This weekend BigDoor’s co-founder and CEO, Keith Smith shared his thoughts about core metrics that really matter with the online publication Geekwire. Keith walked through the four KPI’s that every site should focus on: Loyalty, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. As Keith stated in the article, “The simplicity provided by these 4 golden metrics allows us to focus on the key drivers of our business, no matter the size and scale of our audience.”
We’re really excited about this Infographic that our designer Chad put together. We’ve been talking about the private beta of our Engagement Economy and today we reveal some early results. At BigDoor we have built a framework that focuses on the four things that matter most to online publishers: Frequency, Engagement, Virality and Revenue. Check out the results!
Today we’re very excited to announce the acquisition of San Francisco-based OneTrueFan, a distributed community and web check-in rewards system. Demand has been so great that we have taken the bold step in acquiring OTF as a way to accelerate our product development and phenomenal growth. There’s been some great articles written about our news already including VentureBeat, GigaOm and All Things D.
Through this acquisition, we’ll gain access to an incredible team of web industry pioneers! OTF Co-founders Todd Sampson and Eric Marcoullier were responsible for IGN.com (IPO in 2000, acquired by NewsCorp in 2005), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo in ’07) and Gnip. Not only do we now have access to this incredible team but also to thousands of publishers and technology that fit perfectly in to our gamified loyalty platform. We’ll be focusing on building and running our BigDoor branded rewards program. We’ll be launching Bigdoor Rewards next month and it will carry with it many of the same characteristics publishers loved from OneTrueFan: easy to implement, great analytics, and increased user engagement. Then in late-October we’ll also be taking the wraps off our Engagement Economy and making it publicly available to larger publishers and online communities. There’s more to come – stay tuned!
A great article today on Geekwire about incredible growth in the South Lake Union neighborhood. While the national news focuses on the economy and lack of jobs this article examines the explosive growth in SLU, including a mention of BigDoor and TechStars!
The article says, “In fact, South Lake Union has already attracted 13,647 jobs — well ahead of the 10,497 that were estimated in the original Sommers’ report.”
We’re excited to be part of this thriving community – though we grumble some when the line of the taco truck is 20-people deep.
Every Wednesday we have a company meeting and our awesome dev team walks us through a Demo of everything they worked on during the prior week’s sprint. At BigDoor we iterate on our platform weekly – we listen to and value feedback from our partners and incorporate as much as we can each week to make our product that much better through each weekly iteration. Yesterday’s demo revealed a “surprise” which one of our great devs Brian Immel details below. We took the liberty of posting this in its entirety but feel free to check out Brian’s blog – its chock full of goodness!
“New Features…..You Didn’t Even Know About”
Yesterday’s demo was exciting.
At BigDoor, the developers (myself included) Demo to the entire company everything we worked on during last week’s sprint. Honestly it’s one of my favorite parts of the job. We move so fast that the demo has become a greatest hits list of killer features that makes our platform so great. With so many awesome things coming down the pipe weekly, we set the bar pretty high. So to demo something truly impressive it’s got to break the mold of normal awesome and become uber-awesome.
During yesterday’s Demo, our fellow developer, Harley Holt gave us that opportunity.
Our weekly sprints are jammed packed with “stories” we’re working on. Usually this means new features, performance gains and bug fixes that are in line with our company roadmap.
However, Harley went above and beyond the call of duty. Somewhere between his daily work hours and getting a nasty ankle sprain playing kickball, he built something truly uber awesome. I can’t tell you what right now (awwww, you tease), but I will say it got me all giddy and giggly with excitement.
As a result, today’s demo was exceptional. At the end of our normal routine, Harley showed off the thing he’s been working on for the last few weeks outside of our normal sprints. No one asked him to do it. It was just a damn good idea so he led himself.
So kudos to the man. In my mind it was worth the ankle sprain, since we’ll see ripples from Harley’s work for months to come.
And that was all before 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Wonder what we’ll do tomorrow?
The following post comes from our Co-Founder and CTO, Jeff Malek. As we continue to scale our business, Jeff has put together some thoughts about our team and how we approach our organizational structure.
“People continue to express more and more interest in our platform, and so a few weeks ago we started talking about putting the pedal to the metal in terms of hiring. There’s so much we want to do and our teams are stretched lately to keep up with demand. I started envisioning what the ideal team and tech org structure would look like, going forward.”
“As I iterated through various thoughts and plans, I found myself verifying them via retrospectives, reflections on what I’ve experienced working well in tech organizations. I was writing my thoughts down in the same spreadsheet I’d been drafting up our hiring plan, and finally came to a point where there were some material points worth sharing with a wider audience. I knew an email wouldn’t do, and a blog post or other wordy effort would fall flat. So I gave SlideRocket a shot, a tool I’d wanted to try for a while (very cool, by the way). In other words, it wasn’t my plan to create a presentation out of this effort, it just kinda happened organically. Feedback has been good, so here’s the part that’s fit for your security level clearance (you’d have to join our team to see the really good part; we’re hiring by the way).” – Jeff Malek
Meet Paul. Paul started at BigDoor about a week ago. Today he was voted MVP of the Sprint and as such gets to wear the Viking Hat. As a technology company, we iterate on our product weekly – running very short Sprint cycles. At the end of every Sprint, each of our developers vote on who is the most deserving to be MVP. This week Paul was chosen.
We have 18 developers and have built a powerful API that is open, flexible, and allows us to scale solutions for all types of implementations. We listen to our partners and try to incorporate their feedback in our weekly Sprint cycles. Our infrastructure supports the full spectrum of partners, from independent bloggers to enterprise partners like Major League Baseball.
Paul was busy testing out cool stuff but was happy to let me get a pic of him wearing the Viking Hat!
The time finally came that we outgrew our previous office space. In just two short years we’ve grown to 21 employees and with another 10 expected by early fall we knew we had to make a move. Late last week we took over our new space and we’re so excited to share the news! We even created a fun, sharable, embeddable “Infowidget” to share with all our fans that shows an interactive walk-through of our key company highlights over the past 12 months. Check it out here!
Today we have a guest post from BigDoor’s own HR Nasty. A few weeks ago the company went on an off-site – it was a fairly simple get-together and, as HR Nasty explains, it was important for the team to get away and gain some perspective on the company and where we’re headed. An excerpt from his recent post about building a team and the importance of perspective below:
Team Building is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For some its group exercises (Ropes Courses and Trust Falls come to mind here) and a lot of Kool-Aid-drinking-Kumbaya-singing kind of “stuff.” We’re a startup; we work fast and long hours. Team building for us is a little different:
We’d echo HR Nasty’s points here, it was fun to get away and it’s great to work with such a stellar team. Sound fun? Check out our current jobs and enjoy some of our photos below from the off-site.
Hello World!
My name is Collin. I’ve been at BigDoor from the beginning and have developed many iterations of our Front-End library. I have failed and have been successful. In all cases, the goal is to make something easy, fun and awesome to use. In dev-land this translates to quick iterations, learn from the issues and make it better. That being said, I’m very happy with our recent release of our JavaScript library. There are definitely warts and improvements to be made but I firmly believe we finally have a library to build from.
Engineering Goals
Our Front-End libraries have both short and long term goals. Usually our short term goals are feature driven while our long term goals are for long term adoption. The following long term goals have been driving our development from the beginning.
In our previous libraries we were more concerned with our short term goals by adding features and iterating over those features to get them right. Those goals still exist from a design perspective but from the engineering perspective we needed to shift how we were developing in order to support these two long term goals.
Past Design
Previously we developed ‘modules’ which provided an interface for a given feature. These modules would provide an API for the feature and handle remote and local communication. We also incorporated jQuery plugins. We used 3rd party plugins and wrote our own to define what feature a node would provide.
If we continued this way, we could never meet our goals. We were only developing the Logic and UI layers. We needed to shift from a scripted feature set to a full feature application with a clear separation of concerns.
Current Design
Before we started a recent custom implementation, we knew we had to provide better separation if we were going to be successful. We spent a few days drawing diagrams, researching best practices, deciding on how to leverage existing libraries and coming up with names for what we were trying to define.
Once we had flushed out our ideas we had to go back and provide some structure for how we could think and talk about it more publicly. We took the multitier architecture model and identified our layers as the following:
When these were identified we only had a rough sketch of which classes belonged where but we had to start developing due to our impending deadline. However, this was the first time we had a clear separation of concerns and a shared language to work from and couldn’t wait to get started!
We now have the following architecture to work from in order to meet our short term goals as well as quickly and accurately iterate over our feature development:
Future Design
It would be nice if I could predict the future and tell you what features and functionality we are working towards but I can’t. What I can say is that we are working hard to make this publicly available as soon as possible by reintegrating Facebook Like, Badges, etc., as well as prototyping new applications.
I’m super excited with this release and couldn’t be happier to be a part of this team. I can’t wait to see what we can come up with next!
Goodbye World!
–Collin Watson