Pointless Corp » SpeakerRate

SpeakerRate Gets a Blog and an Intern

Brian Williams — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:04:24 +0000

If SpeakerRate is the Pointless Product you care about most, you certainly want to keep up on the new SpeakerRate blog. The primary author will be Zach Robbins, our summer intern focusing on product management. We’re working on some exciting ideas, and your input is always welcome!

SpeakerRate Internship Opportunity

Brian Williams — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:56:51 +0000

We love SpeakerRate and believe it has a ton of potential. That’s why we’re inviting an MBA intern to spend the summer working with us as to take SpeakerRate to the next level. We initially called it a “Product Management” role – which it is – but I prefer the “Future Web Entrepreneur” part of the title. As the job description states, the role reflects the life of a web entrepreneur – everything from customer support to community management to product design to developing a revenue strategy. You’ll work with Viget’s world-class UX, design, development, and marketing teams as we expand the success we’ve had with SpeakerRate thus far. You’ll gain experiences typically only available to someone who takes a ton of risk to build a product like this — all wrapped neatly into a 10 week internship.

This is not your typical MBA internship. Know someone who should apply? Please tell them about the opportunity or apply yourself!

SpeakerRate on ReadWriteWeb

Brian Williams — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:34:40 +0000

Rick at ReadWriteWeb has a good write-up about SpeakerRate. He sets up the reason why SpeakerRate exists really nicely with this intro:

If you’re a speaker, you know that standing in front of a crowd isn’t half as hard as getting critical feedback on your talks. People who disliked it will generally remain silent or opt for a snarky tweet or two. Those close to you will tell you “You did great!” no matter how poorly you performed. Getting the feedback you need to improve can be the most difficult part of the whole process.

Exactly.

While he liked the concept and UI, Rick found the LinkedIn validation step to feel a bit spammy, which is consistent with feedback we’ve been getting from other folks. I commented on his post to try to clarify (updates to your LinkedIn profile can be temporary — we aren’t begging for links / mentions on LinkedIn!) but suffice it to say we’re working on changes to that part of the process to make it less scary.

Keep the great feedback coming!

SpeakerRate, Now Open For Rating

Brian Williams — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:30:38 +0000

We posted recently about SpeakerRate, our first official Pointless Project. It was behind a private beta wall, and we invited in a small group of folks to provide feedback so we could make it better before releasing it to the world. Their feedback was great, and some of it was “why the wall?” For this kind of app, the wall seemed to really hinder the full experience.

The most obvious use case for SpeakerRate is this:

Speaker creates an account and adds her upcoming talk (if it’s not in there already — many are).
On the last slide of her presentation deck, Speaker adds something like: “So, how’d I do? Let me know at speakerrate.com/[username].”
Attendees go to speakerrate.com/[username], rate Speaker’s talk, and leave some constructive comments.
Speaker reads the comments and learns how she can give a better talk next time.

Pretty simple. The problem with the wall was that it blocked Step #3 above. So, down came the wall.

Good ideas and feedback continues to come in, which is helping us make SpeakerRate better. Keep it coming!

Introducing SpeakerRate

Brian Williams — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:46:05 +0000

Over the past few months — even before we formalized the concept of Pointless Corp. — we’ve been working here-and-there on a project called SpeakerRate. SpeakerRate is a community site for event speakers, attendees, and organizers. We’ve been all three of these at one point or another, and we felt that a site like SpeakerRate would be helpful for each role.

At SpeakerRate:

Event speakers can get valuable constructive feedback directly from attendees and find out how they can improve their content and delivery for their next talk. They can also establish a SpeakerRating, which will help them earn future speaking opportunities.
Event attendees can provide constructive feedback to speakers, track the talks they’ve attended, and research upcoming talks that they might attend.
Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they’ve given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they’re organizing.

We’ve used it for a few weeks at Viget while we worked out the kinks, loading in some 2008 event data and and a few ratings. One of the things I like about the concept is that it’s a community site that was immediately useful, even with a very small number of users. If it grows and more people are active, great — the value builds over time. But, unlike a lot of web start-ups, it doesn’t have the same “cold start” problem that many community sites have.

As of today, we’ve opened it up to a small group for more feedback and tire-kicking. If you’d like to check it out early, submit your email and we just might invite you in. Either way, expect to launch publicly in the next few weeks. Thanks for checking it out.