A Big Week At Ribbit
It's been an amazing week at Ribbit. We launched the company on Monday and we've enjoyed surprise after surprise all week long. The press coverage was exceptional. Depth, accuracy, intelligent reporting. People
(bloggers / reporters) dedicated time to their writing and painted an accurate and complete story.
This is contrasted with other launches I've done where the journalists sometimes cut, paste and reassemble other writers articles and claim it as their own. The journalist on the Ribbit launch spent considerable time interviewing us and digging deep into the details. For a more complete list of news coverage you can go to the Ribbit Press Page. (We apologize to the people who covered us who are not listed on the press page. So much went on this week that we were just in a scramble. We simply ran out of time to gather the posts).
Much to our surprise, we also ended up getting television and radio coverage, again where the journalist worked hard to get the story right.
This launch was not "designed" to be a consumer oriented story - it was actually focused on creating industry and developer awareness for Ribbit and the Ribbit API. We expect the Ribbit business model to behave as a platform , as such it needs both developers to create applications and users to create marketplace "pull". This leg of the marketing was more focused on increasing the number of developers - and it was successful in that we tripled the size of the development community in one week, from around 650 to over 2,000.
In short, we are very grateful for the coverage we're getting. It's critical for a start-up to get coverage and exposure. Being a start-up, we can't buy the awareness we need, so we hope for the journalist and bloggers to carry the story - which they did, so Thank You everyone who wrote about us, It's very much appreciated.
Hi Don - great to hear about Ribbit - you've got my Crunchie vote. Back in the early 90's there was a UK company called Rabbit who launched a CT2 service, but you could only make calls (not receive) within 100m of the base stations - not surprisingly it didn't fly when mobile networks came along.
Best Philip Hemsted, Co-founder Yuuguu
Posted by:Philip Hemsted | January 03, 2008 at 11:11 AM