How does a little girl save the world's third largest social networking sites?
a lot of Internet products have been a lot of help from users, the most basic is that users will use the products they use. Comments or suggestions. But there are also users who have made great contributions to their favorite products.
2008 has been in a dilemma for Evernote, and it has only enough money to support three weeks. CEO Phil Libin plans to turn off the company.
more than 3 a.m. on the day he announced the decision to the employee, he received a user mail. This user likes their products very much. He added a sentence at the end of the mail: if you want to find an investment, please let me know. Phil soon contacted the user. After two weeks, the impression note received $500 thousand from the user. The investment saved the impression notes.
the story above may be known by many people. But today, at the WMD conference held by the investment agency and the incubator 500 Startups, Jim Scheinman, the partner of the investment agency Maven Ventures, told a story of his work at the social networking site Bebo. This time the help Bebo reversed is a little girl.
Jim is the first employee of Bebo, responsible for all business development related businesses. At that time, Bebo was already the third largest social networking site in the English world, lagging behind MySpace and Facebook. But in Britain, Ireland and other places, Bebo is more popular than the latter two.
the beginning of the story is that Bebo has made a technical decision, using a database rarely used by other websites at that time. They got the support from Oracle, and everything went smoothly.
but one day, suddenly Bebo's website couldn't be opened. The staff of Bebo can't find the reason at all. The whole team is very anxious. If we can't solve this problem, the whole company will be finished.
after many searches, they received an e-mail, and an engineer described to them the possible problems of the website. This is exactly the same as they see inside, so they come back to the mail as if they met the Savior and ask the engineer if he can help solve it and offer. But the engineer's reply poured cold water on them, saying he had no interest in helping them to solve the problem, and that Bebo would not be able to meet his offer.
at that time, Bebo's website had been unable to open for three days. Jim heard the Engineer in England, so he booked second days' ticket to England and decided to find him. But unexpectedly, he received an email from the engineer, which contained a code. After Bebo put the code into the database, the problem that the website could not open was solved. And the engineer didn't ask Bebo to pay.
then Jim knows the truth. The engineer's daughter was a Bebo user, and Bebo was unable to open a serious impact on her communication with her friends, so she asked her father if she could solve the problem. After receiving the affirmative reply, she threatened her father that he would run away from home without solving this problem. So Jim received the code in the mail. The story of
Bebo and the story of impression notes are all good luck. But not every startup can get such good luck, and many times you work harder and better luck - for example, impression notes make this key user fall in love with their products, for example, Bebo has worked hard to become the biggest social networking site in Britain, so that little girl could not be cut out.