Going Into Closed Beta

So we have hit our predetermined threshold of Alpha user far quicker than we had anticipated, due mainly to some unexpected press coverage here and Twitter. We are also thrilled about being very close to feature complete for Version 1.0. This being the case, we are now going to go into our next phase of our launch, a semi-closed beta. This means a few things for end users:

1. We are moving from a 1-100 to a 1-1000 scale. This gives us a little more granularity in our rating system and will also hopefully get away from the idea that a 60 is failing, similar to a grade.
2. Current users’ functionality will not change at all
3. We will be accepting new users through invite only
4. Invites (for now) will be available by submitting your email address on the front page
5. Sometime in the very near future, we will begin releasing a controlled number of invites a day out into the wild.

This has been a particularly exciting few days for us here at Divvs and we will use the next few weeks to scale our systems properly so that we can move to the next phase, open for business.

Badges? We ain’t got no badges.

Except now we do. Here’s mine:

Want to get yours? Signup for Divvs, or login to your Account page if you’ve already signed up.

That’s why they call it Alpha

I was planning to do some system upgrades this morning, and had already taken the site down to maintenance mode, when I saw jhaynie signing up. I was curious what Jeff would think, so I quickly brought the site back up and let him finish registering. He posted about it on Twitter a few times during the process, and directly or indirectly encouraged a decent sample of the Atlanta tech community over to try the site.

Over the course of the day, there’s been a good amount of conversation on Twitter and in email about Divvs, plus a lot of people posting their ratings. (For the record, we love that. Don and I, and our family and close friends, are completely obsessed with our ratings. I check my rating, and everyone else’s, several times a day. Sometimes I run them again, just to watch it go and make my laptop get warm.)

So, some people asked some good questions today, and instead of constantly Twittering back and forth, I figured a blog post would be a better way to answer some of them.

First, thanks to all our new users. We love that you’re trying Divvs, and we love your feedback, positive and negative.

Several people commented that it took a while to get their first rating. If you had seen how long it took 2 weeks ago, you’d be delighted at a 15-30 minute wait, but yes, we want that to be much shorter. That’s our number 1 priority before we go into a real beta phase.

A few people didn’t know whether their rating was good or not. On the “My Account” page you can see the current average rating, and tonight I’m updating it to also show you the current top rating. You can also see how you compare to your five highest rated friends on that page.

At least one person was worried we were collecting marketing data. While we do ask for a lot of information, it’s all optional. We require an email address, but I even relaxed that requirement (don’t tell anyone). Whatever you give us, we’ll do our best to get you a rating based on that. Our privacy policy has more, but I will definitively say that we won’t sell or give away your personal data. Ever. The only thing we ever give out is your rating.

Perhaps the biggest question was “What good is it?” While it’s a lot of fun to gloat that you have a higher rating than your friends, if that’s all it is then it’s about as useful as the Wired Internet Celebrity Meter.

We’ve got a lot of work to do on the site to explain why Divvs is useful, but here’s a few quick scenarios to tide you over:

• You’re new to eBay, and want to sell your motorcycle there. You have no feedback to establish your credibility, but you have an active group of friends on Twitter and Facebook. By putting your Divvs Rating in your listing, you can use the social connections you already have to give potential buyers a sense that you’re not a scammer.
• You’re looking for tickets to the Braves game on Craigslist, and find someone with a decent price, but they’re from out of town. Neither of you wants to give out a lot of information, and neither of you really trusts the other. If you exchange Divvs Ratings, maybe you both feel better about making the deal. (Our SecurePost product makes this even easier)
• Sticking with baseball…you’ve got two extra tickets for the game, and want to sell them at the stadium. The guy who wants to buy them is worried they might be fake, so you pull up your Divvs profile on your iPhone.* It doesn’t prove anything, but it may be just enough to make him comfortable buying your seats.
• There was a blog post yesterday on Wired about kids and Xbox Live. It got us thinking about how to integrate with Xbox Live Gamertags. Things like that happen every day. People are looking for ways to increase security and decrease fraud, without handing out their Social Security number. Divvs is for all of those situations.

How do we make money? Well I have to save something for the business plan and the PowerPoint, right? I will tell you that we’ll never charge users to sign up or to get their Divvs Rating, we’ll never sell all the data to marketers or spammers, and we’ve got a couple of potential customers engaged in conversations. If you’re really interested, hit me or Don up for a copy of the business plan. We’ll both be at Open Coffee and Capital Lounge in Atlanta next week.

* iPhone webapp should be available for demo by Open Coffee

Twitter Support

I got Twitter support working yesterday.  If you haven’t added your Twitter account to Divvs yet, why don’t you go do it now.

I talked about an interesting technical tidbit of our Twitter support over on my personal blog, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world.

So tomorrow morning Michael and I are unveiling, at least in a limited sense, Divvs to the world.  Its been quite a trip to get here and I’d like to talk a bit about the journey and some of the more memorable events or non-events. This post will be the first of three on our experiences.

1. Starting a company is scary. I could list a ton of reasons for why this is the case, and most of them are obvious, but I think that its best explained by an anecdote of Michael’s that happened just the other day. Michael goes to a church retreat every year called SUUSI, and acts as a counselor to lots of high school kids. One of the kids asked him how he got clients (for our consultancy Ivey and Brown). The response was mostly through word of mouth and reputation. The next question was the kicker though, “What happens if you don’t get any clients?” The response to that was, “Well Billy, I guess I starve”. This last month or so this one has started to weigh heavier and heavier but I’m finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
2. Its also been a great ride. Even if we fail miserably, I’ve been happier these last few months being able to do what I want and if we fail, I’ve got no one to blame but myself….. and Michael, I can always blame Michael. But the freedom that I’ve had was something I’ve not enjoyed in many years. And its very different from just working in a startup, which I’ve done many times. Being one of the founders means that there is no one else that’s going to pick up your slack, because there is no one else. This is, at the same time, a terrifying and liberating thing.
3. This has truly been an education in how much my programming skills have slipped over the last few years as I have done more security and played more of an architect role. My perl-fu is still strong, but the true Ruby way continues to evade me for now, I guess my mind just thinks better in Perl. But I am having a hell of a lot of fun practicing anyway, and have even started to pick up soem Erlang too. Along the same lines, my math skills have gotten so rusty as to have been nearly non-existent. I remembered almost no calculus or geometry and even had to look up some basic notation. Truly a wake up call for continued education, even if it is purely self-directed.

to be continued over the next few days….

Beds made of Dreams (And a new feature)

I hear that when you’re the founder of a post-funding startup, when you travel you stay in hotels where the beds are made of dreams, the showers cascade like waterfalls from heaven, and they leave ice cream on your bed in the morning.

When you’re the founder of a pre-funding startup you stay in the cheapest place you can find where you won’t be murdered in your sleep.

The last time I came to Atlanta, I crashed on my sister’s couch, but this trip we have meetings scheduled instead of just code sessions, so I found a really cost-effective (cheap) and efficient (tiny) hotel. There’s barely a desk, but there is a tiny couch-like surface embedded in the window.  And Wi-Fi.  I love that even the cheapest hotel manages to have free Wi-Fi.

Since we’re showing Divvs off to some folks today, we decided last night to finally implement a new feature we’ve been talking about for a while.  I haven’t had time to document it yet, but you can now secure your posts on Craigslist, other listing sites, blog comments…anywhere that has a text input box, really.  Using Divvs’ Secure Posts, you can let people know your Divvs Rating without giving up any other information about yourself, and still give them the security of knowing you really made the post.  Check divvs.com in the next day or so for official details, or play around with it now.  I made it live last night after we finished writing it.

Are you using Divvs?  If so, let us know! We’d love to know what you think.