Monday, February 28, 2011

A late February update


February
Well, it has been a while since I have written. Things here are plodding along and there has not been anything in particular that seemed worth writing about. We are settling into a nice rut...I mean routine.

People continue to buy the app, followers follow us on Twitter, and Facebook users "like" us every day. (We have over 8100 Twitter followers and over 3500 Facebook fans.)

Lyle and I both check sales each day and, although we wish they were growing faster, we are excited when a new country shows up on our list of buyers. Our fantasy of "things going viral" in the first 2 months has waned, but we are hopeful that a little work every day will still get us where we need to be.


Amid this "lull' in SoDunked! excitement (how can an app with an exclamation point in its name NOT be exciting all the time?), I try to find interesting people to dunk and post to Twitter. Do we dare to dunk public figures like Gaddafi or Madoff? Should we dunk the radar image of a looming typhoon or the mugshot of a hollywood celebrity? In the course of this quest for a good dunkee, I have "discovered" the Wikimedia Commons--a resource for images that (mostly) are in the public domain and can be reproduced and modified for uses such as putting someone's face in the SoDunked! app and posting the resulting dunkee to Twitter or Facebook. There are very few good places around the web where you can quickly find an image--for free--that has its provenance detailed clearly and the photographer's wishes for its use right there in plain language.

That is really all there is to report. As entrepreneurial ventures go, things feel pretty snoozy and boring, but that can be--from what I hear around the entrepreneurs' water cooler--part of the deal. We are learning that patience and perseverance are just as important as a good product and marketing strategy.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Who would you dunk today?

We at Sodunked! think that all occasions produce someone or something worth dunking. However, today amid the crazy amount of precipitation and loads of work, Lyle and I cannot decide who to dunk next.

We live in a part of the United States that is currently cold and raining ice on top of seemingly constant snow since the end of December. I like snow in winter, but in the city we quickly run out of places to put it. Lyle would like summer to begin NOW.  

We have been dunking our snow-covered cars, the icy sidewalk, and the shovel a lot. We have dunked Old Man Winter. We could dunk Mother Nature but we are a little nervous she will get us back worse. Maybe we should dunk a groundhog, maybe Punxsutawney Phil—the most famous U.S. groundhog (he lives in the town of Punxsutawney in Pennsylvania)—who did not see his shadow this morning and, so the wisdom goes, predicts there will be an early spring (but I do NOT believe him).

Who do you think we should we dunk? Who are you dunking?
 
To anyone celebrating the return of sunlight to the Northern Hemisphere or the many holidays during early February and to everyone, may this be a hopeful time. But, for when you just need to let out your frustration, go dunk someone!

For anyone who follows Punxsutawney Phil's advice, visit the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club web site or see a video of today’s prediction. For more about Groundhog Day, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day.


Mother Nature
Please tell everyone you know to get SoDunked! and don't forget to enter the contest to be eligible for a $100 iTunes giftcard.

Note: Images used here today are all part of the Wikimedia Commons with full re-usage rights: Mother Nature’s face from a photo by Bibi Saint-Pol of a ca. 200-250 C.E. floor mosaic in Umbria, Italy, Old Man Winter created by Etamme as a label for a home brewed winter brown ale, and a groundhog photo from user R6MaY89.