Sprenzy.com Blog

It’s been too long since I’ve posted on this product development blog. So here’s a quick update on what Peter and I been doing and have planned for Q1 2007. At the end of this month, Sprenzy will be six months old. Since our launch, we’ve been focused on bug fixes, SEO and content development for the Shopping Blog.

In early November, we added Amazon reviews on product pages when possible. We still need to improve the lookup process to match Amazon ASINs with SDCs product IDs. Mashing up Amazon data was the only significant enhancement in Q4 2006. The rest of the development was behind the scenes and not exposed in the UI.

Since we are a bootstrapped startup, we don’t have the resources to do much general marketing or SEM. And frankly, while we are proud of our work on Sprenzy, it’s still a commodity comparison shopping site that isn’t buzz worthy. So we’ve relied on SEO and minimal SMO to attract organic traffic. With this approach, it’s going to take time to build significant and consistent traffic levels, especially with a brand new domain.

We knew this to be the case and have always planned on adding social functionality to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. That’s why there’s an S shaped icon for social in front of the Sprenzy logo. We aren’t planning to be a social shopping site, such as Yahoo! Shoposphere, Kaboodle, Crowdstorm, ThisNext and so on. They are all good sites and we don’t want to compete in the social shopping space and we are definitely not going to be a YASN.

So what new functionality do we plan on releasing? It definitely has a social and community aspect. We are taking a proven and common feature found on many sites and improving it thru better interaction design/UI and appropriate web 2.0 3.0 concepts. Sorry for being vague but… that’s all I’m have to say about that. Hopefully, we can get into a private beta phase before the end of the month.

With the new functionality build out, we decided to complicate the process by also doing a redesign at the same time. We are tired of looking at the current design and color scheme. Don’t you think six months is long enough for the current design? There will be a radical shift in color palette when the new functionality is released, followed by UI enhancements.

That sums up our plan for Q1 2007. Then we may go global in Q2 2007? Releasing a site on another continent counts as going global, right? Look out for more announcements in the following weeks. If you have any suggestions for Sprenzy, we welcome and would appreciate any and all feedback.

Every now and then an event puts everything in perspective for me. Today that event was the discovery of James Kim’s body. I used to work with James during my short time at CNET. I barely knew James since he worked on the editorial side of the house and I was on the product development side. My interactions with him were limited to friendly hellos as we passed in the hallway.

On Monday, I was ecstatic when Kati and the kids were found safe. I was hoping for a happy ending for the Kim family but sadly, James was not found alive. A tragic event like this really puts life in perspective. It seems so trivial to worry about blogging, new product features, SEO, site traffic, etc., when there are more important things in life, such as quality time with family and friends.

There are times in a work environment when everyone is on edge or stressed out over a missed milestone, a server going down or a Google dance. Just remember the majority of us aren’t saving lives. Some of us are simply building web sites. If we all take a step back and look at our work issues, it’s not worth wasting the energy to worry and stress over these relatively trivial issues. With a little perspective, you realize that there are more important things on which to focus your time and energy.

Life is so short and precious. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a tragic event to remind you of this fact. My thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to the extended Kim family.