Everybody Helps

The Anatomy of Referrals - You Media

One fundamental thing that drove the vision of CrossLoop for me was real people, real relationships - I fundamentally believe that a business process of speaking to a 'Mrinal' using 'Tom' as an identity is completely broken. In fact, fake identities can lead to law suits like that by Tony La Russa of the Cardinals against Twitter recently.

And that is the fundamental thing we provide to all - a platform to enable people to fix computer problems but most importantly, an opportunity for customers to know the real 'Mrinal' helping them. Our expert Helpers mostly use their own picture, their real name and have an individual link to their profile that one can go back to. This enables the customers to make an informed decision to go back again and again to 'Mrinal' and refer him/her to their friends and family through word-of-mouth assuming the service provided is excellent.

When did you last go to a attorney or an accountant who used an alias while doing business with you? When did you last go to another lawyer or attorney, with another alias, at the same firm for follow-up questions or sign them up for another year?

So you can imagine my excitement when I found this eMarketer report today that states the top overall customer priority named was service excellence, followed by building a trusting relationship.

But as rightly pointed out, trust is not as an easy thing to build - it takes time and commitment personally and professionally. I have personally written about this on my personal blog way back but Its a bit like having a cat versus a dog - the former lives well with asynchronous food and water left behind whereas the dog needs you to take them out on walks, runs and some tlc.

 
So when you build that trust and customers love you... yes, love you .... they tell their friends and family - each one of us consequently becomes a media for transportation of that event - I call that 'You Media' (a pun intended on new media)

The study goes on to speak more to what purchases are effected by word-of-mouth but I can assure you that the best brands, and our expert Helpers on CrossLoop are one, are built through it.

So go ahead - Be 'connect-able'....

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop Crosses 100M minutes along with Eric and Stacy

Very recently we crossed a HUGE milestone in our business - 100,000,000 minutes of desktop sharing enabled by our award-winning software CrossLoop. Just to reflect back on where we have reached, it took us 134 days to enable our first million minutes after we launched and today, we serve one million minutes in 4 days!!

Also, to give you perspective of what 100,000,000 minutes of engagement means:
100,000,000 =  190 years (we launched CrossLoop about 2 1/2 years ago) or if you were flying with Neil Armstrong to the moon, you could do more than 1000 of those trips to the moon and back!

In order to celebrate this historic milestone, we surprised our expert Helper Eric Schuermann and the customer, Stacy Wagner from Lancaster, PA, he was supporting, with a Kindle each. If you want to get help on anything virus, malware or scareware to speed up that slow computer, he is the man you want to connect with. You can contact him via his CrossLoop profile here.

Here is Eric with a little video he made for us expressing his excitement to hit the milestone along with us!

Good Afternoon, Good Luck and have a great weekend!

Support Us - Vote for CrossLoop to Win TiE50

We are very excited to inform you that CrossLoop is a finalist amongst 149 others out of 1,200 nominees for 2009's TiE50 - a selection of the 50 best startups worldwide.

TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, is world's largest not for profit institution focused on promoting entrepreneurs with a global presence.

This is especially relevant to us since we are in the business of fostering entrepreneurship ourselves by enabling tens of thousands of expert Helpers to build their own brand, reputation and business on the CrossLoop platform - our Marketplace!

Its really simple and will take a minute to vote:

1. Go to http://www.tie50.net/polling/
2. Choose 'CrossLoop' under the Consumer Web column, which is the first one on the left
3. Click on 'Cast Your Vote Now' at the bottom right
4. Submit your email address and click on 'Cast Vote' and you are done!

We believe its time to change the way computer support and training is provided - it needs to be done by real people built on relationships who 'own' your problem.

Your vote will go a long way towards achieving our vision!

Good Morning and Good Luck!

Please Meet Ashley Coffey - A CrossLoop Scholar

We started from day one with a very basic philosophy - we believe everyone helps and we want to make sure we enable that. The business around it is our super simple, award-winning software and a marketplace of over 14,000 Helpers for those who do not have a friend or family to help but we wanted to keep doing things that live that philosophy apart from the business.

So in that spirit, we asked ourselves how we can enable anyone who is helping ... independent of business, independent of computers and empower them.

So it gives us great pleasure to introduce Ashley Coffey, a student at Oregon State University, who is probably now in Namibia, Africa for an internship to conserve the Acinonyx Jubatus...um the Cheetahs. She is headed to the Cheetah Conservation Fund as a 'CrossLoop Scholar'

If you are curious to learn whether you can outrun a cheetah or not or where you can go to pet them, here are some neat facts about them

We wish her the best and look forward to her updates.

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

Celebrating 2008 and Looking Forward to 2009

We genuinely believe that we are where we are today because of our phenomenal users. We were and are a small company and have come so far due to the phenomenal excitement of each and every one of you.

We started the company on three simple fundamental beliefs:

1. Build a phenomenal product (which drives)
2. Loyal Users who love associating with it (and hopefully us :)
   
3. Focus on the success of the customer before your own - we called that collateral success

So here is a short recap comparing 2007 and 2008 across some major metrics that we track closely from growth and engagement perspective.

Total Cummulative Sessions

2007: 1.04M

2008: 3.98M

Growth: 382%

Total Help Minutes

2007: 17.73M Minutes

2008: 75.31M Minutes

Growth: 425%

Total Helpers

2007: 3,428

2008: 14,719

Growth: 429%

Venture Financing

2007: Series A $3M by El Dorado

2008: Series B $6M led by Venrock along with El Dorado

Product Recognition:

2007: CNET's Top 5 Downloads

2008: Walt Mossberg's review in The Wall Street Journal. Here is his interview on The Fox Business News Channel on TV:

In 2 years, we have come a long way from the early days of November 2006 when attracting 50 new users in a day was VERY exciting.

We never want to forget where we were and at the same time recognize that we have long ways to go in achieving our dream - only that with so many more users, our journey together with you is FUNomenal!

Good Evening and Good Luck and here are free hugs, as always, for being with us!

CrossLoop on “Coping with Caregiving”

Some of you do and some do not, but the CrossLoop desktop sharing software got started when my co-founder and CTO of CrossLoop, Tom Rolander’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and he wanted to help his dad remotely and empower more of his family to 'visit' with their father, anytime, anywhere. In case you wondered why our software is so easy to use.....

This past Sunday – October 25th - I was interviewed on Jacqueline Marcell’s “Coping with Caregiving” show, hosted by her now for over 6 1/2 years, where we discussed exactly this same topic – helping and 'meeting' with your relatives with CrossLoop. As many of you have witnessed first hand, its a classic use case for us. As I state in the show, I set up my parents in India with Skype and video-conferencing using CrossLoop so that they can, for free, baby sit their 2 1/2 year old grand-daughter ... the 'care cycle' that starts here! Now how can you not love that convenience :)

Jacqueline who was a television executive for a number of years has completely transformed to an elder care expert and awareness/reform advocate. She has been through a lot in her life including barely surviving her most wretched year taking care of her “aggressively elderly father and sweet ailing mother” which was one of the reasons she is an elder care activist now. You can read more about her biography and mission here. “Elder Rage, or Take My Father… Please! How to Survive Caring for Aging Parents”; producing and hosting the “Coping With Caregiving” radio program for 6 ½ years and interviewing over 700 healthcare professionals; media including TODAY, CNN, PBS Documentary to name a few. Read her background in details here

Jacqueline has run her “Coping with Caregiving” radio show on wsRadio here: http://www.wsRadio.com/CopingWithCaregiving. With over 3 million monthly listeners, 22,000+ archived shows and 4,000+ websites promoting their network, wsRadio is the worldwide leader in Internet talk. They air her show and over 100 custom shows on business, health, hobby, special interest, and eBay Radio for eBay Inc.-- one of the top websites in the world with over 250 million users.

We are more than thankful to Jacqueline for having us on her show and are truly excited to be featured on the wsRadio website here.

You can listen to the interview here anytime or by clicking on the play button below:

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop is "Walted" Way Waaaay Up Globally

As I type this I know its all happening but every other moment, I go Really? 

So here is what happened to all of us today - Walt Mossberg (below with Steve Jobs), the Personal Technology Columnist of The Wall Street Journal, reviewed the CrossLoop software and Marketplace of Helpers. It was an extremely detailed, very well written and objective review - it shouldn't surprise us since Walt is know for exactly that for the many many years he has been reviewing technology products.

The entry on him on Wikipedia says "Walt Mossberg is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. In 2004, in a lengthy profile, Wired called him "The Kingmaker", saying "[f]ew reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures"".
He was also named as one of the 100 most powerful/influential people in the world by Vanity Fair for 2008!

He is the highest authority, in my opinion, in terms of technology and the most trusted brand.

Walt's stamp of recognition is going to do wonders for all us. This also means we are now going to be discovered amongst millions!

The Wall Street Journal has the second highest circulation in the US with over 2Million readers

• Online, they have 17M unique visitors a month 
• They have the most number of online paid subscribers - over 1M 
• They are one of only 2 newspapers in print actually growing  
• Here is an in-depth segmentation of their audience  
• If you want to read Walt's past columns, they are all here for free 

So here all the coverage we received today:

• In Print and online today: "With CrossLoop, Users Can Get Help from Techie Friend". This article is currently right in front on the homepage of the "Tech" tab!
• His personal video review of CrossLoop below (link here)

• Walt discusses CrossLoop on Fox Business News below (link here):   

I dont think we all at CrossLoop can thank him enough for this opportunity but nevertheless, a HUGE..No, HUMONGOUS, Thank you from all of us to Walt!

I also want to take this moment to thank the CrossLoop Helper who provided Walt with such a great experience - the prompt response, the permission-based approach to solving problems mentioned by Walt and of course, the expertise to solve the problem. It made a big difference. 

Note that one never knows the significance of the next customer so the best we can all do is treat everyone in the best possible manner!  

I need some more time to digest what just happened so rest assured another post coming soon on this milestone real soon...on a blog near you!

A VERY Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop Funding Wrap Up

About a little over 48 hours after our Series B funding announcement, here is the exciting and very positive feedback we received about our story through all these outlets that covered us. Impossible to list them all in this post so the following are a few examples, a collage and a location to read them all.

"Rise of the Machines takes hold"

 CrossLoop Raises $6M Series B

 

CrossLoop Announces $6M Series B Venture Capital Funding

Tech Support company CrossLoop Closes $6M Series B Round

 

Online Computer Help company CrossLoop Gets $6M

CrossLoop gets $6M for Peer based Tech Support

CrossLoop Offers Crowdsourced IT Help

 

CrossLoop Raises $6M for Development of its Elegant Marketplace

Here is a collage of some more and I have added a PhotoStream on the sidebar on the left. 

 

All the articles are here

On behalf of everyone at CrossLoop, we thank all the reporters, bloggers and media professionals who stopped to listen to our story and then helped us tell it! Oh - and I don't want to forget my father, my mother, my brother, my cats Romeo and Cleo without whom all this would.....

Signing off on my 100th post (!!) - Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

CrossLoop Raises $6M to further Lower the Bar for Computer Support and Training

We started our journey with a desktop screen sharing software to help and get help on one's computer. It became immensely popular because it was:

- free and

- worked and

- was grandma-friendly

With the mission of enabling anyone to get help on anything, easily, immediately and cost effectively, we then began to complement our technology with people who can help, who want to help and who like to help. We embarked on this phase in December along with El Dorado last year with our Series A funding announcement. The fundamental notion was to provide all that was necessary to get computer help - technology and people who cared about the Customer.

The next phase of our journey came when we opened up our Helpers, over 5,000, to everyone in April.

Now we have over 11,500 Helpers signed up on our Marketplace - the largest one-stop shop in the world for all computer tech support and training needs!

Now we get to celebrate another big milestone as a small company - we are proud to announce our Series B venture financing of $6M led by Venrock along with El Dorado!

We welcome Rich Moran from Venrock to our Board. Apart from authoring the best seller Nuts, Bolts and Jolts (his 6th book), Rich has appeared on NPR, in Fast Company and he also writes a personal blog here. 

First and foremost, we recognize that our CrossLoop Helpers and consequently us, are first in the people business. Rich brings a rich background with expertise on organizational effectiveness and social science and very very importantly - he does it with humor. We love that since we are all about being a FUNomenal company!


Along with Rich, we are also very excited to welcome Andre Haddad, the CEO of Shopping.com (an eBay company) to our board! His Bio is here.
 
From an experience perspective, we are a marketplace where we want Customers to find the most relevant Helpers for their needs. Andre's rich entrepreneurial and international experience through iBazar (a leading European marketplace, which he co-founded and eBay acquired in 2001 for $140M) and eBay, brings tremendous knowledge and experience to all of us since we have Helpers in over 130 countries and total users in over 190 of them!  

Both Rich and Andre bring a lot of deep and relevant professional experience to us and we all at CrossLoop look forward to working with them closely and bringing their best to all our users.

Finally - a little trivia which makes this a very exciting milestone for me personally.
I started my career by selling enterprise CAD/CAM software on SGI boxes in India. One of those that I sold a lot of was a software called I-DEAS from a company called SDRC - Venrock was an investor in SDRC! 

Our official press release is here

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!

Your Success First Leads to Ours

Once in a while I will see a question from a user or a comment on a blog post wondering how we will make money or will we charge for the use of CrossLoop down the road.

I had addressed it here (the product, as is, will always be free and we plan to add premium services) before but let me do it again for the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of new users since then and with more insight into the team, its philosophy and culture which is all around a term I call "collateral success".

Generally all corporations are built around the core objective of maximizing shareholder wealth/value. I argue that it does not focus on users first. Our philosophy of collateral success focuses on our users first - make you successful first and we are confident, we will be successful. Think personal professions - would you choose to follow your passion and incidentally make money or would you prefer to do something and devote a significant amount of your life focused on your paycheck first?

There are business models that can measure and monetize this but more as we move along our product roadmap and make some exciting new releases soon.

Based on that philosophy, our last  big release was all around providing experts and professionals in anything computers - technical support, training, etc. - tools to be able to quantify and personalize, market and monetize their reputation. Here are some good examples of some of our CrossLoop professionals who are leveraging it:

OnClick Tech Support:
1) They provide remote support with CrossLoop and here is their CrossLoop badge: http://www.onclicktechsupport.com/remotedownload.htm
2) They are using Craigslist to advertise their service with their custom URL (click on the CrossLoop logo): http://duluth.craigslist.org/cps/604835940.html

When you click on his profile here (or through his Badges on the above links), you will notice the number of sessions he has logged now with different individual clients - he is building up a very impressive reputation with some good customer testimonials that aid in getting them more business.

Robert Plumer
1) CrossLoop Badge on his blog here
2) His profile and custom URL on CrossLoop: http://www.crossloop.com/RobertPlumer   

I intend to feature creative technical support and training CrossLoop professionals here on our blog. If you have an active profile with our Badge on social networking sites, classifieds, your blog etc. - email me at least two links, like above, at mrinal [at] crossloop.com. I will work on getting them up here and again - hope to get you some more promotion.

Think of me as your marketer and if you really like what I do - I welcome tips through the small widget on the left sidebar below :)

Good Afternoon and Good Luck!