Genotrope Journey

John and Ganesh have worked hard to deliver the latest round of new features for Genotrope. Now registered users can see the new companies and recent news from their professional graph. Just click on the RSS Icon at the top right of the Find Company/Job page. If you wish, you can then set up a feed so that you will know about recent news or new companies that have been connected into your graph.

Secondly, we have gotten rid of the dreaded java applet that produced the company graph. Ganesh has built a fresh and much more functional flash version that delivers a lot more information and does not randomly bork.

Hope you like these improvements. As always, let us know about any problems, questions or suggestions you have to make Genotrope more useful for you.

thanks from the team

We realize that one of the features we need to add is for those of you just getting started or breaking in to the start up market.

Not having a company in your profile that is connected to other startups or VCs will mean that there are few to none companies on your Find Company Page.

We are soon releasing search features that will give you an overview of the startup market, from which you will be able to submit your resume to companies you find interesting.

In the mean time, it is a kluge but if you add a VC as a past employer in your profile, it will let you look at the list of companies they invested in, when you go to the Find Company Page.

If any of them seem interesting and you would like to keep informed of their progress, add them to your “watch list”. If you would like to explore potential opportunites, submit your resume to a single company or make a list from the Find Company Page.

In the future we will let you do this in a less convoluted manner, but for now, a kluge will get the job done.

We received a great email from one of our new users last week that started like this. “I see a lot of demand for something like this” and ended with “you have major design problems, though.”

On one hand not want you want to hear, on the other it came with some very specific input outlining what could be fixed and what new users see and think upon first arrival.

We have always wrestled with explaining what Genotrope does to the new user, versus having too much instruction built into the pages which will be unnecessary once learned.

The initial idea was to build good contextual help features. So most of the answers to the questions we get are contained in the help files, problem is, few like to click on the small orange question mark Icon to find what they are looking for. So we are working on ways to make the site more clear and easy to use.

In the mean time, the help files will tell you

1. the data base of companies is Peer Produced, as a registered user, you can add companies and connections.

2. To find companies that may be of interest, you need to enter your past employers in your profile and make sure the companies connections are as robust as possible.

3. Once you navigate to a company or VC page, you can navigate around the graph by clicking other company nodes. You can also pan and zoom the graph. If you prefer, you can navigate by clicking on companies from the list below the graph.

4. Registered users have a personalized feed of information and opportunities from companies in their professional graph. Just click the RSS icon on the Find Company page.

5. Users can submit resumes to a list of companies once they have perused the Find Company list and checked off companies of interest. Resumes can also be submitted from the company record as well.

6. Genotrope follows up your resume submission by contacting the hiring manager on your behalf.

So, we are working on getting this information to new users in a more obvious and affordable manner. In the mean time, check out the help Icon when you get stuck on a page.

Sorry for the inconvenience, some of the records in our database are unavailable. We are aware of the problem and will have it corrected as quickly as we can. Thanks for your patience. ( caching problem as a result of a bad build)

Just when you think things are going smoothly something like this pops up. Typical rev 0.1 release I guess. Everyone is digging the new VC Directory though and we are getting a lot of attention from it. We will incorporate it directly into the site soon so you wont have to get to it from the Startup Buzz blog.

regards, ts

We just added a new feature in the Startup Buzz section. Now there is a new page

Boston VC Directory + Investments

that takes you to the Venture Firms record and graph of investments. Check it out, cool to see the IPOs and defunct companies to get a feel for their tract record.

The RSS Icon on the Find Company page takes you to a list of all the new companies that have been added into your graph since your last visit as well as news and career listings of the companies you are connected to.

We shut the site down for a few minutes friday at 5:30 pm but are back up now. Sorry if we bumped you off for a few minutes. let us know what you think about the new stuff or any feedback at all, we appreciate it.

A new release caused an unexpected problem. New users were unable to register. Needless to say, this was a major issue, especially after our first press coverage and the new users taking a look.

The problem has been corrected and we have sent messages to those that contacted us regarding the issue. We hope that those of you that tried unsuccessfully to register will give it another try.

Genotrope was fortunate to have our first press coverage in Mass High Tech. MHT does a great job of covering our local market and pointing the spotlight on early stage companies. Thanks to Efrain Viscarolasaga for the article. 

We would also like to thank David Chang co-founder of Mobicious for his positive comments.

We hope this is the first in a long line of press coverage. We have a lot of plans for future releases and events coming in the near future.

So we are back up now. It was a pain in the backside to be down for so long. Sorry for the inconvenience. We actually didn’t accomplish what we set out to do yet, but now that the site is back up, we will figure out the port forwarding and be able to serve up the app without site re-direction.

thanks,  ts

We scheduled some maintenance for late last nite. New firewall, but the provider did not get around to do it when we requested 2-3 am, so now we are out of commission for a few hours.

Sorry for the down time. We ask for your patience with us, but we will be back ASAP.

thanks, Tom Summit

Yesterday we decided to get some much needed feedback by putting Genotrope (web app) or Genotrope (landing page) in front of the toughest audience we could think of, the Y Combinator News community.

Within ten minutes we were receiving comments from all over the world. First of all, I highly recommend giving this a try. You won’t like everything you hear but that is the whole idea. If you can make it on YC News, you can make it anywhere. What happens when some reformed enterprise server developers build a web app and let the YC News community pick it apart? They can’t sit down the next day due to missing buttocks parts.

So the end result is that we had about 350 visits from YCN. 75% bounces, only about ten users spent much time looking into the actual application. Thanks to those users who spent from two up to 40+ minutes on the site. They came from all over the US as well as Peru, Australia, India and Eastern Europe.

What type of feedback did we receive? A few people thought Genotrope was a strange name, even by web standards. A few said they liked the site. A couple didn’t like the color scheme. A lot thought the landing page graphic was distracting or just plain bad. For the most part it was about the UI, usability and graphics. The best inputs were to improve our landing page by focusing our value proposition and clearly stating what benefits we provide to users.

Another take away was that this group does not casually register for every site they come across. Out of 350 or so visitors, we got 4 sign ups. The feedback here was, show me what you can do for me and then we will register if we like it. Some of our functionality requires registration (just an email), so that limited what the new visitors could experience.

We really needed the input regarding the site design, however, the feedback was somewhat disappointing in that it was all web designer input and there was none regarding the actual concept, business model or use of the application. Granted, the blame is mostly ours, due to a less than attractive design and muddy benefit message, maybe most could not see past that to get to the business proposition. We will make the improvements suggested by the YC visitors and then come back to get more feedback on the use of the web app.

Cant wait to do it again.