GrowVC (the “C” is for Community, not Capital) is a global crowd-funding platform for seed funding startups. They help startups secure up to $1mm USD in funding from the GrowVC community. Very cool guys, very cool company.
Thanks for the interview Markus, I really enjoyed doing it.
With the holiday season upon us, we’re in the giving mood already. Today, we released some important new features at CloudSponge we thought you might be interested to hear about. I say this because we’ve heard from YOU, our customers and want to give back to you some of the items you had on your wish list.
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new.
Overlay Widget Demo Video - People always ask us “What’s CloudSponge all about?”, “How does CloudSponge work?”, “What does it look like for my site?”. Well, we now have an improved demo video on our home page to show you how CloudSponge works. We walk you through a typical “Invite Your Friends” application that most customers use CloudSponge for. Enjoy!
Search box on “Choose Your Contacts” – Your users now have a search box available to them to search through a long list of contacts. This will help them choose their contacts quicker and get them back to your website sooner.
Custom anchor text or image to call widget – You can now create your own custom anchor text or image to call the overlay widget. By default, the anchor text reads as “Add from Address Book”, but you can change this to whatever you want.
We’ve had people also ask us about adding the the individual address book icons here to call the individual import processes. We’re still working through a solution for this one. You can follow this thread here.
Return contacts from the widget – “Out of the box” we realized our new overlay widget did not provide a way to bring the contacts back to your site without writing additional JavaScript. Since we want to make things super easy and dead simple to install, we now have included this feature in the HTML we provide you.
If you’ve been looking for #3 and #4 above, sign in to your CloudSponge account to get an updated HTML snippet to paste into your site.
This has all been made possible through our new feedback forum. Thanks to everyone who chimed in with their feedback.
Still missing something from CloudSponge? We’d love to hear from you. Give us your feedback and we’ll do our best to address your requests. After all, we wouldn’t be where we are today without the continued feedback and support we receive from our customers.
Get up and running with CloudSponge in under 5 minutes!
Background
With everyone’s IT budgets stretched to the max these days, you may have been hard-pressed to find time or the resources to plugin our API to import address books. Or, you may have struggled through the user experience flow for the OAuth user consent screens. Instead, you would rather have a simple copy & paste code snippet you can install and getting running in minutes, so you can focus on your core business.
If this is you, we’ve been listening.
Import Address Books in Under 5 Minutes
Today, we’re proud to launch our new, easy-to-install HTML widget. You can now get up and running to import address books in a matter of minutes.
Sign In to your account and follow these easy steps.
Add Your Website Domain
Copy & Paste Code to Your Domain
Brand the User Experience (optional)
Import Address Books
To see this widget in action, take it for a test drive!
Looking for our API? Check out our Developer Portal to learn more. We will continue to support both the widget and API going forward.
As most of you have certainly noticed, we recently launched a new design that we’re very proud of. What you may not know is that we used a brilliant company called 99designs to get it done very quickly and economically.
Let me know what you think of our new design in the comment section below. We’re always very interested to hear what our customers (and would-be customers) have to say about any aspect of our business.
Hautelook offers a new “sample sale” each day that lasts for 48 hours and features a limited number of clothing items from 8-10 designer labels. Hautelook works with the labels to take over their “exhaust” or written-off inventory and sell it at a ridiculously low price (up to 75% off retail). Since the clothes are available for a limited time and the hottest brands are constantly being rotated, members are eager to come back quite often to check out, what is quite literally, a new store every day. This gives Hautelook some very sticky customers.
Hautelook is the latest in a string of “flash sales” companies competing for your spending dollars with “today only” or “only 100 available” sales. Though not a new concept, flash sales are making an impact in a big way with how people are buying online. Within the clothing space, there’s Gilt Groupe, Ideeli and Kaboodle. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of “deal-a-day” pioneers Groupon – limited number of one-day only coupons redeemable at a local business – and Woot – one-day sale on a single product available in a limited quantity.
What is making these companies so successful is their ability to tap into people’s social community to generate new users and sales. Hautelook’s “Invite a friend, get $10″ promotion has helped them grow to more than 2.5 million members since launching in 2007. This incentive not only encourages members to refer their friends, but keeps the money they earn within the Hautelook system for future sales. The more people they refer, the more money they have to spend at Hautelook. It’s a win-win-win across the board for member, referral, and Hautelook.
Though no solid estimates are available at this point, Jason is bullish about his prediction of a 10x growth in 3 years within the flash sale clothing space. Looks like Hautelook couldn’t agree more, as they recently raised $31 million in funding. Already at 200+ employees, Hautelook will look to keep pace with their hiring, plus expand their customer acquisition efforts to social media and maybe even a mobile offering. They are also considering expanding to other verticals, where flash sales are popular.
Looking forward to hearing more about Hautelook’s success!
I sat down for a chat with Markus from GrowVC to chat about CloudSponge’s journey and entrepreneurship in general.
