Posts Tagged Seattle
Quick Reviews: BunchBall and BigDoor, social gamification service providers
I had the opportunity to evaluate BunchBall and BigDoor, two of the leading social gaming service providers, aka gamification. Here’s a quick low down:
BunchBall – Great demo by Kevin Spier, Director of Sales. Bunchball has a mature tool set and has been around since 2005. They have many well known clients such as Comcast, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC. I was quite impressed by their capabilities and analytics. It’s rare that service providers surpass my expectations but BunchBall did. BunchBall is backed by Granite Ventures and Adobe Systems Incorporated. The downside is that their current pricing model reflects their targeted clientele. Bunchball has a set pricing model in the mid 4 figures per month for up to 1MM unique visitors. All in all, a great value for established customers who have the budget to drive traffic to their site in a meaningful way – because let’s face it, gamification works if properly implemented. Kevin was quite helpful and introduced me to several of his connections who are interested in the space of my new venture.
BigDoor – Good demo by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor. BigDoor recently scored a $5MM venture round led by the Foundry Group, so they are playing catch up in some ways to the more established BunchBall. They have a toolset that will be able to get me the gamification features I desire, albeit with more massaging from my own development team than BunchBall. One plus about this is that BigDoor provides their technology more like an open source library so I can customize the features to fit my needs. Keith also has been quite helpful and BigDoor has a huge advantage for two reasons: First, I, too, am a Seattle based startup CEO, so I am biased towards supporting local businesses and startups and Second, their pricing model, while based on API calls, scales with my business. This is an almost unarguable advantage for a cash-strapped startup and ultimately led towards our choice to go with BigDoor.
Do yourself a favor if you need to drive traffic and participation to your site and check out these two Companies, both offer superior value-added services.
Quorus – helping sites connect with their users
Posted by Dan Hall in Adding Value, Startups, social media on June 18, 2010
Had a great meeting last at Caffe Umbria with Michael Dougherty, the CEO and Co-Founder of Quorus. They are doing some very cool stuff helping sites connect with their users including a couple of tools that allow real time chat between users viewing the same page (very helpful in allowing users to discuss products in real time) and simplified member sign ups. It is a great way to add value to your site. Get in touch with them to help drive engagement and conversion especially if you are in the e-commerce space.
Sourcing Seattle – a Shift in Focus and Topic
Since March of 2008, I have been posting on and off again on Sourcing Seattle mostly about human resources and organizational dynamics. In May, I made the transition from the government sector back to the Seattle startup space, and I am quite excited to be back. The Seattle startup space is full of interesting, passionate individuals working on a number of very cool ideas. To mirror my professional transition, Sourcing Seattle will now be focused on these same topics.
Stay tuned to hear about my journey in the Seattle startup space and the interesting people and companies I meet.
Dan Hall
Re: When recruiters tell you the opposite of what you are looking for
Posted by Dan Hall in Startups, recruiting, social media on July 5, 2008
A friend of mine who is connected within the Seattle Startup community, sent me this post by Marcelo Calbucci on the Seattle 2.0 blog discussing the frustrations and shortcomings that Startup Managers have of recruiting agencies in general.
I felt compelled to respond, having gone through a similar process, while recruiting for my Company as an internal Seattle HR Manager.
My response is below:
I am the Recruiting and HR Manager for a Social Media startup in Seattle. In the past six months I have personally recruited dozens of employees.
Being in-house, I have a distinct advantage because:
1. I passionately care about the future and well-being of my Company.
2. I recognize that I am the first person a potential candidate hears outlining my Company and our products. I take that responsibility very seriously. If I am not passionate to be here why would a candidate? People want to work at a Company people are passionate about; this gives me a huge advantage over some of those Companies you listed in your post.
3. A lot of candidates don’t use recruiters, nor care to. I work with contingent recruiters and recruiting agencies at times. There are some good recruiting agencies out there but most only try to fill the req and don’t have a large stake in the fit.
4. Recruiting agencies rarely (and I mean rarely) go below 20% placement fee structures. Their candidates better be 20% better than anyone I can source (which is not a normal occurrence – again I know the culture and fit of my Company and evangelize it passionately).
If you plan on hiring more than 5 or 6 employees in a year, do yourself a favor and hire a good fulltime HR and
Recruiting Manager, not only you will get better candidates, but you will also reduce liability (which there is, and don’t kid yourself, a lot from a HR standpoint), and save money.
Plus every candidate who doesn’t get a job, now knows our Company from someone who loves it and they have a positive lasting, impression, which has cascading effects in the long term.
Dan Hall
Seattle Human Resources Manager
