Gina Bianchini was briefly one of the most prominent female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, suddenly dropping from sight in March 2010 when her start-up Ning stumbled. Now she’s back with a new idea.
- Gina Bianchini
Many people want to do something more concrete than simply engaging in the kind of freeform conversation allowed by sites like Facebook and Twitter, Bianchini says. Her new company Mightybell, which is launching a limited public beta test Thursday, lets users post experiences and goals that others can achieve by completing a series of steps.
Bianchini says.
“Not that online conversations are not important.”
But her company was interested in a different question–”what are the social dynamics that motivate people toward action?” she says.
Say someone has taken an exotic trip, one that requires special preparations. Mightybell’s mobile app and a website are designed to let that person break up those preparations into specific actions–like buying foul-weather clothing or unusual equipment–that can be spiced up with photos, videos, maps and other information. Interested users can go about completing those steps, posting comments about their progress and other observations that may lead to interactions with others using Mightybell.
Besides inspiring followers of such projects, Bianchini hopes that the company will motivate people attempting to start them by providing an array of valuable statistics about the people who are attempting to complete various tasks.
Bianchini has shown an ability to attract attention. For example, she landed on the cover of Fast Company magazine during Ning’s heyday, in an article that also featured the firm’s co-founder and venture-capital backer Marc Andreessen. The closely held company, founded in 2004, calls itself the world’s largest platform for creating social websites, hosting many such offerings on its own servers.
Not long after Bianchini’s exit, however, the company laid off 40% of its workforce and modified its strategy to emphasize paid accounts over free ones.
Bianchini says she has had nothing to do with Ning since she was replaced as CEO, and has mainly been “laying low” in Palo Alto, Calif., developing the ideas behind Mightybell. The company has just nine employees, but has raised $2.1 million from Floodgate and First Round Capital.
COMMENTARY: What a cool idea: A mixture of crowdsourcing and gaming. Mightybell is really project management turned into a game. Like in a typical project management model, projects or goals (called Experiences) are broken down into a series of tasks that need to be performed in order to complete the project. The game players or followers are each asked to perferm a specific "task" as part of completing the project or "experience".
Gina has also introduced a viable revenue model, the Premium Experience. Mightybell describes Premium Experiences as follows:
By choosing to make your Mightybell Experience premium, you are asking people to pay to access your new Experience before they can see the first step or action.
How can you use Premium Experiences?
1. If you have valuable expertise around a topic or a a successful plan or regiment towards a goal others may have, people may want to pay for that. You will find out by using Premium Experiences.
2. If you have a cause or are a non-profit, prompting people to donate in exchange for access to following your progress step-by-step, set-by-set, day-by-day has the potential to be compelling. Imagine being able to have your friends, family, fans, and followers watch how you’re training for a marathon or preparing for a mission to Africa.
Those are just a few ideas. We are looking forward to seeing how people use this feature offered on Mightybell. It’s only limited by your creativity within the boundaries of, well, the law and what you agree to in our Terms of Service.
How much an individual could charge largely depends on your experience, reputation and noteriety. If you are a celebrity or athlete it could drive a lot of interest. If Lady Gaga wants ideas for a new costume she could wear to attend the Grammys, she could ask designers of hats, dresses, jewelery, accessories and shoes to submit ideas for each task. They might be asked to poney up $1000 for the privelege. Mightybell gets 30% and Lady Gaga keeps the remaining 70%, which could go to charity. Lady Gaga could even offer a reward or bonus for the best ideas to complete a task.
More than likely, game players for a Premium Experience will probably pay a very nominal amount, let's say somewhere between $5 to $25 to encourage game players.
I have Gina Bianchini in my blog before, and the fact that Gina was able to raise venture capital from Floodgate and First Round Capital indicates that the revenue potential could be significant.
Here's Gina at TEDxNYED:
Here's another video of her being interviewed for MipTalk:
Floodgate provides venture capital, management and mentoring for digital technology startups at a very high level. They have helped fund Twitter, Digg, Socialware, IMVU, formspring.me, Circle of Moms, BranchOut, Chegg, togetherville, all startups that I have profiled on my blog.
First Round Capital is a seed stage investor in digital technology startups. They helped fund adkeeper, foodzie, HomeRun, KidZui, Mint, RockMelt, Stumbleupon, Swipely, UberMedia, all startups that I have profiled on my blog.
Still deciding if I want to poney that $1.00 to test drive Mightybell.
Courtesy of an article dated September 9, 2011 appearing in The Wall Street Journal
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