Hollrr blog

Great shots of our office from our Fanpulse...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:53:00 -0800

Great shots of our office from our Fanpulse neighbors. More here.

Beautiful photos from @kineticac.

Tag you're it!

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:44:36 -0800

Yes, yes.. we’ve been busy. And some of you have already emailed us to let us know that you’re digging the new features. We’re thrilled. As promised … we started to roll out some cool features related to tags and lists. Check out the Top 10 list for #TravelEssentials and #iPhoneApps to see the new features in action.

Right now we’re working harder than Santa’s little elves to get some more features out the door. We promise to have a lot more in store for you over the next few weeks.

We want to say a big congratulations to our neighbors here in...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:47:17 -0800

We want to say a big congratulations to our neighbors here in Pier 38, AppJet. AppJet make the very cool EtherPad and were acquired last week by Google. We wish them all the best!

We take our mission at Hollrr seriously

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

We believe that excellent products should trump big marketing budgets every time, and by harnessing the power of word of mouth recommendations, we want to overthrow advertising on the Internet.

In creating Hollrr, we want to connect people who are passionate about discovering up-and-coming, cool, new products and services. We want to connect people who love hearing about new products from small underdog companies, and even more…. who love discovering those product and telling their friends about them.

At one point, we thought the best way to nurture and encourage people to do this was to collect and share affiliate rewards that any referral on Hollrr generated. As we nurtured and watched Hollrr grow, we realized that this is not the case. We came to realize that the true fans of a product don’t really care about affiliate rewards. As we listened to the Hollrr community, we realized that Hollrrers hollrr for the love of the product and because the LOVE helping other people discover that product. When we listened, you told us that any type of affiliate reward just confusing and counter to the reasons they Hollrred.

We’ve listened to the feedback and we agree. We agree that any sort of affiliate reward program does a disservice to your motivations in giving your favorite product a Hollrr. As a team we have decided to turn off the rewards feature on Hollrr. We believe this decision will allow us to focus better on our core mission, and allow our community to focus on discovering and rooting for their favorite products out there.

We have big ambitions for Hollrr… but its heart will always be its community of fanatical users. We are eager and excited to hear your thoughts and suggestions. If you’d like to chat, please feel free to use the comments below or email me direct at hegs[dot]hollrr[dot]com.

We’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.
Happy Hollrring,
-David

Hello to Jeff Carlucci. Our first professional athlete on...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:37:51 -0800

Hello to Jeff Carlucci. Our first professional athlete on Hollrr. Welcome aboard.

Twitter can have Shaq. We got Jeff!

Stop… you’re making us blush.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:29:54 -0800

Stop… you’re making us blush.

Aww… thanks guys. Big shout out to the crew at Give...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:11:00 -0800

Aww… thanks guys.

Big shout out to the crew at Give Forward. They rock!

Amen. (Article is worth reading too)

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:31:01 -0800

Amen.

(Article is worth reading too)

Looking for technical co-founder / head of dev for Hollrr

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:07:31 -0700

We’ve some exciting news to share! We’re expanding the team here at Hollrr and are on the hunt for a rockstar to join us as Head of Development. This is a tremendous opportunity to come on board as a co-founder for a growth start-up with BIG ambitions.

If you’d like to know more about the job, check out http://hollrr.com/jobs.

_______________________________________________

We’re aiming big…

Hollrr is a start-up with big ambitions. By harnessing the power of word of mouth recommendations, we want to overthrow advertising on the Internet.

From our headquarters in San Francisco CA, we are on a mission to destroy generic, banal banner advertising that no-one likes, and allow fans to liberate great new products struggling to reach new customers. Viva la revolution!

We have a lot of work to do, and we need your help.

Technical Head (we will call you ‘El Jefe’)

Let’s be clear… we’re looking for a lot from this person.

Advertising/marketing as we know it is going to be flipped on its head over the next 5 years. Search/Google has already done that for one component of it, and the combination of Social Media and Advocate Marketing will do it to another component of it. There is a huge opportunity, and we believe the opportunity is wide open to be captured.

We are looking for a Technical Co-Founder to help us capture that market.

At a high-level that means that not only would you have to be a rock-star engineer, but you’d also have to be a partner contributing significantly on the business/user insight side too. In addition, you’ll need to be a solid people manager able to recruit, build and manage a high-performing Dev team.

This means we’re looking for someone who can hit the ground running:

Understand and contribute to the vision for Hollrr
Be obsessed about iterating quickly to turn user insight into features/improvements so we can build a community of fanatics
Have the engineering chops to architect and plan for scale, but the humility right now to get down ‘n’ dirty in the code as we iterate quickly
Bench lift 300 lbs

The ideal person would have done a similar role at 1-2 start-ups previously… but to be honest, by far the most important thing is that you are an open-minded, curious individual, passionate about building Hollrr.com.

We’ve noticed a lot more iPhone apps on Hollrr recently....

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:15:21 -0700

We’ve noticed a lot more iPhone apps on Hollrr recently. We wrote a post on this a couple of months back.

One of our favorite new Apps out there is ‘Waze’. Waze uses the data from other Waze users to predict traffic conditions and skilfully steer you around congestion or accidents.

They posted a very nice blog here telling their users how to use Hollrr to get the word out about this cool new app.

Nice email from a user. Day made.

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:35:00 -0700

Makes our day every time without fail!

David—
I was introduced to Hollrr from a friend of mine that read about your company while flying. As a lover of new products — Hollrr really strikes a cord. I have been working for a startup company in Cleveland, Ohio for the last five years, so I appreciate your platform for “the underdogs.” In fact, I have been developing a new mobile media accessory product on the side that I will be launching this holiday season — and I can’t wait to try to get the word out using Hollrr. We’ll be looking to make things public in about 2-3 weeks.
Again, thanks for creating Hollrr!
Best,
Mike

Mike - thanks for the kind words!

Love this email from Zappos. Zappos wants you to do something...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:17:00 -0700

Love this email from Zappos.

Zappos wants you to do something … but they remind you by sending a thoughtful funny email.

This weeks Hot Hollrrers!

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:01:00 -0700

We love hearing everyone shout about the things they love and learning about so many cool new products and services! We also love making lots of cool new friends and wanted to give shout-outs to some of them this week for being such Hot Hollrrers!

Check them out and follow them if you like what they’re hollrring about:

Shannan

Matthew Harrison Smith

I heart PGH

Sherri

"Hi, Absolutely love Hollrr. Just wanted to let you know, ever since I’ve signed up this has..."

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:13:00 -0700

“Hi, Absolutely love Hollrr. Just wanted to let you know, ever since I’ve signed up this has been happening. No big deal, just wasnt sure if it was something technical that should be pointed out.

When I sign in, i get a blank page. Then I hit the back button and i am at the home page and signed in.

Keep up the great work!!!! And thanks for creating one of my new top 5 sites!!!”

- I checked my inbox yesterday morning to find this wonderful message from one of our users.

I wanted to remind all users that we LOVE when we get feedback from you - both negative and positive. Feedback helps us iron out any bugs, and lets us know which new features will help keep Hollrr rocking!

…plus glowing compliments like this tend to make our day too ;)

Photo

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:39:00 -0700

We moved into new offices last week. We’re now part of...

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:14:43 -0700

We moved into new offices last week.

We’re now part of Dogpatch Labs on Pier 38.

If you’re in San Francisco, stop by and say hello.

Pier 38 – Suite 210
The Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA 94107

(map)

This weeks Hot Hollrrers!

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:32:00 -0700

Just like you like to hollrr about the things you love, we like to hollrr about the Hollrrers we love!

Here are this week’s Hot Hollrrers. If you like what they’re hollrring about, follow them! If you don’t like what they’re hollrring about, find some people to follow whose hollrrs you do like!

Robby Young

Haley

Darcie Newton

Lauren Novita

Check it out! The great people over at Southwest...

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:53:00 -0700

Check it out! The great people over at Southwest Airlines’ Spirit Magazine gave us a shout out in this month’s issue. Spirit is read by nearly 2.5M people each month! If you’re flying Southwest in September, look us up…there is a whole page talking about Hollrr!

(Link|PDF)

Big new feature update! You can now Follow your favorite Hollrrers

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:24:00 -0700

We just rolled out our biggest launch of new features to date. By far and away the BIGGEST request we had from you guys was to make Hollrr more social…’Let me see what my friends are Hollrring’… and who can blame you, Hollrrers are awesome people!

We’re thrilled to announce the rollout of features so you can follow your friends and favorite Hollrrers. Now when you log into Hollrr, you’ll see all the Hollrrs of the people you’re following right there on the Home page! Plus, each user now has your own page where you can profile your Hollrrs.

But wait… there’s more ;) The other big request we had was for email notifications and summaries of what’s happening on Hollrr. Again, we’re thrilled to roll-out this feature too. The default setting for notifications is ‘medium’ frequency… if you wanna hear from us a little bit more, or maybe a little bit less, you can adjust your notifications frequency on the settings page.

Video

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:04:00 -0700