

Crowdbooster (YC S10) in "How to Measure Your Brand's Online Influence" - dtran
http://www.inc.com/guides/201102/how-to-measure-brand-influence-online.html

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tptacek
Here is the thing I don't get about Crowdbooster.

Lots of chartsengrafs. Some of them are even interesting. I'll click over
every once in awhile, see if my Twitter messages are driving followers away.
But the site is not very sticky.

But buried on one of those graph pages --- I can never remember which one ---
is a button for "schedule a Tweet", where Crowdbooster has _figured out for
me_ when my Tweets should get published.

Why - oh - why - oh - why isn't the primary interface to this whole app just a
big Tweet dialog box with "tweet now" or "tweet at best possible time"? I
would use that EVERY DAY.

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sp_
I have been using Crowdbooster since last November (no serious reason, just
felt like betatesting another YC startup) and until like two days ago when
they improved their graphs a bit I honestly thought they are dead. In the last
four months the website pretty much did not change at all.

Here is a suggestion. Maybe you can work on improving communication with your
users so they know what is being changed and added to the site. I just checked
out the blog for the first time like a minute ago and only once is a new
feature mentioned (the #FF feature from 19 days ago). All the other entries
seem to be focused on 'we are mentioned here! and we are mentioned there!'.
Since I do not even read the blog, I even missed the #ff feature.

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mlinsey
Thanks for the feedback. Since our launch three months ago, we have been
occupied with:

(a) working one-on-one with some of our larger users on some premium features
that we will be opening up soon.

(b) supporting our userbase; we got a significantly larger number of signups
than expected from our initial beta launch and have been seeing double-digit
monthly growth since then. As a result we've had to delay some feature work to
fix lots of bugs and scaling issues in order to effectively track millions of
tweets our beta users.

For the latest product updates, follow our blog or @crowdbooster on Twitter.
We're also looking at other ways of getting the word out to our users about
major new features when they are released. Thanks for sticking with us!

~~~
sp_
Thank you for information. Yeah, I was considering that you might be working
hard on scaling these days. The site seems to work mostly well, so you seem to
be doing a good job there.

Thank you very much for the email you sent me too.

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smpappas
Great article. If I'm starting a new ice cream sandwich delivery service for
example, it would be great to know how much influence my facebook and twitter
accounts have over my revenue. On the other end, hopefully influence ratings
will help services suggest places online to market new brands based on similar
industry case studies.

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davidjhall
I find this ironic since one of the top articles today is "The HB Gary Email
That Should Concern Us All (Sockpuppet Management Software)" Can you easily
measure crowd interest if it's becoming easy to fake online users.

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PeterT
Awesome article!!!

