One Week Out

One week from today, Mpayy officially opens its doors to the public, and the new standard in payments begin. One of the original purposes of this blog is to give a behind the scenes view of operating at the startup phase of a new technology company. Today, we will open the kimono a little bit, and provide some of the exciting ways Mpayy will establish relationships with YOU, our soon to be members.

• (Up to) $25,000 Bracket Challenge - In discussions about our target demographic, Mpayy expects our Members to be 18-45, skewing toward tech savvy, who use their phones to access Sports, Weather, Stock and Video Game content, primarily. Participants in Fantasy Sports are of unique interest because of the frequency with which they plug in to check their statistics. Certainly, our product is particularly useful for any of the 80 million Americans rolling balances on their credit cards, because interest begins burning at the moment of purchase for those card-holders. However, our expectation is that our Members will skew toward higher incomes.



• The Widgetization of Mpayy - Last December, I discussed here the New York Times new "MyTimes" page that allows users to include their own content on their page. The most unique one I like a lot is having the movies pre-filtered to my preferred local theaters. However, in one week, Mpayy will bring a truly integrated, secure payment widget to facebook, Yahoo, iGoogle, NetVibes, Vista, Mac OS X, etc. Mpayy expects this will be incredibly useful for i) charity associations accepting contributions through their facebook pages - Darfur Now for instance; ii) individual pledges for fundraising; iii) and just paying your friends. Further, given the number of businesses focusing on facebook, our payment widget will open the door to unrestrained commerce, and facebook has clear potential to compete with eBay, especially in light of the number of users and frequency of use by each. Lots of merchandise can move through this venue.
  
  



• Marketing, PR & Sales - We met with a PR firm recently to discuss potential engagement. It's an interesting conundrum. Any impassioned marketer will tell you that it doesn't matter how much better your mousetrap is if no one knows who you are. We'll pursue a strategy that attempts to get coverage within publications of a number of constituencies from tech geeks to payment wonks and everywhere in between. We'll pursue a mix of search engine and display marketing, and lean heavily on word of mouth campaigns, promotions, and a few launch parties, the first of which is here in Chicago on January 30th.

It's an exciting time, and it's starting to heat up.

Get ready for the new payments standard. INSIST on Mpayy!