The digital world has this aura of some parallel universe where all interactions are with computer screens and shaking hands with someone is done by messaging a handshake icon. And, to be sure, this myth is hard to bust. But most of us are still creatures of the habits of the good old universe where people like to actually convene in a physical location to interact. Singapore based e27 organized Unconference 2009 this year for precisely this purpose. It gave CountSpin a chance to meet other startups, bloggers, developers, technology-focused investors and their ilk.
We get feedback from users all the time, but it was a special delight to present the site, see the reactions, and collect live feedback. We even had a lucky draw for those who submitted written feedback (a little encouragement always helps!) and the winner got a Casio G-Shock DW-5600E-1.
Our approach towards publicity has been measured and gradual. The simple reason behind this is that we are firm believers in the ‘release early, release often’ model. We have gone out to market with a public beta precisely because we mean to shape CountSpin as per market feedback.
KillerStartups picked up our story. Their reader-base is filled with tech gurus with a critical eye, so we would have preferred to wait until we were out of beta. Nonetheless, we are happy for the recognition and will certainly value the feedback that this will help generate.
“We all love a bargain and, on CountSpin, it’s all about watching the price drop every second and snapping up a bargain before the stock sells out,” says the TownsvilleEye. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Marcus Chhan from Marketing-Interactive recently asked us in an interview if there was a particular reason why we timed the launch to coincide with the recession. Well, I wish I had a clever-sounding answer for him but the humble truth is that we did not foresee how this year was going to shape up any better than the next guy. That said, we did explain to him that the recession presents a good opportunity for businesses like us. For one thing, it gives us better access to assets (people, merchandise, etc). Furthermore, it reduces opportunity costs for us thus making it easier to labor away at a start-up.
So we will make the best of the timing and pretend as if we had planned for… nay, engineered this recession all along. Meanwhile, you can browse Marcus’ full coverage on - http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/9921
We admit it — it does feel good at some level to be identified as a ‘young’ anything these days, now that the big 30 is behind us. Daniel Goh has given us the compliment of being ‘young upstarts’ on the technology blog he runs by that name. Check out the article below -
