Today we are celebrating our first birthday as a team! Ben Way formed the SendSocial team on 9th March 2009, by sending an e-mail to some of the respondents to his Twitter and Blog posts, inviting them to work with him in developing and launching the service.
All of us accepted the challenge, and a year on, we have launched and continue to develop the business. We recently introduced our API to online retailers, who are busy getting their sites ready so you can ‘Send by SendSocial’. We also have some other really interesting developments we will be revealing soon, so watch this space!
We have some thoughts already, but where would you like to see SendSocial in another year’s time?
Every blog post I write seems to begin with an apology for not writing as much as I’d hoped or promised. As good as my blogging intentions have been, it’s been hard to find the time to tap out a few hundred words here and there, especially when there is so much going on – both in my life and at SendSocial. Every hour feels like a commodity at the moment.
It’s Sunday night – well, Monday morning now – and I’d planned to go to bed hours ago, but my head is whirring away with ideas and I’m in such a creative mood that it would be foolish to waste that by climbing into bed. I wish it was possible to plan when these bursts of inspiration would come; then, maybe, I would be able to arrange to see my accountant on a day when I’d got more than only a couple of hours’ sleep.
I started my second semester at university in January convinced that I would be able to see my business management course out, at least until the end of this academic year. Not two weeks into the term, and I’d decided to take a leave of absence to pursue SendSocial and my other business interests on a full-time basis. Things were getting to the point where my management course was proving to be little more than a distraction from the excitement of being an entrepreneur, and the prospects of never having to write another essay or sit another exam were too much for me to ignore.
Most of my friends at university don’t know about my life as an entrepreneur (they probably think I’m just some lazy layabout who never manages to make it into lectures), and it has been weird juggling my entrepreneurial exploits with learning about Pareto efficiency and other obscure economic principles, on the odd occasion that I was able to drag myself to my university’s Waterloo lecture theatre.
So I did it. I took the leap.
And I don’t regret it.
A lot has been happening behind the scenes here over the past few weeks – things that we can’t talk about just yet – that have me more excited and confident than ever about what lies ahead. We quietly released our API a few weeks ago, and our first partner integration will be complete in the coming weeks. The prospect of being able to ‘send via SendSocial’ on your favourite ecommerce websites is something that I am looking forward to, and our API allows this to happen.
Part of me wants to spill the beans on everything else that we’re working on, but I’ll most likely wake up to a barrage of angry emails and phone calls if I do.
I’ll blog about them as soon as I can, and that’s a promise this time. Right now, I’m going to go to bed, open my eyes in the morning, and continue to enjoy the journey.
Somebody wake me up in three-and-a-half hours, please.
Since we launched in November, we have been amazed by the number of suggestions for how SendSocial could be used in other ways. We have also had interest from a number of organisations wishing to offer a similar service to their customers.
This got us all thinking – wouldn’t it be great if you could buy a gift for your friend from one of your favourite online stores without needing to look up their address?
We are therefore delighted to announce the immediate release of our API, which lets online retailers and service providers offer the same convenience and privacy that we offer on SendSocial.com.
Our Address Brokerage Service allows organisations to easily integrate the SendSocial process to their existing checkout procedure, releasing address data only if the recipient accepts the request. This allows our partners to use existing logistics arrangements, making integration with SendSocial simple and risk-free. There are no setup or monthly fees, and we only charge our partners when requests are accepted.
To safeguard our users’ data, we have a comprehensive application process before potential integrators can start using the API, with stringent terms of usage meaning address data remains private and is only used for the purposes of fulfilling requests that have been accepted. As a final safety net, any improper use of our API is subject to hefty penalties.
We are currently working with a number of online retailers and are looking forward to announcing the launch of our first partnerships very soon.
Please be aware that due to the adverse weather conditions, our courier partner myHermes is experiencing severe difficulties across many areas of the UK. Both collections and deliveries are impacted and myHermes are doing all they can to keep delays to a minimum.
If you wish to check the status of your delivery, please contact us on info@sendsocial.com.
Over the Christmas period there will be a limited delivery service, with no collections or deliveries between 25th – 28th December 2009, or 1st January 2010.
SendSocial wishes our customers and visitors a very happy Christmas, and best wishes for the new year.
I’m willing to spend £3.99 using SendSocial to send each item to someone else. In exchange for this I want an item in return, other than the iPod (for which I want an Apple Micro-DVI Cable) I’m open to offers!
Here’s a photographic record of one of our first address-less parcels, which proves they really can be delivered! This one travelled from Newcastle to Derby, and is just one of several test parcels we have been sending recently ahead of our launch.
We’re excited, to say the least, that SendSocial will be launching to our investors in just over 24 hours’ time. I’ve just been reading through some of the very first emails that the team exchanged when Ben first floated the idea, and it really is remarkable that, in the 8 months since then, we’ve built and are preparing to launch this thing.
I had butterflies in my stomach when a myHermes courier turned up at my house bright and early on Monday morning to collect an address-less parcel. Even the courier was impressed – the first time she’s collected something like this, she said, but most definitely not the last.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one of the things I love about SendSocial is that we’re all entrepreneurs. We’re all passionate about what we’re doing and what we’re trying to achieve. I glanced at my watch the other night to see that it was 4.30am. Quite how I was still bursting with energy at that time, I’m not too sure.
It might have been the coffee, but even at that time of night, emails were flying into my inbox: “What if we do this?”, “That could work…”. There’s such a buzz within the team at the moment, I think it highlights the fact that launches are always fun and we’re really grasping this one by the horns.
Most people I speak to love the concept, but a concept is of course a very different thing from a business that people will use and appreciate. That’s why tomorrow is very important to us – it’s the first time that real people can see what we’ve been working on, and you’ll be able to send and receive requests from the off.
We’re conscious, as well, that people are going to come up with ways of using SendSocial that we’d never even have thought of. And, for our investors, it all starts tomorrow. We can’t wait to hear your feedback – good and bad – on the site.
Oh, and if you’re not an investor, there’s no need to feel jealous (well, maybe a little): we’ll be opening our doors to you before long.
As you might imagine, there’s a fairly complex website behind SendSocial, and it’s my task to ensure it all works as the SendSocial team wants it to. Here’s an update to let you know how we’re getting on.
We are now in advanced stages of testing with Hermes, whilst doing a great deal of testing on our website. If you have been keeping an eye on SendSocial through twitter search, you will have probably seen some of these tests happening. Forgive us, we’re not trying to spam twitter, rather just carrying out the tests we need to make to launch successfully!
Security is perhaps the most important aspect of SendSocial, and certainly one of the greatest challenges in its development. One of SendSocial’s unique advantages is the fact you never see the other party’s address when arranging a delivery, and we will be promoting the anonymity aspects of SendSocial as much as the low prices and convenience it offers.
Needless to say, we take security very seriously, and have developed SendSocial with this at the forefront of our decision making. We will be securing the whole site using SSL (that means there will be a padlock in the corner of the screen), with the industry leader in Internet security, VeriSign. Not only does this mean your data is encrypted during transmission over the Internet, it also gives you and your recipients, who may be using SendSocial for the first time, the best possible perception of security and professionalism, which we believe is crucial.
Another area we are focussing on is performance – we know you’ll want a website that’s quick and just lets you concentrate on your task, so have been painstakingly refining the system to get the best possible performance for launch. We have taken note from other recent launches that not everything always goes to plan when you flick the big switch, so have built SendSocial on enterprise-grade technologies, allowing us to scale easily as traffic volumes increase. We want SendSocial to be a busy site, so have prepared for this!
Over the next week or so we will be finalising functionality and testing, whilst preparing our systems for launch. It’s very nearly there, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback and suggestions after you’ve given SendSocial a try.
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