Yoly Week 2

Marketing and Brands

It's been a great week for us. We now have over 200 people on all of our social networks that are following our news streams. We have also gotten some people volunteering their expertise to help out with our effort. Thanks to all of you that have given your time and energy to our efforts. Don’t forget to tell your friends about Yoly and get them to start following our progress!
We just received our stickers for our marketing campaign this week. The stickers and the T-shirts from the previous week are part of our push for the Beta Launch next month. Exciting times. As you can see from the photos we already have some great models for the shirts. All of them are Darren’s nephews and a niece. Walking billboards have already been seen with Yoly on their shirt in Idaho, Utah, California,
Dallas, Houston, Missouri and Illinois. The word is spreading.

Partnerships and Video

We had a great meeting with another startup that is further down the road than we are. It was great to hear their startup story and learn from what they have already gone through. We are partnering with them to co-market Yoly and RezBuzz, an all-video resume service. They have a focus on colleges and helping college students differentiate themselves in this tough job market. They have had tons of press on NBC, CNBC, Fox news and several local stations all over the US. We will be working together to help promote Yoly and RezBuzz as tools that can help college graduates find opportunities for work.

Development update

We had another release this week. We have made improvements in performance, integrated Facebook contacts, improved the contact application, and changed the interest elaboration user interface. One of the coolest new features is a mashup with Wikipedia to suggest additional search words for an interest. We have also added the ability to filter results based on words or phrases. You can check out the latest release at www.yoly.com. Register today and give us some feedback.

Banking and accounting

Every startup needs to save money and spend money. It is best to keep things separated from your personal money. It can be difficult to work out what money went to the company and what you spent on your own. So we opened up an online bank account, which cost us nothing. Another startup move since money is tight. To do our bookkeeping we decided on Quickbooks basic which gives us the basic functionality that we need to keep our books. Keeping the money separate is the only way to go.  I look forward to another productive week this week with another release and the start of our marketing campaign at the beginning of next week. See you next week.