RunToShop.fi went live and back
Ville Vesterinen
I attended RunToShop party last week at Shaker, Helsinki along with a lot of Finnish entrepreneurs and it was a blast. It was an opening day of the RunToShop.fi service, which was to act as the first step towards opening the service internationally at RunToShop.com
RunToShop is a social recommendation service for stores that rewards its users for recommendations as well as for the actual purchases. Whether it works or not is anybody’s guess at this point when the full fledged service is not rolled out yet.
The service at .fi address came and went. I did create a profile and browsed around the service to familiarize with it and decided to came back later on. Yet, today I found that the guys had but the site back behind a login and a password, probably to fix some buggy code. I didn’t get a proper look with still so few stores and service providers on the site at the time and am eager to take a another look as it goes live again. Hopefully there will be a lot more to browse through.
What is notable in RunToShop however is the way it was build: The guys behind the concept started building the start-up only in April 2008 and according to RunToShop CEO, Taneli Tikka, the service has already over 150 partners: Mostly in Finland and in the UK.
What is also unusual is the very strong advisory board the start-up has gathered which includes close to 30 experienced entrepreneurs and key figures in the industry. Similarly Taneli Tikka who is driving the start-up as its CEO has a long list of start-ups behind him, including Dopplr and IRC-Gallery to name only a few.
I did a video interview with Taneli, but since I only had my iphone with me Kai from Floobs borrowed me his Nokia N95 to record the interview. Unluckily I didn’t have a chance to pick the video clip from Kai last week, and when I gave Kai a call yesterday I got an SMS back saying he was hiking somewhere in the Norwegian Lapland, so it’ll have to wait a little. We’ll post the interview on the blog as soon as I get my hands on it.
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August 28th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Not to try to rain on anybody - but from what I saw from runtoshop they really do need time to get things better. Quite a few aspects were simply just up to par on current standards and conventions in 2.0 startup world. Hope they’ll get up to speed and release a far better service later this fall.
Am I the only one who finds the four-eye ad slightly gross?
August 29th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Samin is precisely on the right track here. The party we had was for our test group (which includes about 200 alpha users) plus our fellow entrepreneurs “the scene” was invited as well.
The 200+ people strong test group has been answering questionnaires, fiddling about with different conceptual ideas etc. And this party was a “thank you” for their work, and an initial launch of more intense testing for them. To many test users this was actually the first time when they got the chance to take a look at the very raw service itself.
So absolutely: we need to get things better, and that’s precisely the idea here. We are just being untraditionally finnish here =) and taking a bold move of testing things out very publicly very early in the game.
Now we have gathered tons of initial feedback (and technical logs on bugs etc), which has been pretty much what we expected to receive: the service is very raw and not nearly done yet, however the concept has been validated; people like it and want to actively use it. So the site is back behind a password for a moment to sort out the most important stuff, and then tests will continue.
The tests will be tests and “beta” for a long while still, an official launch will be later once things are more ready. We are being unusually public about this: please followup on our progress and keep sending in your feedback!
The four-eye picture is funny as hell and meant to be memorable and gross. It’s actually an optical brain hack based on the mechanism how the human brain as a hierarchical neural network recognizes human facial expressions and how this picture throws the whole mechanism off: it creates a conflict between 2 logical layers in the brain-hierarchical neural network and causes a feeling of grossess, oddness and the whole pic just being WRONG =) The idea came from Mr. Jouni Mannonen of Mahtava Development who is an expert on how the brain functions.
Funny, memorable, gross. yes ;) all of those things. You’ll be seeing more of them in the future. And yes, it’s meant to be a joke =)
August 29th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Taneli,
Kudos to the whole RunToShop team for being untraditionally Finnish here and taking a bold move of testing things out very publicly very early in the game as you said. I certainly hope more start-ups will follow your example.
Also great to see that RunToShop is very open about it all, something that comes across clearly from the interview I made with you.
…now we only need to get rid of the Finnish obsession about NDAs =)
September 8th, 2008 at 3:14 am
[...] beta is live for public (Only in Finnish at this stage). Earlier on the site opened briefly for a group of about 200 alpha users that were able to play with the [...]