Sönke, Fridtjof and me are currently in Cuxhaven/Lüdingworth (the old farm we started building the software and getting our first customers). We are actually here for a development session to launch some really great features in the next weeks. We will improve the social network functions, give you a possibility to get more communication on your Jimdo-Page and one other thing I will talk later about. Sönke is implementing our message queue dropr to get more performance and reliability in the backend. Enjoy some photos.
Sönke has some fun with screens like this!
These are our development servers here. The silver one is nearly six years old. Now he is only backup I know they don’t seem like this, but these servers are crazy. Our sys-admin did a great job. The servers simulate our whole backend, even with the distribution in several data centers.
I usually don’t forget to buy milk, but if I would, I’d definitely give Remember The Milk a try. I didn’t have a look at the product yet, but the website and the presentation of this cool web-service is really awesome. These guys do so many things right, let me point some of them out:
Product Presenation
I understood what the product is about and what possibilities it offers just by having had a glace at the first page. The screenshots are great, the examples of use make a lot of sense and the links to learn more are placed really well.
Offering a paid Pro Package
They have linked “Upgrade to Pro” with the small line at the bottom “Has RTM made you more organized and productive? Upgrade to Pro and support RTM.” and if you click on the link one of the three main advantages of Pro is “A warm fuzzy feeling for supporting RTM”. Wow, that’s cool. Earning money with a todo list might be hard, giving it a slightly emotional touch will sure make it easier for them. At least they’d get me: if I’d use your product, I would pay for this feeling
Your mascot Bob
I think nearly every startup has somehow a mascot. For us, it’s not really a mascot but we consider Atomic Bomberman as something similar (we even have an Atomic Bomberman ink stamp we use to stamp official documents ;)). But I don’t know any startup that uses their mascot to communicate news and cool blog entries in such a nice way.
When I see cool services like these I always think how we could cooperate with them. In this case, my first obvious thought was that of how cool it’d be if every new user of the RTM todo-list would have a first entry “create my free website” with Jimdo Oh wait, I even have a better idea…
Guys, keep up the cool work, and congrats to the 500.000 users.
Christian
Disclosure: I don’t know any of the Remember The Milk guys and am not connected to that company. I just like what they’re doing
We started with SEO & SEM very late (too late :)) at Jimdo. Several things make it very hard for us at the moment:
Building a website is one of the oldest ideas in the web. So there are many competitors who are several years old and have strong positions in google.
With most keywords we also compete against big hosting companies. This is not cool for the SEM prices
SEO is one of the most important things because you will get free traffic and users everyday as soon as you are at the top. I only can recommend every new startup: Build your keywordlist before you start and do an on-page optimization for this keywords from day 1.
SEM is very nice because you will see results only a few hours after you start. And with the awesome tracking tools from google you can even quantify the profit or loss very fast.
We are very curious about one thing with SEM: How many people who are searching e.g. “free homepage” will upgrade to our Pro Package (6$ per month). Do people who include “free” in their search terms really only want free things? Or do they only want to try it for free? Maybe we will show some statistics about that in this blog later.
Almost two weeks ago I had the chance to go to the BarCamp Baltics. It took place in Riga, Latvia. I’ve had the opportunity to visit Riga a couple of times before - and I simply love the city. The contrast of change, the major shake-ups during its history and the kindness of the people make it a very unique city.
So as soon as I noticed that there’d be a BarCamp in Riga, it didn’t take me long to book the flights.
What I really love about BarCamps is the nice atmosphere, relaxed talks and new inspirations that you get from other sessions. Does it make your company boost if you go to a BarCamp? No, it doesn’t - and to be honest that shouldn’t be the goal of attending one. The goal should rather be getting to know interesting people within the community, get valuable feedback concerning your idea (maybe you’re meeting a blogger or two how love your idea and are going to write about it) and just have a good time.
So I actually went to Riga because I wanted to get a better feeling for the East-European Market. I talked to lots of people had a great time and did also give a session about how we’re actually growing Jimdo. It was lots of fun especially because I hardly new anybody there and the participants were from all over the world. Just great. A big “paldies” (Latvian for thanks ;)) to the great organization-team!!
Four years ago we founded NorthClick on an old farm. Without a cent we moved in at Fridtjof’s home and developed the online-software that now is the core of Jimdo. NorthClick distributes this software to Small and Mediumsized Enterprises who can use the software for updating their websites really easily. Short after the founding we won a businessplan competition (we used three matchbox cars to explain our idea to the jury, we guess they loved that idea ;-)) which gave us approximately 20,000 USD. In combination with some basic agreements and our first customers we had enough money to move to Hamburg and rent our first office. Since then we already moved into a bigger office and have a rising number of customers and colleagues!
During the first three years more and more of our friends asked us whether they could use our system for private stuff. We were so fascinated by the cool pages they created! Some used the system for pages about themselves, three guys used it to document their sailing trip from Germany to Sydney, some to promote their bands…and the feedback was just unbelievable!
That’s when the idea was born to give Pages to the People!
As you’ve noticed we’ve just started this additional Jimdo Blog. During the last year since we launched Jimdo we ran across so many things that were noteworthy and that we wanted to share with you guys. However, our own corporate blog is mainly addressing our users so we didn’t want to post the geek-topics over there. That’s why we decided to start this additional blog over here.
What are we going to post about? Our leanings as a start-up, maybe industry news, our experiences…well, you get the sense of it. Who’s posting? Anybody of the Jimdo-Team. We don’t want to limit this blog to a founder-blog, so everyone within the Jimdo-Team might actually be blogging.
If you have anything you would like to hear about from us, make sure to let us know, either via mail to team at jimdo.com or in the comments.
We’re going to post in English but since we’re actually a German company please excuse our language mistakes.
We’re looking forward to some really cool discussions here!
I know they don’t seem like this, but these servers are crazy. Our sys-admin did a great job. The servers simulate our whole backend, even with the distribution in several data centers.
Your mascot Bob