Thoughts in Time

Now this is what I’m talking about. Johannes has created two pikle pikums on German football… and I’ve won both of them. I guess I know more about Bundesliga football than I thought.

Actually, what I’ve really been enjoying is the feedback we’re getting on Pikum! It’s not the nice notes (”Pikum looks great, lots of fun”), but the notes, twits, and blog posts where we’re learning what people think we can improve. There’s a lot to the Pikum! product and getting into private beta gives us the opportunity to learn how we can best refine and simplify the interface, user paths, and help content to make it really easy for users to understand the game, get started, and start competing… so they can Pikum and win too!

Yesterday we decided to release Pikum! into invite only beta.  The core site processes are working, and we felt the best way to go from here (a good product) to a great product is to get users into the site so we can get feedback.  It’s all about getting feedback and iterating.

It’s been great to see people getting in, entering pikums (we already have a couple with double digit entrants), and sending out invites.  We’re also accomplishing what we wanted in that we’re finding the key issues and pushing them to the top of our list to fix (for instance, we’re finding that we still have a lot of work to do on email deliverability - something we thought needed work, and realize we REALLY want to focus on!).  I was also the first person to win a Pikle Pikum on the live site (Johanne’s “German Quickie”) … We’ll see who the first winner of a real money Pikum is.

We’re going to be blogging ongoing at blog.pikum.com  as we find issues, implement updates, etc.  Stay tuned!