How do you measure how much your users like your product? This is one of the essential question that every founder needs to answer to make the right decisions - to move the product ahead.

In some lean startup related discussion I stumbled accross the idea of asking your users if they were sad if the used product would vanish. As the lean startup is all about validating assumptions based on data and turning them into "validated learnings" this simple way of measuring a user's attachment was an idea that spoke to me. I wanted this for connex.io but our designer Thierry convinced me that we had to adapt the idea for it to work in our context. And we did.

Based on the simple idea outlined we created a small form on which we simply ask our users if they are happy or not. We adapted the question because we feared the original phrasing would scare away users looking for a reliable, thrustworthy system. In our case we felt it was a necessity because people see their address book as very valuable and want to know that it is stored safe and secure.

Based on the reformulated question we started gathering feedback. Around 10% of our active users have provided feedback this way. The ratio of YES and NOs has been within what we expected but the box has allowed users to give feedback that is much more valuable than just a YES or NO. It gives people an easy way to vent their frustration if something went wrong. People seem to click on NO almost instinctively providing us with an opportunity to help them and turn them around.

We mainly use Uservoice to provide our users with help and gather feedback but this box has proven to do better in helping us to reach out to unhappy users.

We were wondering why users click on the button when they do not contact us through a service such as Uservoice? We believe that it is almost effortless to click one of the buttons and that some users probably already feel better simply by clicking.

How does our box work?

The box is simple. A question and two buttons. Although simple almost every user we talk to has noticed it. Once a user clicks YES or NO the click is registered and the user is given the opportunity to expand upon their click.

If expanded or not we are sent an email notifying us about the happy or unhappy user (including the comment if there was one) which allows us to react in near real time if a problem occurs. We can thank the user for their feedback and if a user is unhappy we can ask him what went wrong, what he expected to go differently and how we can help.

Over 50% of these emails to unhappy users get a reply by the user and often they already are halfway back to being happy.

It is a seamless way to get in touch with our users without them having to do more than expressing an emotion and allowing us to provide our users with surprisingly good customer service.

Summing up: This feedback mechanism has allowed us to realize in near real time when something goes wrong for one of our users and we can offer them help and solutions. I can only recommend to every startup to start using a similar mechanism. It is the best way we have found so far to let users initiate contact giving you a reason to reach out to them and build a relationship - wheter the first reaction was positive or negative.

Written by Marcus Kuhn

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Startups are en vogue and a lot of people describe themselves as entrepreneurs. But in my book not every young company is a startup... In my mind startups have a scalable and repeatable business model (that isn't proportionally related to how many hours are worked).

Investors put money into startups in the hope of getting back more than 10x their investment. They need that multiple because startups - as described above - are associated with a lot of risk. Commonly it is thought that only 1 or 2 out of 10 startups are a runaway success, 2 to 3 will survive and approximately make back what investors have spent and the rest will die and lose most or all of the money that got invested in them.

With this trend of everything being a startup Zurich has started to position itself as a startup cluster. The eZurich initiative even wants to be Europe's Silicon Valley (Link to a PDF). But is this even realistic?

Clusters are important for startups

Startups seem to thrive in clusters and Silicon Valley is the most well known example for that. By now in and around San Francisco a (web-)entreprenuer can find whatever he needs to create a successful startup:

• Talents
• Money
• First Clients

Nicolas Berg splits these requirements up into 9 preconditions for a startup cluster to be successful:

1. Previously successful founders and startups
2. Internationally acclaimed universities
3. Lively ecosystem
4. Highly qualified immigrants
5. Early stage investors
6. Unbeaurocratic innovation subsidies
7. Regulations and Infrastructure
8. Established companies in the same sector
9. Attractive home market

These are clearly mostly a given in Silicon Valley, but how does it look in Zurich?

Zurich (by MadGeographer)

Zurich is an attractive place for companies. The excellent Universities provide talents, the infrastructure is well maintained and works, public authorities are service oriented and quite quick, laws in Switzerland are stable and politics are rather predictable. On top of that Zurich is a very nice place to live which helps attracting foreign and retaining local talent.

There is a first generation of internet entrepreneurs that had successful exits that is now investing and mentoring. Organizations like the IfJ not only raise awarenes but are literally trainig thousands of students (and others) how to take the plunge and start their own company. The Commision for Technology and Innovation has been supporting innovation for decades. The Technopark in Zurich has spawned a lively ecosystem around it that contains many, many startups (over 284 in Zurich) and many other things entrepreneurs need.

Regulation in Switzerland is reasonable and geared towards common sense in many cases (e.g. Value Added Tax has only to be paid if your company crosses a certain revenue threshold). All these are reasons why Switzerland ranks very high in competitiveness rankings.

So Zurich is doing quite well and that shows in various rankings. But it is not all good:

But all these things literally come with a cost. Living costs in Zurich are extremly high and as a result salaries are very high as well - often too high for a startup to be feasible and competitive in the global competitive landscape.

But we did not want this to stop us and Zurich has treated us well. We have found funding, we found amazing employees here, the Technopark has been an excellent starting point... We would have loved to completely build our company here. But Swiss immigration made that impossible. The main reason why my co-founder and the other programmers in our company are not working from Zurich, why we had to go the way of a virtual team, is the barriers put in place to get a work permit for Non-EU citizens.

Last week a Blog post by Moritz Zumbühl stired up a controversy (that even got picked up by the Swiss Daily Newspaper Tages Anzeiger). In the Blog post he outlines how he tried to found a startup with a "foreign national" that had been pursuing a doctorate at ETH. The odessey to get Emre Sarigol a work permit had lasted 15 months cost thousands of Swiss Francs and yielded nothing but frustration.

He has now written a letter to the mayor of Zurich. We wholeheartedly agree with this letter and everything it states and call upon every startup in Zurich to sign it.

Our experience in getting a Swiss work visa for Ata has been different. We gave up much earlier. From what I had heard from other founders and what experts told me it was neither within our budget nor within our schedule to get a work permit. We had to work around this problem and did so by becoming a virtual team that is working in various places. We are now building our tech team in the Ukraine. As a result of these difficulties we are now employing people outside of Switzerland so we can have our tech team in one place.

So what?

I do not think that Zurich is an important startup cluster yet - but it certainly has potential. A lot of things have been done right and an attractive environment for companies - young and old - has been created. It is now up to entrepreneurs, investors and unfortunatley also regulators to get the last hurdles out of the way.

If we can find the means to get these stopgaps out of the way there is nothing that will stop Zurich from becoming a great place to start a company with a scalable and repeatable business model. That it will be able to compete with Silicon Valley I doubt though. Just Zurich is a bit small for that.

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Yesterday Tyler Nichols published an article on his experiences with offering a Freemium product and why he is not going to use the Freemium business model anymore. This stirred up quite a discussion on Hacker News in which Paul Graham stated that Tyler's conclusion is wrong and that it only matters how many paying customers you end up with. And I agree with that.

Freemium

Freemium is a business model in which a substantial part of the product is given away for free to attract users. The free product it often either restricted in functionality or limits on usage are imposed. The free product is a marketing strategy with the goal to attract a large number of users and in the end more paying users than could be attracted without the free version.

The caveat is that in most cases only a very small percentage of users converts to paying "Premium" users. This means a relatively small portion of the userbase needs to cover development, operating expenses and profits.

Freemium and connex.io

At connex.io we are not using the freemium business model. Some of our reasons overlap with Tyler's (i.e. support costs) but in essence we are not using Freemium because we do not believe it will work for our product.

To offer connex.io as a freemium product we would need to limit our free product's functionality (for-pay connectors, sync-back will be charged, no automatic deduplication etc.) or impose limits on the usage (only a few connectors, number of contacts, number of syncs etc.).

We believe that both kinds of limitations will lead to a sub-par user experience and therefore lead to lower conversions and an overall lower number of paying users.

Free trial

But we do see the attraction a free product has and therefore offer a free, unrestricted 60 day trial of our product. At the end of the trial a user either needs to start paying or their account is getting suspended. We have 60 days to convince them that they cannot live without our service.

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Last year we started a tradition with a series (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3) of posts that reviewed our first year as a company. The second year just ended and it is time to continue the tradition.

2011 was a good year for connex.io - we made quite a bit of progress. But as every entrepreneurial endevaour there were ups and downs.

The year started with a shakeup as our head of marketing left our team only days after having joined it. We were not able to make the team work and that threw us back quite a bi t. But we had Michael, our first intern, who was there to pick up the pieces and made it work. While growing the team was one of the most difficult tasks of the last year - especially because we were on a very tight budget - we had great people join our team and help us out. One of those being Nina who joined our team this December and is leading our marketing efforts.

In February we also started talking about what we had done so far and introduced the Syncing Protocol that Ata developed and released a little bit of software as open source.

Even though our first design had been working okay it definitely was neither the pretiest nor the most functional. That is why we decided to redesign our solution and we are very happy with the result.

Also in March we got accepted into KTI, a Swiss certification for startups, and Marcus got selected as a venture leader in Switzerland - which came with a trip to Boston in June. But before going to Boston we struggled "a little" to get our App into the Appstore.

Finally, after 15 months, Ata and Marcus saw each other again in Dubai in July. It was a productive three days and two features got finished those three days and released shortly thereafter. People could now also see their contacts within our webapp. And we removed useless contacts from their address book automatically keeping it clean and tidy.

Techrunch Disrupt in San Francisco

Over the three month period of July, August and September we hunkered down and whipped our product in shape first for Techrunch Disrupt in San Francisco where we presented it to individuals off stage and later for our Launchparty.

Our Launchparty (by Jan Rothenberger)

We organized a big event together with 5 other startups and opened up our registration on September 30th.

After the launch we recovered a little but went back to listening to our customers and learned things that we did not understand before. And those learnings will be a big part of what we will be working on in 2012. 

Finally we got recognized as a Top100 Startup in Switzerland towards the end of the year and finally introduced payments and started monetizing our product.

I want to give all those that helped us make things happen in 2011 a shout out: Thanks Michael, Jillian, Sophie, Anton, Christopher, Zubin & Nina.

We also had a few external contributers that did exceptional work:

Thierry - our designer - just did fabulous work and helped a lot in making our service into something better. His help goes way further than simply design.

Robin - our iOS dev - helped in getting us of the ground with iOS quickly. We could not have done it without him.

The report card

We set audacious goals when writing this post a year ago and now is the time to get our report card.

1. We want to start asking money for our service and get 1,000 paying users until the end of the year.

We started asking for money and we have a handful of paying customers. Unexpected difficulties slowed down our development and caused payments to only get introduced in December 2011.

2. We want to broaden the service we offer and support at least 15 devices or services by the end of the year so we are able to fulfill the needs of most users.

We did broaden our service and support 8 different devices and services today. Those are: iOS, Mac OS X, Android, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Thunderbird & vCards. Support for Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail and Outlook is in the pipeline.

While we did not get to the 15 devices and services we aimed for we did get very close to a state where we can fulfill the needs of most users and should take that final leap with the devices & services that currently are in the pipeline.

3. We want to get noticed. Articles in major tech blogs and newspapers are what we aim for.

This is the goal where we failed most. While we got a mention here and there - especially in startup focused media - we haven't gotten to the amount of coverage we envisioned a year ago. The importance of coverage hasn't reduced though and that is why we are working hard on making it happen. With the addition of Nina to our team we have someone dedicated to this and we are confident to make big strides in this area soon.

Although we did quite well in 2011 but we did not reach our own goals. We will have to do better in 2012 and we intend to do so by applying our learnings and focusing even more on the things that matter.

Our goals for 2012

Keeping in sync with last year we have some big ambitions for this year.

1. We want 12'000 paying users by the end of the year.
2. We want to grow our team to 6 or 7 people. Slightly heavy on the development end.
3. We want to increase our public profile and get recognized for our service.

In a year we will see how far we got.

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It took some time to close the «deal» but in the end it went quickly. connex.io hired me as the new CMO and I started a few days ago.

Before agreeing to start Marcus and I discussed for a few weeks how to approach this position and if I am the right person for the job. For good cause: Working at a start-up not only demands an «entrepreneurial mindset» but as the team is often very small and working together closely personal chemistry and a cultural fit is even more important than it normally is. Furthermore in the early-stage phase that connex.io still is in everybody must be flexible and willing to carry more than just their tasks because there will be more tasks and functions than people.

Even during that application process Marcus already started to challenge me with several tasks and after quite a few meetings and Skype calls about expectations, responsibilities, compensation and participation we closed the deal and I happily agreed to join the (ad)venture and to move from Vienna to Zurich.

So we had a meeting of the minds. But a startup still needs a good product and an attractive market to succeed (even if a perfect team with a mediocre product has better chances to survive than a poor team with a great business idea). After my «due diligence» of connex.io I was happy to find both: a highly skilled, smart and humorous founder team - Marcus and Ata - and a product that is solving the «address book challenge» better than some big names that have been struggling for a while.

But those are not the only reasons why I am excited to join connex.io, there are more: Over the last few years I worked as a journalist and co-founded multiple classic media, online media and Internet startups. I started in online journalism when it was still seen as a «copy & paste» job that was not adding value. How times change! Today online media is standing at least on equal footing with classical media and the trend is clear. Those early days in online journalism are one of the things that will help me with the tasks ahead - tasks that are as diverse as:

• Knowing how to tell stories that make the various channels work and that journalists actually want to write about.
• Optimizing conversions so we turn more of our visitors into happy users.
• Optimizing our website so it can be found (SEO).
• Social Media Marketing and community building.

In the end I look forward to joining a start-up that is located in an attractive environment (Zurich) and aims for a global market. I also look forward to the talks with existing and future users as well as media and partners and want to listen to their feedback and  exchange ideas so we can improve connex.io together..

Please do not hesitate to contact me, I want to hear from you. You can reach me by sending an email to nina@connex.io or just leave a comment here.

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Almost one year after adding our first user (thanks Andi!) to our Beta version and after a year of continuous improvements we are finally flipping the switch: connex.io is becoming a business.

We are introducing payment plans.

Free for 60 days

A full version of connex.io will remain free for 60 days for everyone. This way people can give connex.io a spin and kick the tires without having to pay upfront.

After the 60 day trial there are two plans to choose from:

• A monthly plan at USD 5 or
• A yearly plan at USD 50

With both these plans (and the trial) there are no usage restrictions. User's can:

• Upload an unlimited number of contacts
• Connect an unlimited number of address books

Existing users

connex.io was free to use up until today.

Existing users:

• That signed up before September 30th 2011 will get a free account for life. We were very happy and thankful to see all those early adopters using our solution - they provided us with crucial feedback. As a thank you we will provide all of them with a free account for life.
• That signed up on or after September 30th 2011 will enter the 60 day trial period today (those using a promotional code when they signed up will get their bonus added from today).

New users signing up will enter the 60 day trial as soon as they create their account.

At this time we want to thank everybody who has supported us over the last year with feedback, moral support or anything else. It has been an exciting year for us and we are eager to keep pushing forward. Thanks!

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We are looking for two developers to help us improve and scale connex.io:

1. Core developer - To continue the development of our Sync Server and related components as well as help in improving the data quality of the contacts stored in our user's address books. Get more details.
2. Frontend Developer - To reinvent our Web Frontend, improve the overall User Experience and help with the development of our plugins. Get more details.

We are looking for the most talented hackers that want to make a difference because we need help to:

• Implement new features such as:
  • A dynamic map of a user's contacts.
  • The ability to edit contacts.
  • Support for new devices & services.
  • Real-time sync
• Improve our User Experience
• Improve our Syncing
• Improve our Deduplication
• Improve the quality of our user's contact data

We believe that our product is the base on which we build our company. We have created a good base and are now ready - maybe together with you - to move ahead quickly. We are in a fast paced market and our competition is not asleep.

A few things about working at connex.io

• You will be challenged to work on hard problems such as syncing contacts among many different platforms or deduplicating contacts that describe the same person only based on fuzzy information. To read a little about how we approached these problems so far take a look at this blog post from earlier this year.
• You work with a dedicated, talented and inspiring team that is relentlessly pursuing the vision behind connex.io. You will be an integral part of that team. It is much more fun to work in an environment where one is understood but also challenged. We strive to create such an environment.
• Have an impact immediately. You will be working on code that affects our users from Day One. To read a little about how it is to work for connex.io take a look at this blog post (written by one of our interns).
• You will be responsible for your own work. You will be able to take over parts of the system and be responsible for them. Together with Ata or Marcus you will help decide where we go and what we do.
• You will be working with cutting edge technology. Our stack consists of Tornado, Redis and Cassandra among others. And we are continuously evaluating new things to see if they can move us ahead. One thing we did in this regard was improving the Python implementation of Google's Protocolbuffers which we open sourced.
• You will be deciding what you work with. Linux or Mac OS X, Laptop or Desktop, none, one or two external screens? It is up to you. Together we will assemble the setup that you want. On top of that you work in excellent offices that have everything you need.

Core Developer

Our solution requires a time critical, accurately coordinated dance of multiple distributed services that run in parallel. To import and export the contact data from external devices and services efficiently we use asynchronous I/O to handle many concurrent connections. The stateless design of our own connex.io Contact Sync Protocol as well as the statelessness of other internal services enables us to not lose data in the case of failure and to recover quickly from it. To store the data reliably we use a a distributed Cassandra database which is replicated automatically.

You are a passionate hacker who's interest in programming goes beyond just a job. You want to solve hard problems and see how your solution is used by many. You:

• Are a python hacker with multiple years of experience in Python development
• Have a good understanding of web applications and network security
• Have a working knowledge of algorithms and data structures
• Have experience in working with REST APIs and actually designing them

It is a bonus if:

• You have worked with Cassandra

Frontend Developer

We strongyl believe that rendering templates on the server side is a thing of the past. In the future web apps will have their UI written entirely in Javascript and talk with REST services to exchange data between the client and the server. But you know that because you have already implemented an app using a Javascript MVC framework.

You are at the forefront of development in web technologies? You:

• Have extensive Javascript experience
• Are well versed in Web technologies (caching, cookies etc.)
• Know how to protect against web security issues such as XSS, XSRF etc.
• You know Python

It is a bonus if:

• You have experience in developing Smartphone Applications

Get in Touch

If you feel you are the right person for one of these jobs lets talk. Contact us at marcus@connex.io.

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The lean startup (methodology) was coined and is promoted heavily by Eric Ries says that progress in startups is measured in validated learnings. While this sounds utterly abstract it actually makes a lot of sense. What Eric basically says is that startups progress along their path to success by making the right decisions based on things they have learned from their customers - learnings that have been proven through experimentation.

Eric Ries at the Web 2.0 Summit (by Eva Blue)

On this blog we already mentioned a few times that we like the ideas behind "The Lean Startup" and have followed bits and pieces of the methodology. But recently we have started to adopt more and more bits and pieces of the methodology. In that spirit we want to share a few of the things we have learned from our customers.

Both the address book and the contacts it contains need to be clean

People hate duplicates. People not only despise the duplication of contacts but also the duplication of details within contacts.

After having setup connex.io for their address books people want to instantly see a clean version of their address book - duplicates are the first measure people use to judge the quality of their address book and every step we have taken towards achieving this ideal state of a perfectly clean address book has helped to increase our customer's happiness both measured quantitatively and qualitatively. But what we especially can see is the impact negative experiences have on how people perceive their address book. If they see numerous duplicates they judge their address book as having a low overall quality - and us having done a bad job.

The address book needs to be spotless (by t3mujin)

But just removing duplicates as aggressively as possible is not the solution, there is a catch. While people hate duplicates in their address book there is one thing they hate even more: Contacts that are wrong. Merging contacts aggressively - and therefore removing all duplicates - will lead to wrongly merged and therefore wrong contacts - there is a tradeoff between missed merges and wrong merges. As a result of this connex.io is optimized to avoid false positives - merging contacts describing different people - first and avoid false negatives - not merging contacts describing the same person - much later.

This pursuit of automatically cleaning people's address books is at the heart of what we do here at connex.io and is one of the main reasons people are using our solution.

Contacts need to be safe

People are constantly worried about losing their address book or some of the contacts stored within it. The prospect of handing over their contacts to a service which is manipulating them outright scares them. In addition to that a lot of our prospective users were burnt at least once and have lost contact data because a device or service failed them. The fear of potentially losing contacts - exacerbated by the bad experiences they had with previously trusted address book management tools - makes prospective users not even try our solution.

Contacts need to be safely stored (by Anya Quinn)

We realized that this fear is an enormous adoption hurdle that needed to get out of the way. Therefore we implemented and are implementing measures to preemptively attack that fear by building trust.

1. We are creating a backup of every address book as soon as we connect to it. This allows people to always restore the original state of their connected address book as if it never had been connected to our service.
2. We started showing people their address book online on our platform. Based on the assumption that an address book in the browser is relatively useless we removed any such thing from our web app. As it turns out that was a mistake. People only believe what they see and they could not see their address book.
3. We adapted our positioning & messaging and are still doing so. As an example: A video that we created to explain our product was carefully authored to build trust - we went so far as to choose a voice actor for the voiceover that almost sounded like the guy you normally hear when listening to safety instructions on an airplane.
4. And lastly we are becoming more transparent in what we do and are going away from a rather scary blackbox model. This is part of a larger pivot that we will write about in more detail soon.

Most people are hoarding contacts

The address book must contain everyone people have ever met, no contact left behind. People almost never delete any contact and radically underestimate the number of contacts they have in their address book. While the average connex.io user has over 1'000 unique contacts in his cleaned up personal address book most people think they only have 300 to 500 persons in their contact list.

Although people are hoarding their contact they still only want to see relevant contacts. The noise created by all those relatively unimportant contacts aggregated automatically everywhere is drowning out the really important contacts and makes it hard to get an overview over one's personal network. And the aforementioned wrong preconception about address book size even worsens the perceived address book quality if it displays too many worthless contacts. People think contacts appeared out of thin air.

We have already started to react to the hoarding phenomenon by making sure that contacts that have entered an address book only leave it through the expressed will of the address book owner. To make sure that people only see relevant contacts we have started filtering contacts based on a few simple rules. Only contacts which actually contain worthwhile contact data are synced back to connectors if the filters are active.

There is still a long way to go but we are sure that we will get there. Iterating from improvement to improvement hopefully along the path to success.

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Some of you might have heard that we had some issues getting our App into Apple's App Store. In the end it took 5 months and 28 days but we got there.

We are happy that connex.io has been available for iPhone and iPad users for a few days now.

One unfortunate side-effect of Apple's absolute control over its market is that we cannot give away the App for free. Therefore we make it available at the cheapest possible pricepoint: $1.

Give it a spin, test it and tell us how it works for you.

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The connex.io story has been going for over 20 months. Last week we launched our product. It has been and increasingly is improved based on the feedback we get from our users and we see that we are moving quickly towards product-market fit.

What does this mean?

We are looking for someone marketing the heck out of our product. A fulltime CMO with a passion for finding the right way on how to position a product, finding the right stories to sell it and that is eager to plan an overall marketing strategy and then implement, measure and continuously adapt it.

Do you think you are that person?

We are looking for:

• The right person for our team. It doesn't matter much where you are, what your background is or what your grandparents did for a living. We want you to fit to our team.
• Identification with our idea and vision. We want to completely automate address books and to market this vision authentically we believe you need to believe in it too.
• A track record that matters. We do not care much about diplomas (but do not hide them). We are interested in what you have done and how connex.io can be a continuation of your story.
• Someone that is able to defend their point of view relentlessly but still willing to find a productive compromise towards the end of the discussion.

In general we are looking for someone smart, ambitious, entrepreneurial, independent with the stamina to get through the ups and downs of life in a startup.

What we offer in return:

• A talented, driven team pursuing their vision with passion.
• A dynamic (competitive) environment that you and us will need to adapt to daily.
• A fun place to work in where you will be given the freedom to work your way. We care about results and not if you achieved them between 9 and 5.
• Challenging & demanding tasks that will require everything you got and that you will be responsible for from Day 1.
• A team which is willing and strives to learn. We iterate quickly based on what we learn and measure if our adoption worked or not.
• A salary that we will have to negotiate. As a startup we obviously aren't able to pay top-notch dollars but we are proud to be fair and value our people. In addition your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership.

You can read more about how it is to work for connex.io in this post by Michael, our first intern.

So?

Get in touch with us! Call me directly at +41763785133 or shoot me an email at marcus@connex.io.

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A little over 10 days ago we started seeing our systems becoming instable causing difficulties with accessing our online portal and syncs becoming unreliable.

While the data of our users was always safe these outages were not only a nuisance but also caused duplicates to appear in some of our user's address books.

We are very sorry that this was happening and have taken the appropriate steps to stop this from happening again.

What happened

An instability was introduced into our server through an update and caused to crash our system after some time of activity. We immediately started tracking what caused the problems but did not immediately find the reason.

We first suspected our (physical) servers as they had just received an update and had been causing intermitent problems in the week before. Unfortunately this suspicion could not be confirmed which meant we had to dig deeper and analyze the changes we had made in depth while continuously restarting our system so we could offer a minimum of service.

After a few stressful days we finally found the error and fixed it. In some edge cases our system would run into an infinite loop which caused our system to crash. 

Since the fix our systems have been running reliably for a little over a week.

Consequences

We have adapted our procedures to avoid this from happening again:

1. We have taken steps that should prevent an error from being introduced the same way.
2. We have adapted our procedure on how we approach an outage so that a fix to a similar problem should be fixed much earlier and outages should become more transparent to our users.

As a young startup this was the first time we were facing such a problem. Our reaction was not as good as it could have been and we are both aware of and sorry for it. We have taken away many learnings from this incedence and are confident that we will be able to handle the next one in a much improved way.

Thank you for your continued support.

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For too long our users were greeted by a comming soon message when they tried to call up our Clean & Fix page - not anymore.

We just released our brand new Clean & Fix page which allows users to:

• Search their complete address book online and view individual contacts
• Delete contacts from the address book
• Merge contacts that you want to combine
• Unmerge contacts that were combined wrongly

All this will provide a new and much improved user experience. Obviously this feature is new and we need your feedback to make it as good as it can get. So let us know what works for you, where you are struggling and what improvement potential you see.

In the following the functionality of Clean & Fix is explained in detail.

Search your Address Book

To find contacts in your address book just start typing in the search field. The whole contact is searchable - you can search for:

• Names
• Cities
• Places of Work or Study
• etc.

Delete Contacts

To delete a contact do the following:

1. Search for and select the contact(s) you want to delete
2. Click on the Delete Button in the Action Area
3. Confirm the Deletion

Contacts that are deleted this way are removed from your address book and will vanish from your devices and services upon the next sync.

Merge Contacts

To merge multiple contacts into one contact do the following:

1. Search for and select the contacts that you want to merge
2. Click on the Merge Button in the Action Area
3. Confirm the Merging

Contacts that are merged this way will be combined on your devices and services upon the next sync.

Unmerge Contacts

To unmerge a contact into multiple contacts do the following:

1. Search for and select the contact that you want to unmerge
2. Click on the Unmerge Button in the Action Area
3. Confirm the Unmerging
4. A window will open and show you the multiple unmerged contacts
5. You can now remerge the contacts that actually were correctly combined before
6. Click on Done once all the contacts needing to be merged have been merged

Contacts that are unmerged this way will be seperated and appear on your devices and services upon the next sync.

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You have asked and we have been listening.

Filtering contacts so that only the ones that contain at least a phone number or email address are mirrored to your device has been the most requested feature so far and we just released it to all our Beta users.

You remain in full control of what is happening to your contacts. For each device you can individually decide wether all or only relevant contacts are mirrored. The setting can be found in the connector settings. By default only relevant contacts that contain at least a phone number or email address are synchronized to minimize clutter.

Tell us what you think and if you have further ideas you think we should explore please let us know..

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Already for a few weeks we have been using a new, Uservoice based, support system here at connex.io. It allows us to both collect ideas you have about our product and help you with problems that turn up. Overall we believe that the new system will allow us to provide you with a fast and competent customer service - which is what really counts.

Something is not working? Tell us!

You can reach us on various channels. He easiest is to drop us an email at support@connex.io or to use the "Feedback & Support" tab on the right side that you see once you are log into the connex.io Beta.

When you contact us we will get back to you as soon as possible.

connex.io is missing something? Tell us!

Getting help is not the only thing you can do. You can also let us know what Features we are missing, vote on existing suggestions and help us to find the real meaning wih comments.

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After 44 days we finally heard back from Apple. They rejected our App.

And while this might sound like bad news at first it actually is progress. Our App was rejected based on two reasons that can only stem from a misunderstanding. We have just appealed the decision and hope for a quick resolution.

Thanks for all your patience.

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In this post I share our experience with getting our App through Apple's approval process. Needless to say that the experience has been less than satisfying and the lack of results is hurting us as a company. Apple seems to be using the power it's got to stop us from publishing our App. We just don't know why.

It all began almost two months ago. On the 2nd of April we uploaded our application so it could be reviewed. This part worked flawless but then the waiting began...

April 9 - First Review

After seven days Apple started its first review. Unfortunately Murphy was hard at work here and our webapp crashed just a short while before Apple started its review. So after three days, on April 12th, we received the first rejection based on the failure that was caused by our webapp not being online during the time Apple tried to test it.

April 18 - Second Review

It took another six days for Apple to try again after we had explained the cause of the failure the first go around. This time Apple was also not able to test our App. It wasn't our fault though - the technicians at Apple were not able to enter the credentials we had provided them with correctly. Rejection.

While these two first rejections were annoying and would not have been necessary we feel that these are normal complications that can happen. But the real problem for us occured after the third review had started.

April 19 - Third (not yet ended) Review

Only one day after the second rejection the status of our App once again switched to "In Review" and stayed there since. From our side we can see that Apple successfully connected an iPhone with connex.io and that the contacts on that phone were synchronized with our system. Beyond that we don't know what is stopping Apple from approving (or rejecting) our App.

April 26 - First Email

As we had received no information as to what the status of our App was, we inquired as to what the hold up was and asked on what we needed to do to resolve it. After another four days we received the following answer:

Hello Marcus,

Thank you for writing in about connex.io.

While we don't yet have any additional information to share with you, we did want to assure you that your app has not been forgotten.

We will keep you posted and send you a status update as soon as we can.

Thank you for your continued patience.

Best Regards,

Melody

App Review Team

Glimmers of hope. Apple had not fogotten us, it was just taking a bit longer...

May 10 - Second (and so far last) Email

After we had received no update for another ten days we sent a second request for more information on the 10th of May emphasizing the importance for an answer for us.

And we received the following answer:

Hello Marcus,

Thank you for the email. We do not have any updates about connex.io to share with you at this time.

We fully understand how frustrating it can be to hear that additional information is not available. Once we know more about the status of your app, we will immediately notify you.

We apologize for the delay.

Best Regards,

Shannon

Frustrating indeed and entirely useless.

As we do not have any response we also have no chance to appeal the decision or improve our App to remedy Apple's complaints. We are just left hanging in the air, waiting...

What now?

We have been aware from the beginning that the App Store and the power it gives to one party would be a risk but because of existing Apps (such as Plaxo's, or Soocial's) that do similar things we saw that risk as neglectable. We were wrong!

But because of that risk we have always had a Plan B. If the App will not get approved within the next weeks - a possiblity that is hard to deny by now - we will have to support iOS devices through other means such as the Active Sync protocol that is natively supported. Unfortunately the user esperience will be inferior but at least it will work and the potential for external interference is small.

We are very sorry for these delays and will update you with any developments.

Update (04.06.2011)

We just received a rejection from Apple. More here.

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connex.io's website is wearing new clothes. While our old design served us well over the last months it was time to improve upon it. We are convinced that the new layout communicates our message much better and that it will help us in successfully bringing our product to market.

This is also the moment we want to thank Thierry Blancpain (www.thierryblancpain.com) for the excellent work he did and the pleasure it is to work with him.

Obviously a website is never finished but we are quite happy and would love to hear what you think! Screenshots of new and old can be seen after the fold.

New Design

Old Design

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This is Part 5, the last post in our social web series. This post is my personal guide to helpful resources for navigating and staying up-to-date on social web applications and practices – ranging from great books to my favorite Twitter feeds and useful blogs. Use our VIP list to connect with resources that will help you stay updated on the latest social web and marketing trends.

As we’ve talked about throughout this series, navigating the social web can be overwhelming, especially if you’re new to it, but it can offer many benefits once you figure out what works best. However, one major difficulty of the social web is its continually changing landscape. New platforms are created. Older ones die out or overtime become something different. So, like we mentioned in Part 2, one of the most important things is staying current on practices, platforms and applications. We understand it can take a lot of time to gain and retain insight on the new and emerging trends. That’s why we’d like to help you get a better initial understanding, but also supply you with some resources that will make staying up-to-date easier.

This is a personal list of sources that have been very beneficial to me. I hope that you find these resources helpful and add them to your tool kit. But, keep in mind these are just some of my favorites. There are tons of great resources out there, so use this list to help guide your own search.

This leads to my last tip: If you’re using Twitter (or another social platform), make sure to check out your favorite sources’ ‘following’ and ‘followers’ lists regularly. Contacts on social media platforms change frequently so it can be daunting to keep up with these, but I’ve found some really awesome people and companies by taking a look at third party connections.

For me, Twitter is a really helpful aggregator on breaking research, whitepapers, case studies, general news, and tips for choosing and using different media. It’s nice because the platform itself limits how much is said in a single post, so by skimming over the ‘headlines’ I can quickly and easily find what is pertinent and useful in real-time. After all, you choose who you follow so by following other insightful twitter-ers I stay up-to-date quickly and easily. But, Twitter isn’t everything – regular blogs, websites and books are always great resources too. So I’ve included these as well.

My Favorite Books on Social Web, Marketing & Innovation

Here’s some books that I’ve read recently that have helped me understand the complexities – good and bad – of using the social web. I highly recommend these books and parts of them have been mentioned throughout this series. But I’ve also supplied some additional links that can help you stay connected to the authors and their other helpful resources.

Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business by Larry Weber

• Where to find the author:
  • Twitter: @TheLarryWeber
  • Website: http://thelarryweber.com/
  • Webinar & Whitepapers: http://digitalinfluencegroup.com/

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott

• Where to find the author:
  • Twitter: @dmscott
  • Website: http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/
  • Blog: http://www.webinknow.com/

Collaborating with Customers to Innovate: Conceiving and Marketing Products in the Networking Age by Emanuela Prandelli, Mohanbir Sawhney and Gianmario Verona

My Favorite Blogs, Websites & Twitter-ers

Here’s my personal list of favorites that I follow regularly by Twitter updates and RSS feeds. Of course, you may know some of these – had to include some of the known industry leaders – but you should definitely find many great sources that you’ve probably never checked out. These resources help keep me up-to-date on everything from choosing the right platform to creating the right content. Following what others in the field have to say is a great way to stay current and savvy about the newest uses and changes involving the social web, marketing and innovation. And this cuts down on the time you personally invest into research – letting you get back to some of the more important things. We can all benefit from knowledge shared through the social web.

Therese Squared Media

• Twitter: @theresesquared
• This company, founded by Thérèse Cator & Therese Mui, has been one of my favorite new sources for social marketing ideas and tactics. I rarely sign up for newsletters because, like all of us I get enough stuff in my Inbox already, but I thought I’d give their newsletter a try and haven’t regretted it. They don’t bombard you with useless information; you get one email per week with their latest tips and strategies. Their tips are current and easy to digest and implement. Best of all, it’s all for free. If you don’t want tips delivered in email just follow their blog or do what I also do – follow them on Twitter. Also, the founders are really nice and engaging so if you see content you’re not sure about or have your own suggestions send them a ping. They’ve been really friendly and accessible on Twitter, which you don't find very often when engaging with experts. Make sure to download their free copy of “40 Smart Social Media Status Updates” – it’s great!

Blueknee Marketing

• Twitter: @bluekneemarket
• The company, founded by Pooja Khanna (personally tweets for @bluekneemarket), is focused on marketing for products, startups and business-to-business. The information here is always great for me at connex.io since it has these focuses, but even if you’re not a startup company I think you’ll find Pooja’s suggestions really helpful. He provides great ideas on everything from evaluating your niche market and understanding your competition to maximizing your return on investment for marketing events. With a keen focus on traditional and new marketing tactics, Bluekee Marketing’s blog and twitter feed continue to serve as great resources for staying current on new and clever ways of technology based marketing. Make sure to download their free Social Media Marketing Whitepaper from their blog.

The Social Media Examiner

• Twitter: @smexaminer
• The company, founded by Michael Stelzner (personally tweets for @smexaminer), has become an industry leader in social media trends and research. Technorati and AdAge rank it as one of the world’s top business blogs. Though it doesn’t focus solely on marketing per se, the company supplies a rich array of breaking information on everything that is important in social media and business. What’s also great about following their blog is that you can get new, fresh perspectives from many different experts in the field – either through guest bloggers or through one of their founding contributors. Their website gives access to tons of great case studies, how-to’s, reviews, and expert interviews – just to name a few – and also to the 2010 and 2011 Social Media Marketing Reports. And if you like updates delivered directly to your email, signing up for their free newsletter gives you access to a free Facebook marketing video tutorial.

Media Leaders

• Twitter: @medialeaders
• The company, founded by Josh Ochs, is a great resource for marketing, advertising and technology professionals. It’s not only great because it helps supply you with new tips and ideas, but also it’s a great resource for connecting with other professionals and, if applicable, getting exclusive event invites for networking in your area. Getting involved with the media leaders group is a great way to meet contacts from around the world that come together to share and learn. You can connect on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or at live events in your area by simply signing up on their website. To get real-time interesting updates I follow founder Josh Ochs on Twitter and I’ve joined the Vancouver community on LinkedIn (I’ll be moving there later this summer) – everyone is really friendly and helpful.

CIO White Papers

• This is one of the best resources for white papers I’ve found. Meant to be a resource library for business professionals, this website provides breaking white papers and research in areas of social media, marketing, lead generation, business intelligence and cloud computing. Visit the website to view the newest reports or make it really easy by signing up for their newsletter where each week the latest resources will be delivered straight to you. Also, another great filter I’ve found to save time has been to follow Victoria Isen’s Twitter feed where she posts the breaking whitepapers specifically related to social media, marketing and internet trends. She’s been helpful in keeping me updated in real-time to the most current whitepaper research.

Ernest Barbaric

• Twitter: @ebarbaric
• Ernest Barbaric is a marketing and social media strategist who offers really helpful tips on social media tools, but also about how social media has transformed older marketing practices. His personal website is a great resource for articles on topics such as strategy versus tactics, strategy creation and engagement versus reach. But, I’ve also really enjoyed following him on Twitter because he not only shares his own insights but also sheds light on other sources that he himself finds helpful. Make sure to check out his post “Social Media Strategy in 4.5 Steps” for an interesting look at the basics of implementing social media into your marketing strategy.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series and that it was helpful. Make sure to let us know what you think and pass your favorites along. And, of course if you’re late to game, make sure to check out the previous posts.

And like always, please let us know what you think. Like the post? Share it! Tell us about it. We’re easy to find and we’re always listening – comment, email, Tweet or find us on Facebook.

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This post is by Jillian Warren -- connex.io's Marketing and Media Consultant. Jillian is finishing a M.A. in Media Culture from Maastricht University in The Netherlands. She holds a (hons) B.A. in Communication with concentrations in Media Studies and Computational Thinking from the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Through her research, Jillian has focused primarily on new media, ICTs and human interaction and impact.

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