When we started working on Network Hippo we had a core vision: to help people build stronger professional relationships.

Over the last year we’ve experimented with different designs, new features, building a platform, CRM tools, and various other “add-ons” to increase the value to our users.  We’ve had a lot of positive feedback with each change we’ve implemented, but I think we’ve continued to miss the mark and may have wandered too much from our core vision.

Over the summer we’ve been going through a very cathartic exercise of stripping down everything we’ve done and rebuilding it with the sole focus of helping people build stronger professional relationships.  It’s been a long process, but we learned a lot, and I think are emerging much stronger.

Next week will mark an important new chapter in the evolution of Network Hippo. We are making some major changes to the application that will dramatically improve the usability and the value of the service.  More importantly, it will significantly increase the power and effectiveness of your professional network.

We know that some users will not be happy with some of the features that we’ve removed from the application.  We’re really sorry.  Your support – many of you from the beginning – has been our main source of motivation in continuing to work on and develop Network Hippo.  But ultimately we felt our product lacked a clear vision and purpose, and the need for a better professional networking application became more evident as we engaged more users.

We’re hopeful that many of you – and future users – will benefit from a more focused, more powerful service.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about the experience we’ve gone through, why we made the decisions we did, and our vision for the future of Network Hippo.

Below is a preview of the new Network Hippo homepage.

Last week I was guest on Jason Calacanis’ show This Week in Startups (TWiST) where I pitched Network Hippo.  It was a great experience and some excellent feedback from Jason and guest Tim Young.

As you’ll see from the video, I learned that 1 minute is a very short time to pitch, but I think I was able to generate enough interest to keep the discussion alive.

If you’re using Network Hippo and are in a small business or an entrepreneur, and you HAVEN’T been using sales management, you really need to check it out.  Effective sales management is very valuable to your business, and a great compliment to your Network Hippo account (oh, and its FREE)!

Tonight we’re launching a revamp of the sales management application (called DEALS) in Network Hippo to make it smarter and easier to use for small businesses.  I’ll be honest, I have mixed feelings about graphs and reports in CRM systems (more to come next week as we update the homepage!) as I am concerned that too much focus is placed on statistics and not enough on relationships.  HOWEVER, I do think that these new sexy graphs in the sales management section will help give people immediate feedback on their sales progress on a monthly basis.

So what’s changed?

Well, as I mentioned above, we’ve added some awesome new graphs on the DEALS homepage:

What do they mean?

We’ve added three key metrics:

1. Monthly Objective
   Set your monthly sales objective and Network Hippo will tell you how much more you need to sell this month to hit your target.  The area graph below will show you how well you are doing over the last three months.
2. Pipeline Health
   A pipeline represents the number of deals you have in each stage of the sales process.  Ideally you want to have a lot of deals at the top of the pipeline and as each prospective deal moves through the sales process, you have fewer until you get to close.  Too few “in the pipeline” and you may be scrambling in a few months.  Too few at the end of the pipeline and you may be scrambling now!
3. Active vs Stale deals
   This chart shows you how many of the deals in your pipeline have been active (there has been some kind of activity with the deal or the people involved) and how many are growing stale (that you should either follow-up on or kill).

Each of the metrics / graphs updates if you select other members in your team, so they are truly personal metrics (a major focus for us!) – but you can also see across the whole company.

We’ve also made the page easier to segment deals by sales stage and see rollup amounts for each of the stages.

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on how to improve the sales management features.  We still have more features to add (like smart search), and we’re committed to making it a simple powerful sales management app.

Next up: Homepage and a secret (but super powerful) new app!

But only for 48 hours…

Last Friday I was notified that Network Hippo was selected as one of twenty top Canadian startups to spend two days in Silicon Valley receiving mentorship from successful local (but Canadian) VC’s and entrepreneurs, pitching executives at Microsoft, Cisco, and EA, and the opportunity to pitch at the famous Plug & Play Expo. The event is sponsored by the C100 and the Canadian Consulate General in Silicon Valley.

We’re looking forward to spreading some Network Hippo love to the Valley.

About the C100

The C100 is comprised of a select group of Canadians based primarily in Silicon Valley, including executives of leading technology companies, experienced startup entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. C100 members are passionate about leveraging their collective experience, expertise and relationships to help mentor and grow a new generation of successful Canadian-led technology companies.

In 1956, Rubbermaid invented the Rolodex (the Rolling Index) and changed the way we stored people’s contact information forever in two ways:

1. Contact information had to fit on a 3×5 inch card
2. Contacts were organized by name (usually last name)

Over 50 years have passed and new technology has replaced the rolodex… and yet every contact management system continues to emulate the 3×5 contact card and displays everybody in alphabetical order… which makes sense if you have 100 contacts, but what if you have 5,000 or 20,000 contacts?  It doesn’t make much sense.

So Network Hippo has developed a new way to manage your contacts by helping you build smart groups that make it easy to segment your relationships based on concepts like “my friends”, “my mentors”, “people I want to hire”, or by using filters to create groups like “new contacts: people added in the last xx days / weeks”, “my customers: people with deals”, or “web contacts: people who filled out this form”.

Segmenting large contact lists makes it easier to find people, interact with them, and manage our expanding list of contacts.  Why is this important?  Because the internet (and email) has grown the number of people that we are “connected” to exponentially – making it harder to ensure that different types of relationships are getting the attention they deserve.

OK, I add people to different groups… now what?

Each group includes a “contact people in this group every…” with a choice of days or months.  Network Hippo uses this information as an average to make sure that you’re in contact with people in groups as often as you’d like to be – that way your relationships stay strong and focused.

Check out the smart groups at Network Hippo and begin actively managing your relationships today!

We’re launching a new, closed-version of Network Hippo for current users today. And we’re pretty excited about it.

The first version of Network Hippo was launched nearly 6 months ago and we learned a lot from several thousand users. Although we had a lot of very positive feedback (thanks!!!), we think we fell short in two very important areas that we have addressed with this new version of Network Hippo:

1. Organize my contacts
One of the primary motivations to creating Network Hippo was that so many contact managers and CRM systems did this so poorly. We wanted to make it easier to manage the thousands of people we’re connected to. Originally we focused on the strength and importance of our relationships – which we still think makes sense, but it lacks context and can be very manual to update. PLUS, we realized that our relationships change over time, and in different situations. So in this new version we’re focusing much more on “grouping” contacts in really smart ways (see next blog post for more on this). We think this is a much more effective way to manage contacts.

We’ve also added a smart search engine to make it easier to find people. We know its not *that* smart yet, but it’s getting much, much smarter everyday!

2. Personalization
Another primary motivation for us was that contact managers / CRM systems today were either too bloated or too simple.  We wanted to create an easy to use contact management system that did not require a user guide or “system admin”, but had more, smarter features for individuals and small businesses.  We still believe this.  The problem is that not everyone wants the same minimal features.  We learned that from (a lot of) users too (thank you again!!!).  So we’ve moved all of the non-contact management features into a “library” that you can choose to turn on or off.  This enables you to customize your Network Hippo for your specific needs.  PLUS, it enables us to speed up delivery of new features without affecting users who don’t want or need the new features.

So, What’s Next?

With this new version of Network Hippo the team is excited to focus on the core features (smarter contact management) and developing many more integrations with communication and business productivity platforms while building out the many new features that you have been requesting.

I hope you like the new version of NetworkHippo – we’re looking forward to receiving your feedback!

Yesterday we launched our new version of smart social networking contact management software at the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, California.

Check out the video here:

Check out this great film about how Network Hippo has infiltrated Sweden as the new “hero”.  Excellent production quality.

Thanks to everyone in Sweden – we love you too!

We are about to release a major new version of Network Hippo and we’ve been spending the last week in intense testing.

Just today I was testing the new (and dramatically improved) contact importer.  Although much smarter than the current contact importer, it imported my father as “dad” (maybe a little too smart) instead of by his real name.

I thought I would see how smart our web search was to see if it could find relevant information, even though the contact name was mislabeled.  Although it did pull up some relevant information, it really missed the mark on the twitter search and instead returned this tweet from @s**tmydadsays:

Although the search may not have been accurate, it’s good to see that Network Hippo has a sense of humor!

Last night I gave the presentation below on Network Hippo to a dynamic group of entrepreneurs & tech enthusiasts in Ottawa.  The event was organized by Sprouter.com – a great online community of Entrepreneurs.  It’s currently in closed beta, but leave a comment below if you want me to try to get you an invite.