Does the world need another twitter client?
it certainly is not about being the first out there
When we pitch our little project, we often get the same reply: “Isn’t that what Plaxo does?” I often think the answer to that question is “no”, “not really”, or maybe even “partly”, depending on how deep into the industry the guy we’re talking with is. But lately I’ve been thinking of answering “maybe”, or even “yes”. So what?
Twitter has been around for some years now (and the fact that despite being one of the greatest things ever they still don’t have a business model that the people we eventually pitch to would like to hear, but that would be the suject of another post) and since the beginning there have been many ways to interact with it, specially desktop clients. And I mean many.
Well, it turns out despite having endless ways to interact with twitter, there were these guys who thought there weren’t enough ways already and came up with the wonderful Tweetie. And guess what, it turns out that after a couple of months, Tweetie is the third most popular way of interacting with Twitter on the desktop (the second if we don’t count their own web), that is according to twitsats. According to the people around me, it’s just the Twitter client many people had been waiting for.
I don’t want to mean that we’re going to be the same thing on the personal information management arena (sure as hell we’re trying to), but I just can’t help but picture these guys pitching their product:
“What? Another twitter client? And you have to pay for it? Go home, kids”
So… did the world need another twitter client? It looks like it did. Plaxo or LinkedIn have been around way longer than Twitter, and the real truth is that everybody signed up but nobody actually uses them, or at least no more than eventually. Maybe the world just needs another contact manager.
first round.
soft loan // IK2
Being a start-up you’re constantly moving between your vision – which to most people is something dreamlike and unreal, and reality – which is struggling to find financing to realize your vision. It’s a very frustrating situation because you know that if you only had that money you could take that concept of yours and go build it.
There’s obviously many ways of financing a project, and all of them has got pros and cons, and strings attached. The most viable option for us was to to go for a soft-loan as a first step to get going.
In Sweden there are quite some option for this kind of financing, all depending on where you are in your progress and what kind of project you want to pull off. We’ve been discussing both with Teknopol and IK2 and they’ve both been very positive to our project.
I contacted IK2 back in October when I first aired the idea to some people. I met Johan, the Head of Innovation of Almi, and we started to discuss how to move from that stage, to next. He’s been a great supporter ever since and in the beginning of this year he suggested that we’d apply for their soft-loan to make things happen. So we did.
In late February we filled in the loan-application, which very much resembles a business-plan. Customers, Market, Strategy, Financials etc.. you know the deal. Well, many lines later and some complementary market-strategy-plans it’s now in harbour.
I remember the call from Johan, when he me told we got the loan. It’s amazing how happy you can get, to receive the news that you’ve got another batch of money to pay back. I couldn’t stop smiling though. The fact is, that it’s a sign that we’ve been working hard, we’re in the right direction, and we’ve got something that’s worth investing in. I’d like to express my gratitude for the belief in the project, and all the help that we’ve received so far from the people of IK2, Teknopol and everyone else that’s been around – advising us on the way towards a realization.
It’s an amazing time we’ve got in front of us, and here’s a quote from Johan @IK2/Almi on the matter.
“we believe that ambadoo has an exciting time ahead. The need of a good contact system escalate in pace with the development of the media, in combination that the world is becoming smaller and our network is becoming bigger, and the increasing impact of the social networks around” – Johan Olsén, Head of Innovation of Almi Företagspartner Skåne