It's been quite a year...

August 9th, 2009

…since I wrote my last post!

Since then I’ve managed to:

  • get Pennyminder launched,
  • Attended and presented Pennyminder at FinovateStartup09.
  • Launched a Pennyminder companion product called Chipped.In (http://chipped.in/.
  • Launched a site (my business partner’s) called Sharable Things.

From August of last year till March of this year, I was doing a contract with some friends of mine, but I felt that I needed to work on Pennyminder full time (with some time out for some contract work to help pay the bills) and left there to try and make a go of it.

A year on my entrepreneurial path. The results so far are less than spectacular. It is so hard to get traffic for a site these days and contract work seems sparse during the summer. I may have to get a regular job and regroup.

I built pennyminder (and now chipped.in) for myself and extrapolated my needs into a market (that is somewhat validated by the success of Mint.com), but I am now focused on direct validation of my product into the market and I am attempting to use the techniques of the lean startup to do that.

But… most of these rely on actually getting some early adopters and traffic to help you refine the product to fit the actual market. And herein lies my dilemma, I cannot seem to drive any significant traffic to either site nor can I seem to convert the little bit of traffic I am getting into users. Marketing is not my strength. However, I continue to learn and my mistakes are not all that costly.

With this post, I hope to reboot my blog and start posting more often. I intend to write on a number of subjects which should give me some more to write about. I hope to write more on the Pennyminder blog too.

Posted by vince Filed in 0 comments »