Shayan Zadeh: Practical Entrepreneur » zoosk

Building A Freemium Business On Someone Else’s Platform

Shayan — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 21:57:05 +0000

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.

Vote for my panel at SXSW 2010

Shayan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:00:02 +0000

Based on my experience at Zoosk, I have submitted a panel to SXSWi conference for next year titled “Throwing Your Shoestring At Being Platform Agnostic“. I am planning to talk about what it really means to have a platform agnostic product and how can a startup afford to build their product for multiple platforms.

The selection committee has liked the idea enough to put it to community vote. Now, I need your help and votes to make sure it gets accepted. Please visit the panel picker and give it a thumbs up! Make sure you are logged-in or the vote won’t count.

See you all in Austin in 2010

Zoosk is top 500 now

Shayan — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:39:17 +0000

I recently noticed that Zoosk has crossed into the top 500 sites worldwide in terms of traffic. Now onto the top 100 I think we will get there much faster than it took us to go from millions to 500. Anybody wants to guess when we might cross it?

Look who is on cnn.com!

Shayan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:56:54 +0000

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!

Shayan — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:02:05 +0000

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.