The Spokeo Perspective

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet some interesting new start-ups and demo Spokeo at the Plug and Play Expo in Sunnyvale. Plug and Play’s Expo is hosted twice a year to give up and coming start-ups a chance to gain exposure for their products or services. It was nice opportunity to get out of [...]

I hear that question all the time. And I have finally made my peace with it. User growth is good. However, obsessing over user growth in a product under development is bad because it breeds unhealthy stress and leads to shortsighted decisions. I read an interesting interview from Eric Schmidt months ago. In it, he [...]

There’s a proverb, "Birds of a feather flock together" (Chinese has a similar proverb, "one takes on the color of one’s company"). When you see many of your friends have started their own ventures, you’ll feel an inexplicable urge to do the same as well. These friends are more than drinking buddies; rather, we exchange [...]

If you happened to check out our company page today, you’d notice that Spokeo got a great marketing boost in Mital. She is very lively, a fireball of energy, a human Mount Vesuvius. She is exactly what we are not, so it’s a great fit, and we’re super excited that she is with us. A [...]

Ten rules is a wonderful post for startups written by a great web entrepreneur. I’ve read it many times and even taped it to my wall, but I am still not happy with our performance on several rules. I only present the rules here. Please refer back to the original post for descriptions of each [...]

Slow creeping growth… Does that even sound like a good thing? Yes! After months of reworking the idea, tweaking the usage flow, and streamlining the interface, we have advanced out of stagnation. During our monthly review today, we officially declared that we are indeed seeing some pickup. Stagnation (stage cleared) Slow Creeping Growth (current stage) [...]

This past week I visited some family in Asia. For lunch one day, we went for a meal of spicy noodles and pork dumplings at a small family restaurant. When we were done eating I raised my hand to ask for the check. A second later, a waitress said "980 NT" (which comes out to [...]

Once in a while I come across an awesome user. Sometimes this user helps us nail down a feature set with his feedback. Sometimes this user writes an FAQ section more clearly that we originally wrote it. This time, flameape was able to find two bugs that had escaped our testing team and thousands of [...]

Our website has been live for 8 months, and I have to admit, we’ve been terrible in customer service. We’ve read your feedback only to do… absolutely nothing about it. We’re ashamed about this episode, and before you give up on us, let me explain. Let’s pretend for now that Spokeo makes cars. 8 months [...]