Archive for the ‘zoosk’ Category
Inside Zoosk: iDate INSIDE Series
Here is an interview I did recently with iDate team talking about a wide variety of topics including Zoosk’s progress, what is social dating, and online dating industry in general.
Hacking the box: how Socialbox came to be
A few months ago, Jeff (one of our rockstar engineers at Zoosk) had an idea: that our learnings from building Zoosk Messenger could be applied to chat on Facebook. After examining the capabilities and limitations of existing off-browser Facebook chat experiences, Jeff and I believed we could build a better, improved user experience. And that’s what we did. Jeff applied his magic to this new domain and, in a matter of a few weeks, he and his team debuted a new application that incorporated our original ideas. Socialbox was born.
Not knowing what to expect, we rolled out Socialbox and threw some traffic at it. Boy, did it stick. Unsurprisingly, consumers really wanted easier ways to chat with their Facebook friends. In only 6 weeks, Socialbox grew to approximately 2M MAU (see chat below courtesy of AppData).
Seeing this burst of interest, we took it one step further and added video chat to the product. We beat Facebook to video chat functionality on it’s own chat platform by a couple of weeks, which was really cool to achieve. It pays to be agile! 
Video Chat for Facebook on Socialbox
In short, Socialbox is still a side project at Zoosk — but as long as consumers show love for the product we will continue to do awesome things with it. Socialbox is an example of how we encourage our team to approach their jobs at Zoosk. We reward creative thinking and we give our people the resources and support to turn their ideas into reality. We need more people who embody this commitment to innovation.
Building A Freemium Business On Someone Else’s Platform
A while back, i did a talk at Freemium Summit 2010 about building a business on someone else’s platform. It looks like it has made its way onto YouTube . Below I have embedded the first part of the talk. you can find parts 2 and 3 on YouTube easily.
Zoosk Girl Story
Awhile back we heard Flo Rida and T-Pain were interested in using Zoosk in a single for their new album! Obviously we were flattered and got super excited about it. Then the artists went to work and did their magic. The results just came out and wow! We couldn’t be happier. This is a catchy song
This is how the song came about
Flo Rida was in the studio with Pain doing a song called “I’m Dancin’”, which is featured on T-Pain’s next album. One of T-Pain’s boys, Tay Dizm, was talking about how he met some fine girl on Zoosk. He was talking all kind of mess about how good she looked and that she actually had good credit. T-Pain responded from the booth and was like “I need me a Zoosk Girl“. The jokes then turned into a song and it went from there. Since the song was clearly a smash, we decided to work something strategic out with Zoosk to amp the promotions for the song, which is now Flo’s Hype Single off his album The Only One”.
Commented Poe Boy Music Group CEO Elrin “E-Class” Prince
Can’t wait to see how high in billboard rankings this song is going to go!
Look who is on cnn.com!
A couple of weeks ago, Yi-Wyn Yen from Fortune Magazine interviewed me about the current state of Open Social, MySpace platform launch, and state of social network platforms in general. It turns out she liked how I was thinking about the problem and added a couple of quotes from our conversation in her article.
A cool by-product of this interview was that my name now appears (as far as I can tell) for the first time on cnn.com domain. Thanks Yi-Wyn!
Zoosk Me!
This blog has been very quiet lately, but my life has been anything but! If you have been following my journey in entrepreneurship, you remember that I started a company called Pollection a couple of months ago. One of the products that Pollection built was a semi-dating application on Facebook, called Sex Appeal.
We got such a positive response to that product that convinced us we should reposition the company to tackle the dating market head on! So we went back to the drawing boards and came up with the coolest Social Dating product ever! That’s how Zoosk was born!
Zoosk was launched on Facebook on December 18th and since then what a ride it has taken us with her! You can follow the Zoosk story here. In a short span of time, Zoosk has grown to 2,000,000 members, has 15,000 fans on Facebook and we haven’t even started yet . This is going to be super exciting…
Well, just wanted to drop a line here so you don’t forget about me! The reason for slow (or not-at-all) blogging has been Zoosk keeping me busy but I will try to carve enough time to keep this blog alive!
Oh, and by the way I moved my blog to wordpress.com to not have to worry about hosting/updating/etc! It was a super easy migration. The new url is http://shayang.wordpress.com so update your links.
