood now. We all wish her MAZAL TOV!!!
Second: We launched our first community last Thursday and invited our beta users to start using it.
Third: We won as the audience’s favourite startup as following to the TWS2007 event.

For the first announcement I can say that we are growing at a VERY nice growth rate, we started as six founders and three of us expanded their family ,each by one, during the past four months so we are at a 50% growth in four months which is great for a community based startup!! :)
Second, Our community, uNikNet, is alive and we are getting some GREAT inputs from our beta members who invite their colleagues every day to join in and be a part of the new era of the MLM distributor's life.
For the Third one we are very excited that people outside the MLM world took the initiative and voted for us as their favourite company for the TWS2007 event. Our presentation clip on flix was viewed more than twice the times than the second place and it shows a lot to us.

Thank you all (community members, voting audience, family and relatives ) for your support.

The iGiza Team
Some pics from our humble launch:

Soft Launching a Community Website

noreply@blogger.com (Tomer Greenbaum) — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Tomer Greenbaum) — Thu, 17 May 2007 20:42:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Tomer Greenbaum) — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:43:00 +0000

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