This past Monday (February 8th) we officially launched. We setup partnerships with around 20 schools’ student governments around the country and had campus representatives at several others. Currently, we have over 10,000 registered users, almost 25,000 crushes sent, over 4,000 missed connections posted. We’ve been featured in half a dozen campus newspapers with more articles on the way and we sponsored two Valentine’s themed charity events.
One of the major highlights of this past week was our launch party this past Thursday (with a solid 200+ person turnout) – some pictures are on the blog (blog.goodcrush.com) and more will be added to our FB page (become a fan! Facebook.com/goodcrush). The other major highlight was being featured on TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/googlecrush-parisian-love/) for our “GoogleCrush.com – For those without Parisian love – powered by GoodCrush.com.” As you might guess, the website is the same as GoodCrush, but for Google employees. I haven’t checked the number of activated users since last night, but we were up to 21 at that point, including one match at an office in Europe!
Several of the schools we are partnering with had to delay their launches due to the blizzards of this past week and related logistical problems, so we are looking forward to the additional user-ship boost and pending media articles that are set to come out over the next week and month.
One of the most exciting and rewarding elements since launch have been the number of requests by students at other schools requesting/demanding GoodCrush to open up to their schools. We’ve currently received over 35 requests – including three since I began writing this blog post including one new partnership with a student government – in addition to three requests from international schools, one for the military from a soldier in Korea, and one from the company that hosts our website.
Outside users have created a music video, an instructional video, and as you may have noticed on our blog, someone (anonymously, fitting – no?) at UChicago [a school that we weren’t planning on launching at, but did setup a network for] started making posters for GoodCrush and putting them up around campus without our knowledge.
Our first test run with a user-requested school, Murray State, was a huge hit: http://www.thenews.org/features/playing-cupid-1.2151009. Conversations and newly made friendships with Joe, Gal, Trevor, Roger and other GoodCrush users, campus reps, and moderators have been an incredible source of motivation and excitement for our team.
The past few months we have been working on building an exciting offering with more than ‘just’ the Valentine’s Day CrushFinder – profiles, messaging, periodic updates to crushes, missed connections and more – to see if there is a universal demand for a/multiple solution(s) to the problem the CrushFinder initially aimed to address. My favorite feature is the double-blind messaging that registered users can have in reference to a missed connection. There is still a lot of room for improvement, innovation, and expansion on the current GoodCrush site, but it seems we’ve answered our initial test question and we’re excited to tackle the next few items on our checklist!
(Belated) Happy Valentine’s Day and an Update from GoodCrush!
