Archive for October, 2008

“Smart” Bookmarks

Published October 21, 2008 Marketing , service , startup 3 Comments

I want to try and explain what social bookmarking is and then tell you about how we are planning on giving it a real estate twist with our new web application Dwellicious.

I recommended you take a look at this video. It does a great job of describing social bookmarking “in plain English”. But I’ll also try and explain what social bookmarking is here.

Lets imagine you are interested in motorcycles. You love motorcycles. You “ride to live and live to ride motorcycles”, as the saying goes. As part of your passion for motorcycles you scour the web for the best motorcycle websites out there. The best ones you “bookmark”, but since you are using a social bookmarking service instead of just “add to favorites” on your own browser, your bookmarks are shared with everyone using the service.

Now lets say another kindred spirit, who also loves motorcycles, visits the social bookmarking site you belong to. He types in “motorcycles”. Now all the bookmarks that other motorcycle junkies (like you) have made, appear on a list. The motorcycle websites with the most bookmarks are on the top of this list. This is very powerful. What you have in front of you is a list that other humans beings put together about the best websites about motorcycles. Think about that, OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, not a computer, not an advertiser that paid to be on top, not a fancy mathematical program, but other REAL PEOPLE who love the same things you do!

With Dwellicious we want to bring the power of this concept to real estate. But there are two big challenges when it comes to creating a social bookmarking service to real estate.

1. People are mostly interested in the listings themselves, not just the website.

2. Listing information tends to change (Price, status, adding new photos, etc.)

So we needed to create bookmarks that could index specific data about a particular listing on a website. And we needed to make sure that the bookmark knew if any of the changes were made and when. In a traditional bookmarking scenario you are just bookmarking a site because it’s cool, useful, and you want to visit again. But when you bookmark a real estate listing, that listing might not be there next week or the price might have dropped. What we needed was a “smart bookmark” and that’s what we created.


More next week…

We are about to make a final decision on our logo for Dwellicious. Take a look at the previous posts and give us your input!

1,000 true fans….

Published October 15, 2008 Vibe , service , startup Leave a Comment

Something showed up in my Google Reader that I thought was absolutely brilliant. It’s a post from Kevin Kelly’s Blog “THE TECHNIUM”. Which you should be checking out-BTW. The title of the post is “1,000 True Fans“. The post reminded me about the reasons behind us starting a new software company.

One of the things that Dan and I talked about before starting our new company was the goal of not growing too fast, staying small. 37Signals’ book Getting Real said it best.

“Be Yourself-
Differentiate yourself from bigger companies by being personal and friendly
A lot of small companies make the mistake of trying to act big. It’s as if they percieve their size as a weakness that needs to be covered up….
Small companies enjoy fewer formalities, less bureaucracy, and more freedom. Smaller companies are closer to the customer by default. That means they can communicate in a more direct and personal way with customers.”

Dan and I want to create great products. We might have a lot fewer users than bigger companies (Is that such a bad thing?) We might have a few less features than other products (Is that such a bad thing?) Keeping things smaller affords us the luxury of focus and attention (yes, I said “luxury”). Focus and attention on our customers and products. We hope, with this approach, to find a few fans of our own.

We just got our Federal ID Number for Woolley Robertson Group, Inc.

Published October 9, 2008 Vibe 1 Comment

The last 3 digits are 777!

Jackpot!!!

: )

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