influAds blog

During the last couple of weeks we have been working with a new member on the team: José is the new co-founder / CTO of InfluAds. He will lead all efforts related to our technology and platform development (big stuff happening next months, subscribe our newsletter to be on the loop).

José has some great experience working in one of the hottest and most international Web Startups in Portugal doing SaaS for hospitality, prior to that Jose worked with the biggest Portuguese ISP developing a textual ad platform.

Feel free to check his blog at josedasilva.net and to say Hi on twitter @josedasilva.

We’re freaking thrilled to start building a team around this quality level.

Welcome dude!

One of the first concept iterations of what became InfluAds is now launching as the Work & Productivity community,where we expect to have sites & apps offering tools that are mostly used by professionals using the web.

We want to promote a free web where some apps can be free. We believe that Freemium and other paid models have a lot of good aspects but we also believe that concept and pricing strategy can benefit from new alternatives.

The idea is that some sites may be able to offer their services for free, by placing one simple ad in their site. Evernote, GrooveShark and NetworkHippo are a few of the ones that currently do this on their free accounts. We are just focusing on tools that can be used in professional contexts. We carefully curate our members (publishers) and specially advertisers to make sure that defined context is premium toward unique benefit to the end user.

Web users
Users will be able to enjoy more tools for free. They are targeted by one simple an unobtrusive ad that is very relevant to them.

Advertisers
Because we carefully curate the apps that are part of the community, advertisers can use this community to engage with an highly relevant audience that is curated by the environment where they are placed. If some users use some web tools on professional contexts they will be more likely to engage with other interesting offers that may make their life easier.

Community members
Apps can benefit from an ad-sponsored model while supplying free services to their audience. We welcome any kind of app like web or mac based, and we take care of recruiting advertisers so you don’t have to.

We can benefit app owners in different contexts:

Support free plans in freemium-based models

Supporting some costs associated with free plans on freemium-based models. Improving conversion rates by allowing more engagement until the user is ready to pay.

Offer services for free trough an ad-sponsored model

Being involved in a Advertising Network that focus on the specific needs of this kinds of apps, maximizing sales  trough dedicated sales efforts and community influence

Early-stage concepts

We can also help early-stage concepts to achieve some critical size, since we won’t require a minimum size to join. This allow small sized concepts to grow revenue alongside their organic growth, something that is usually difficult to do without reaching critical mass.

We are now welcoming applicants for the community. If you are interested, feel free to email us introducing your concept. Our interaction is usually quite lean so expect a quick answer.

April brings some new advertisers on board. We have been seeing some awesome products and services out there and are looking forward to welcome the second batch of advertisers.

New advertisers will be announced very soon.

Freshbooks is a reference tool for time and invoicing. We are proud to have them trying our service since it validates some of the interest we have got in our disruptive model.

Kissmetrics is trying to give more power to online concepts, trough simple but actionable metrics that allow you to track conversion metrics and better if your Marketing budget is worth it value.

Scrumd is driving Agile practices into Project Management in a simple yet powerful user experience.

Zerigo is one of those small companies that give meaningful alternatives to incumbents. They are a hosting company with innovative services and a user interface that doesn’t suck.

Flux (by theExcapers) is a Web Development IDE for mac. Mac users should get acquainted with these guys since the experts say that “Flux really is the Dreamweaver killer.”

…and from March, still with us are Wistia, Invoic€xpress and AskYourTargetMarket.

Thank you to our awesome advertisers. He hope to match your expectations.

Interested in joining us? We understand that your business and your advertising needs are special.  Email us at info@influads.com so work together toward fulfilling your objectives.

Starting April 1st, we welcome some new members

Startups & Entrepreneurs

The Startup Diggest is a weekly newsletter sending emails to keep you updated on which events are happening in major cities around the world. A great concept that everybody interested in startups should join.

Ash Maurya’s blog has been introduced some interesting practical cases on Lean Startups. A nice complement to the existing Lean Startup movement.

47Hats is a blog helping microISVs and startups succeed. From the same author, the Startup Podcast is also joining us.

The Daily MBA is an interesting blog giving tidbits of relevant management content that’s very useful for Startups.

Design and UX

Poolga is an interesting concept showcasing creative/artistic background images for iPhones and iPads. Visit them and pimp your iMania with some artistic flavour.

90% of Everything is a new addition to the User Experience gang.

Work & Productivity is one of the new communities. With a few member yet, we are aiming at web tools that provide valuable members to professionals using the web. Task.ly, a task manager still in beta, Rescue Time joining us to support their free plans, Tgther (a email-based collaboration tools) and some others to be announced soon.

We end up leaving many other members since it’s impossible to mention them all. Browse around and pay them a visit.

Welcome guys and girls. Most of these members are just our favourite stuff happening on the web and we are very lucky on having them partnering with us.

We have been approached by different people asking if they are too small to join InfluAds. Well, the answer is NO, we are not a network reserved for the big kahunas.

Even so, there are some key conditions to joining regarding our one and only objective: to have a premium community with extreme focus on quality.

Focus on the topics of a specific community

You should cover the topic of the community that you are interested in, and you should provide some degree of content relevancy and quality to that community. Content doesn’t need to be 100% original, but we usually require some self-content, since that drives valuable following audiences.

Have minimum traction

We don’t expect you to have 100K visitors per month. In fact, we don’t care if you are a small blogger in some rural part of Wyoming. You can join us if you have what’s described above, even if you have a small and local audience, because this will allow us time to reach more individual users. Having said this, there is a minimum threshold on size, which is usually associated with engagement with a community.

Are you considering InfluAds?

Email us today. We answer quickly and we’d like to keep an open communication with you. If you are in doubt, there is nothing like a short email to clarify.

In the following days we’ll do some changes to our site to reflect that, including an FAQ.

We are quite excited with our new communities, starting April 1st

Web Development (Launching April 1st)

We believe that this community can draw relevant content to an web developer audience, while removing the usual clutter associated with advertising from very good websites. We hope to have great blogs and apps delivering awesome content and value proposition to their follower audience.

We will have some more members in the upcoming days, but meanwhile feel free to check the current members on this community.

Work & Productivity (Launching April 1st)

This community will target mainly apps that are either totally free or have ad-sponsored plans. We aim at targeting an highly relevant audience that uses them mainly for professional reasons.

We will have some more members in the upcoming days, but meanwhile feel free to check the current members on this community.

eMarketing (Launch TBD)

This community will target blogs talking about topics around eMarketing. Launch is to be defined as soon as we have some critical mass to announce.

Design Culture (Launch TBD)

We have seen different types of sites around design and we decided to create a new community that takes broad design skills, keeping Design & UX for Digital design.

We are now closing in on our launch this Saturday. Since day one we knew that we wanted some cool advertisers on board, and every single one of the current ones qualify as awesome. Thanks for the

Flowtown is putting a new meaning into social marketing. (@flowtown).

Kissmetrics is a simple, metric-driven tool that allows you to optimize the way online conversions (@kissmetrics).

Harvest is a simple and intuitive expense tracking and invoicing system (@harvest).

Ask Your Target Market is a market research tool focusing better information trough engaging internet surveys (@AskYourTrgtMrkt)

threadsy is a coll new messaging tool launching in beta (@threadsy)

Newsberry is simple email Marketing tool focused on high volume senders (@newsberry).

In the following days, we’ll close a couple of deals in some diverse areas. Get in touch if you want to grant one of the last available spots.

We decided to start advertising a couple of humanitarian causes working on Haiti.

Since we have to setup our ads across our member’s websites, fix any detected issue and prepare for scale, we decided to start do it earlier and with some humanitarian causes.

We started with Doctors Without Borders but will add a couple more along time. Feel free to suggest one to our consideration.

Awesome feedback and interaction with clients, prospects and friends have been producing tons of good thinking about InfluAds.

In some cases they give us priceless tips. In some others, they argue against our foundational believes and make us think harder to defend and communicate them better and clearly. Kudos for all those that have been supportive trough  critically thinking trough our concept.

We are now focusing on making our communication to the point: ads can engage more with their audience. That is our distinctive factor and it is better reflected in our slogan and key communication.

We base our beliefs on 5 pillars: simplicity, endorsement, meaning, influence and reach (more on that later).

And that’s why we have been chatting about the “cold” value of impressions and clicks when considering our ads. We believe that our concept is the @garyvee of Advertising. We believe display ads can be engaging, can bean communication medium that goes both ways and that needs to be more involved with their follower audience.

Like in any form of communication, the surrounding environment influences how the ad is perceived and how interaction happens: that’s why we carefully curate our members and advertisers, creating an environment where the community respects the ads being displayed there (instead of ignoring them).

We believe that user’s attention should not be split by 10 different ads: that’s why we have only one ad per page. We believe that communication doesn’t need to be done shouting out loud and that’s why we don’t accept animations or flash. More, we believe that a smaller ad can be as effective as a big one when contextualized correctly.

InfluAds is and will continue to work on building a “Better Advertising trough engagement & meaning”.

We strongly believe that a context, that is by it essence facilitating the user experience trough simplicity, is not stopping effective advertisement. Let’s face it, advertisers do not need impressions or big ads: They need full conversions. We truly believe that by focusing on a context of quality throughout the experience funnel will make the last steps of conversion easier (click, product experience and buy-in).

Inspired by Zappos and so many other great examples we are learning how to grow while focusing on what’s really important.

Our values drafted:

• Be happy, have a lott’a fun
• Be open
• Be reasonable
• Be humble
• Be restless
• Be Inspirable
• Build Ethical Trust
• Maximize value all users, publishers and advertisers

Hey @zappos, I’m pretty sure you wont mind about some inspiration ;-) PS: Weirdness is genetic already…