enthuse.me blog

We’re looking for housemates.

We’ve got a few spare desks here at enthuse.me HQ and we’re looking to share them with smart people. We’re 5 minutes from Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street, stations in a bright, clean office, with fast internet, good music, a well-stocked kitchen and our legendary Falafel Friday every week. If you’re a young startup looking to share space with one of London’s coolest new startups* for a fair price, drop us a line and let’s have a chat.

*That’s what our mum said

Continuing our post series on useful tools that help us improve and refine the enthuse.me website… next up, HipChat.

It seems odd when someone realises that we often have a conversation on HipChat, our internal instant messenger, even though we’re sitting meters away from each other. Actually though, it’s an incredibly useful and efficient tool that we use every hour of every day.

Developers often prefer to work undisturbed and so if you have a question for them that can wait, you can send it in HipChat for them to pick up when they’re free. This way the other developers are also kept in the loop, and you avoid confusing e-mail threads with loads of CCs. You can share files, set up rooms for certain groups (just designers for example) and send personal messages to invidividuals.

The best feature of HipChat is it’s ability to integrate with almost anything. We push GitHub notifications to the main chat, see Airbrake errors, see passed or failed builds on our CI server (Semaphore - also a great tool!) and even notifications of a new support email in our helpdesk. It’s a really great way for all discussions and notifications to be kept in one place.

- Toby Vacher - enthuse.me Head of Product and UX

The year’s most anticipated tech event, Web Summit, is rapidly approaching. Tickets are booked, pitches are perfected, practice drinking sessions are planned. enthuse.me is going to be there, and hopefully you are too.

If you are going, tweet us on @enthusedotme and we’ll add you to our directory of attendees on enthuse.me. You can familiarise yourself with some friendly faces in advance of the event right here.

Not yet on enthuse.me? Register now in seconds using this link and you’ll automatically be added to our directory. Plus, you’ll have a simple, sexy one page pitch that showcases how brilliant you are, and helps you win new work.

Let’s chat in Dublin! We’ll be both pitching and exhibiting at Web Summit, so say hello and let’s have a chat. Drop our founder Dan or our Product Manager Toby an email now if you’d like to meet us.

We wanted to share some of the useful tools that help us improve and refine the enthuse.me website. First up…

Optimizely

What? Sexy and simple A/B testing

One of our core company values is to test assumptions and try to back up decisions with real data. Optimizely is a great A/B testing app that lets me (a fairly non-technical member of the team) tweak links, text and styles on our landing and marketing pages to work out which changes will give us the best conversions.

For example, after a few tests that had no significant difference on the number of visitors who clicked the ‘Get Started’ button on our homepage, one small change of the button text size from 18px to 28px resulted in a near 100% increase in conversions. That’s double the number of people clicking that button! Invaluable.

- Toby Vacher, Head of enthuse.me Product

An Oxford graduate with a degree in Mathematics, Simon Sacerdoti was one of the founders of Avalon in 1992, a multiplayer game world (RPG) in the very early days of the consumer internet. In 1997, Simon qualified as a chartered accountant, and moved into corporate finance, where he advised numerous startups during the dotcom boom.  In 2011 he founded WeSwap with Jared Jesner. After a lengthy closed beta in which they ironed out many bugs and operational issues, they officially launched in July 2013, and are doing a brilliant job in disrupting the travel money sector!

Simon visited us at our office; we ate falafels and had a lovely -brief- chat where he shared some great insights from his experience in the startup world.

Read More →

We thought you might find it useful if we’d give you some advice tips on how to set up a good looking enthuse.me profile and actually be useful to you!

Although it might be easy for some, or self explanatory for others, we still think that most of us enjoy having some guiding tips once in a while if we want to use a tool properly. Because -you know- you can have the best, high-quality ingredients in the world, but if you don’t have the recipe then the food won’t taste that good, would it? 

So, let’s see how you can get started and get the most out of it.  

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Try it free for 14 days, then have 50% off, on us!

I’m excited to announce a great set of tools we’ve been working on to help you get even more out of your enthuse.me profile, and ensure it really is the best way to promote yourself online, gather a following and get what you want out of your work, skills or passion.

Our team have done a great job of putting together these tools for you, and as a thanks for supporting us in our early days, we’d like to offer you a 14 day free trial of all these features, and then 50% off for your first 6 months. With the discount, that’s just $2.50 per month for all this lot:

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Founder of Buffoon and Space to Work, a Role Model for Big Ideas Welsh Project and recently awarded with the Swansea Bay Young Entrepreneur 2013 Award, Adam Amor is a young entrepreneur with an already successful business record. Let’s have a closer look at what he has to say about entrepreneurship, exciting projects, challenges and tips to follow. 

- Nice to have you on board Adam! For start, tell us about your journey so far.

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We caught up with Paul Keeling to discuss about his field of expertise: the magical world of photography.

Paul talked to us about paulkeventphoto, the challenges and perks of photography, shared some business tips and valuable advice, and explained why it is important to use the internet to promote yourself, your work and expertise online. 

-Tell us a few words about your story so far.

My story is an unusual one.

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We are excited to commence our interview series ‘enthuse.meet EnthUsers’ !

We had our first chat with Tanya Smith, founder of tanyasmithonline.com helping bloggers, freelancers and small business owners to leverage the internet and grow successful businesses. 

Tanya took some time to discuss with us about her expertise and passion for online business coaching, how she uses her enthuse.me profile and shared some great tips with us on how to create a business success online. 

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At enthuse.me we are all about passion. We have built a product for you to showcase what you are really passionate about, which made us think about our passion. What is it that we are passionate about, besides building a great product?

The answer came pretty naturally. We are passionate about you! - helping you to promote yourself online in the very best light and build a following.  This is why we decided to launch a round of interviews dedicated to all our amazing “EnthUsers” who want to showcase their expertise within the enthuse.me community.

The interviews will be more like an informal chat about you and what you do best. We thought that it will be a great opportunity for you to tell us a little bit more about yourselves, your journey so far, your passion and expertise, share some tips with us and let other EnthUsers get to know you better.     

We want to keep it simple and fairly unstructured, to give you space to lead and share with us the things that matter to you the most. For start we’ll try to post one interview per week on our blog and spread the word through our social media accounts - of course we’ll link back to your profile to give you that extra promotional boost as well.

If you are interested in being featured, get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.

The enthuse.me team :)

Although we work hard to make enthuse.me great for you guys, we have some fun times too. Especially when the weather is as amazing as it has been the last couple of weeks (yeah you get that in London too!)

So, the enthuse.me team gathered at -our founder- Dan’s house for a Pizza-Barbecue summer-y Sunday.

We had an amazing time, lots of food, drinks and sun!

We are not going to say more, photos speak for themselves :)

Waiting for the food, chatting and getting tanned

Hungry people, can you tell?

Voila! Yummy stone-baked, home-made pizza

Yeap, tech savvy entrepreneurs cook too

Dennis -our UI & UX Designer- getting excited as he was the first one to be served

Apart from being our front end developer, Lewis has his own band too. Yeah, we listened to some nice tunes that evening. 

Back to work now.
Keep checking our blog as we are working on some new, exciting stuff! 

We’re delighted to announce the launch of some great new features: 

Following - you can follow and be followed by clicking on the ‘follow’ button attached to each users profile photo.  You can see all users you follow and who follow you in the new connections module.

Notifications - all users now have a notifications tab, this contains updates from the people you are following.

Invitations - you can invite people to follow your profile if they are not yet on enthuse.me they will be invited to join.  Invite people by clicking on ‘invite contacts to join enthuse.me’.

Expand your reach by getting people to follow you! 

Log back into your enthuse.me account and start following people like Dan Jacobs!

Let us know what you think of the new features!  

enthuse.me CEO Dan Jacobs talks about who enthuse.me is aimed at.

In previous generations people had ‘jobs for life’, this was in the case in both the public and private sectors.  As a whole, people would not move between companies very often and there was a sense that if you wanted to, you could spend your entire life in one job at one company.  Those days are now long gone, in the last 20 years the last bastion of ‘jobs for life’, the public sector has also changed and become more dynamic.  

Now two years is a good amount of time to stay in a job, but more and more people are deciding to leave the ‘security’ of a job and are going it alone, either as contractors, freelancers, entrepreneurs, stay-at-home mums looking for extra income or people setting up their own small businesses.

There are many reasons for this growing trend, the perception of job security is disappearing, people are starting to realise that having a traditional full time job is no guarantee.  With the current financial ‘situation’ in the west, people are being made redundant, being asked to take pay cuts, reduce hours and in some cases, many full-time jobs are becoming part-time.  The work force is realising that you may have more security working for yourself, that taking control over your own destiny can be a better way forward.

enthuse.me has been created to serve these people, our mission is to create a set of tools that support people taking the brave step of going it alone.  If you, as an independent professional, went to a marketing agency, they would they ask you:

1. What is it that you are great at?
2. What makes you different to other people?
3. How can you distill this into key messages?

They are also likely to advise you to keep things simple, to focus on what you’re good at and to work your network.

This is what enthuse.me is all about, we ask you the questions that your potential customers would want you to answer.

Over the next year we will be adding more and more tools to support you to be successful.  Tell me what enthuse.me can do to help you, drop me a line at [email protected]   

enthuse.me CEO Dan Jacobs has written a nice piece on working from home in reaction to the recent news about Yahoo changing their work from home policy - http://chinwag.com/blogs/danjacobs/why-working-home-doesn-t-work

Rosamund Urwin wrote an interesting article this week on how the paper CV is dead or on it’s way out and Twitter is the way forward.   http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/the-twitter-cv-how-to-sell-yourself-in-140-characters-8511001.html

I agree with the general trends she talks about, companies are beginning to realise that the CV, which is fairly static and limited, is not the best way to find out if someone is suitable for a job.  Twitter can be useful.  We recently asked job applicants to write a tweet ‘selling’ enthuse.me as a way of filtering down applications.  

Twitter has it’s limits, as there is only so much you can communicate in 140 chars.  enthuse.me is a great solution as it allows you to bring together the best pieces of media and content you have online which show off your skills and expertise.  You can tailor your enthuse.me profile depending on the roles you are looking for and employees will have a really good sense of you very quickly.

Since founding enthuse.me last year, I have been thinking about how we can utilise the growing number of post-graduates looking for internships.  Now that enthuse.me is ready to start accelerating its user growth from early adopters to regular users, I thought now would be a good time to start looking into recruitment of Interns.  When I started the process, a few questions came to mind:

1.  What can you expect from an intern?
2.  Do you pay an intern?
3.  How do you find them?

1. What can you expect?  I can’t fully answer this yet, our first intern starts this week.  Having seen the quality of applications, my expectations are high.  With proper support and supervision, I am expecting our first intern to make a real contribution to the team.

2. Do you pay an intern?  There are two sides to this, legal and moral.  I personally am feel it’s wrong not to pay an intern if you are expecting them to make a contribution to the business.  In any case, there are goverment guidlines about this - https://www.gov.uk/employment-rights-for-interns

3.  How do you find them?  I found two websites that were low cost and they both attracted some quality interns.  www.internwise.co.uk and www.enternships.com.  Enternships had a neat feature that allowed you to ask the applications a filter question.  As the role was in marketing, I asked all applicants to write a tweet to promote enthuse.  The results were mixed and it was a good idea.  I also asked all applicants whose CV I liked to write a blog post reviewing enthuse.me.  This really seperated the wheat from the chaff and we were left with few candidates we wanted to interview.

Of course, it would have been even more useful if all the applicants created an enthuse.me profile for us to review!

FYI - here are the two adverts:

http://www.internwise.co.uk/events/details/4620-PR-Marketing-SEO-Intern/

& 

https://www.enternships.com/en/enternships/6540-pr-marketing-executive-enthuse-me

The UK Office for National Statistics just released their latest employment figures for Oct-Dec 2012.  The figures show a continuation in the trend of rising employment and a further fall in the number of people claiming job seekers allowance.

Commentators are asking the question, why is employment rising when the UK looks to be heading for a triple dip recession?  Part of the reason I would suggest is that the employment profile is changing in the UK.  There are a growing number of people going it alone and creating their own businesses and opportunities for themselves. 

This recent article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21348712 and others suggest that this trend is growing. 

enthuse.me provides a great platform for the self-employed to brand and market themselves.  Over the next few months we will be adding more features to showcase what you can do and help you reach out to new potential clients.

Since opening up the enthuse.me beta to the public we’ve been looking to grow our small early adopter community with quality users who can give us helpful and critical feedback. 

We have benefited from having a few random bloggers write about enthuse.me and that has been helpful for driving users. 

However, by far the most helpful site we have used is www.erlibird.com – Founded last year by Michael Siegler of Chicago (that’s in the USA), the site is very much aligned with the enthuse.me ethos of quality over quantity.  Its early adopter community of around 12,000 (and growing) users are gently encouraged to give feedback by use of some ‘gamification’ methods.  Users get badges and points for activity on the site which ranges from signing up with a start-up to providing meaningful feedback. 

I’m not sure if it’s the quality of the user, the slick interface or the ‘gamification’ but the quality of feedback was top class with nearly all the user responses being detailed and useful.

Erlibird charge the start-up a small fee for this service and it’s well worth it.