Another Thumbs Up
• What’s the weirdest business experience you’ve had so far?
“Arriving at a late-afternoon business meeting only to realise after ten minutes that the other person was completely inebriated. It wasn’t a long conversation.”
I’d just like to point out that Walid and Sokratis weren’t talking about me there. I try and keep my inebriation confined to the places that TrustedPlaces tells me it’s fun to drink in. But it is my favourite bit of the feature that Jemima Kiss over at The Guardian just ran on the TrustedPlaces founders and this very site:
before we decided to go ahead I did explain the business to my Mum. And what’s more she immediately got it and she doesn’t even use email.
Isn’t that sweet? I suppose I should probably mention the bit about our monthly users having quadrupled since September 2007 and the aim to exceed one million monthly users within the next year rather than direct you to the comments where one person asked how is it that these guys could still be single…
But I believe the most important line was the last one:
We would love to be the next big thing, but, at the end of the day it’s for our users to decide - not us.
So over to you…
January 31st, 2008 at 9:45 am
I loved the bit in Jemima Kiss’s article about asking his Mum about the idea for TrustedPlaces. When the far-seeing John Hatt, the 1996 founder of Cheapflights.co.uk, set down his “ten commandments” for the site, one of the most important was that a fictional 80 year old “Aunt Agatha” should be able to easily understand and use the site. Providing an online service that meets an unmet need AND is user friendly are just two of the basic rules for success; but since Mums and elderly aunts are rarely wrong I reckon TrustedPlaces is going places!