Creating a startup is hard, really hard, and it has been for us here at OnePage. Quite a lot of twists and turns have occurred since we launched and even since our last post. The only thing that has not changed is our determination to see OnePage become a success. We actually had to make a lot of changes under the hood which is why it seemed we had abandoned the site. We will explain all the “behind the scenes” stories and causes for delay on a later date. For now this post is about the changes that have been made to the OnePage product.
The reoccurring feedback (aside bugs) we received since our initial release was that our product was not well defined: it seemed we could be anything or everything, thereby being nothing. Someone actually thought we wanted to create something like Tweetdeck! Our vagueness limited the amount of useful feedback we could get since people were suggesting things in completely different directions. We take the blame for this mix up which we will throw more light on this in a subsequent post. Let us now clearly define what OnePage is supposed to be:
OnePage is a digital platform for creating, sharing and storing business/contact cards.
For OnePage to be complete, you should be able to create, share (especially with mobile phones) and store business cards. As students of the lean startup, we are focusing on the first part: create. We want to be sure you can create your card in the easiest possible way and like it enough to be willing to share it, i.e. use it as your default email signature, ‘website’ on Twitter and Facebook, etc.
One great thing about the new OnePage is that you do not need to be on many social networks to find it useful. See my card below:
And if you have several contact points, you will also love and find OnePage very useful. See Joel’s card below:
You may notice that we have removed several features (for now) to simplify our offering. The reason being we are not sure we know what you find useful so we have decided to put out the minimum feature set. Changes made include:
Addition:
The card is much more like a business card compared to what we had before. You can add multiple contacts of the same service (RSS, Twitter) and even label it too.
Subtraction:
The stream does not exist anymore (is that a good move?). We have also removed the various backgrounds.
Other:
The landing page has also changed to communicate what OnePage is in the shortest possible time. Is it clear enough? We also sorted a lot of the issues raised in Uservoice.
We want your OnePage to be your primary url/website, the single thing you need give people so they can then connect with you in the one million other places you exist (Skype, Twitter, email, Blog, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn etc). An excellent use case is your Twitter account which has only one entry field for ‘Website’; you can safely put your OnePage there and people can connect with you everywhere. Another good use is as a better alternative for your email signature. see picture below.
You may notice that we do not use Posterous for our blog anymore. It is not that we do not like Posterous (we think it is a very lovely product) but Wordpress is much more extensible and better suited for what we envisage out company blog to be like. We want to use this blog to talk about our product and more importantly document our journey launching our startup. Our role model blog is the 37Signals blog. We believe that if we teach what we are learning, we will learn and benefit more. I hope you visit more frequently (you can subscribe to our RSS feed, Fan us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter). Thank you for all your support. Welcome to the journey!
Please let us know what you think.
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