Mingle

As of yesterday, we have officially closed Mingle. The app is now removed from the all the app stores and all web services and servers have been shut down.

Will, James and I (Andy) have partnered with another developer, Austin, to develop a pretty neat app called Ikea Now. 

It’s a mobile app that allows shoppers to preview furniture in their homes before they buy using augmented reality.

itunes.apple.com/us/app/ikea-now/id552805870?mt=8

We launched it 2 months ago as an experiment but now have over 150,000 downloads from more than 100 countries. We might be onto something so we’re expanding…

…the next update we’ll be changing the name to Furnish and incorporating other retailers starting with Crate & Barrel. Other retailers are coming soon.

Stay tuned and follow us at www.thefurnishapp.com and @thefurnishapp

Thank you for your continued support!!!!

Mingle was started in April of 2011 as solution to find an accountant at my local Costco.

Well, not just specifically for that.

Professional networking was archaic, confined and not spontaneous. In the age of mobile devices, GPS and Foursquare, it was clear that the technology and culture was now advanced enough to change the landscape of professional networking.

We were going to lead the charge. And we did.

In the next 14 months, my two co-founders and I secured a small angel round, left our stable jobs and ventured into a journey summarized by airport lounges, red bull, dry erase boards and our devices.

We created a wonderful community of tens of thousands of professionals from over 110 countries. We helped people find jobs, hire employees and even discover love (those two Mingle lovebirds are now engaged).

However, we were unable to figure out how to grow Mingle at a pace required to secure more funding or even to implement a revenue model. We evolved the product as much as possible to help us get closer to the growth formula but it was clear that it we didn’t get much closer so we were left to make a difficult decision.

On December 31st, 2012, Mingle will unfortunately be shut down.

We cannot thank our investors, advisors, team members and most of all, our users enough in believing our product, abilities and standing by the belief that professional networking was ready to be disrupted.

It still is. When we started this journey, we were the first ones. Today, there are many so we believe that someone will find the path to change business networking forever. We’re just sad that it won’t be us.

The Mingle team will move on. Here are some interesting projects that we’re involved in now:

1. Ikea Now/Furnish - http://www.thefurnishapp.com / https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ikea-now/id552805870?mt=8
2. Live Nation - http://www.livenation.com
3. Life 360 - http://www.life360.com / https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/life360-family-locator/id384830320?mt=8

Thank you again for all your support and we’ll be seeing you around.

Questions, comments? - support@minglesocialapp.com

Note: All user data will be deleted on Dec. 31st, 2012. Reselling personal data isn’t cool.

Update 1: We have received hundreds of messages of continuous support and love.  We thank every user for this support. We really did have the best community around.

Hi everybody,

Our apologies for users that are experiencing app crashes when trying to access your settings. We believe we’ve got a fix in place that’s working its way through testing.  We plan on wrapping the new version up and submitting to Apple for approval by the end of the week.  We believe this problem is isolated to only the users that registered an account via LinkedIn. If you do not fall under that umbrella and are experiencing app crashes please reach out to us at support@minglesocialapp.com and we’ll get right on that.

Thanks,

Mingle

Wow, our team is on a roll. Our resident node guru, Atsuya, recently created a new nyan reporter with positive results. If TJ likes it so should you. Check it out.

We’re very proud to announce that one of our own was a part of the winning team for the Lean Startup LA meet up that happened this past weekend. They are now heading to Angel Hack this weekend to fry bigger fish.  Good luck James!

Download the latest iOS release. This version fixes the nasty LinkedIn and Facebook registration bugs that prevented our new users from joining Mingle.  Sorry about that!

We also changed the navigation to feature Video Intros more prominently.

With half of our team in West LA and the other half down in Irvine, it’s not often we meet up. So a few days ago, Will & I went up and got the team together for some Korean food and beer.

The place is called Dan Sung Sa.

We were probably the nerdiest table at that place. Product discussions, coding challenges and interface improvements was pretty much all we talked about. It was awesome.

(L to R) Will, James, Charlie, Atsuya

(L to R) Me, James, Charlie, Atsuya, Will

We are working our butts off to bring our community the best tools to meet professionals anywhere. Great things to come!

In the off chance you’re getting the following message while attempting to install postgresql on your mac running lion.

su: no directory

when running this command

‘sudo su - postgres’

 after you’ve installed postgresql server via macports and initialized the database, etc. What worked for me is uninstalling postgresql server, running the following command and then restarting my machine

sudo dscl . -delete /Users/_postgres

After reboot, went through the same exact motions for installing postgresql server on my machine and everything went as expected.

One of the latest features we’ve recently added to the iOS version is support for recording a video intro. Initially we’re capping it at 10 seconds as we felt that it would keep you on point and focused.

Download the latest iOS release.

FYI, we’re aware of some bugs that snuck their way into this iOS release so hold on tight as we already have a fix waiting for App Store approval. We anticipate it being approved and released later this week.

Have faith Android users, we’re rolling this feature out to Android users faster than you can figure out how to spell the winning word for this year’s national spelling bee in San Diego, “guetapens”.

It has been a long time since our last post and much has happened since but only one thing matters: Mingle is growing.

Every month, Apple has featured Mingle: New & Newsworthy (August), What’s Hot (October) and Staff Favorites (October).

We have over 26,000 downloads and there are no signs of slowing down. We’ve released close to 15 updates since and prepping our largest update yet. It’s going to be awesome…

And today marks a new chapter in the Mingle journey: we now have an office. It’s a dedicated shared space but its absolutely gorgeous and we thank the people @ LBTEC for their awesome support, Ali, Scott and Eric. Thanks guys.

Last but not least, here are some pictures. Come by if you’re ever in Downtown Long Beach!

Last but not least, our patio…

We just submitted a build to the App Store for review.  This version contains some improvements to the initial introduction flow as well as some fixes that should help with the app crashes that you all have been seeing. The big feature that we’ve included in this release is support for logging into Mingle with a LinkedIn account or just creating your own Mingle account. Every app crash email that we get pains us to no end and we just want you all to know that. We do in fact look at every email sent to us.  We’re moving as fast as we can in addition to balancing that age old high wire act of including bug fixes as well as new features.  Thank you for patience!

The past 2 weeks have been a blur. It all started when…

2 random Apple employees introduced themselves at the same cafe on campus. Not at the same time but when the 2nd employee introduced himself, he saw that someone else was there before…someone he didn’t know. 

Long story short, we were featured as “new and newsworthy” then moved over to “what’s hot” and has been there ever since.

20k downloads, 9k users & 40k messages later, we just got featured on Mashable. Tonight. Which spread to Business Insider. Then to the Wall Street Journal. Although it was just the automated link sharing originating from Mashable, it still felt good to see our team’s efforts be captured w/ thoughtful words. Here’s the article:

http://mashable.com/2011/08/29/mingle/

The community feedback has be amazing. We’ve learned so much in terms of what was working and what wasn’t. We’ve been working around the clock to provide the best and natural way to meet those around you. In some divine scheduling, we also just got our huge update approved today just in time for the surge. That helped.

What’s clear is that the race has only just begun. It won’t be a sprint but a fun, passion-filled marathon. 

We experienced some brief downtime due to poor planning on my part.  We should be good now and all systems are go.  Carry on minglers!

Hey guys, this weekend we released a new update but it broken the messaging system. BUT we’re happy to tell you that its now fixed! Mingle Away!

Colored me impressed.  We submitted this latest update on Wednesday and it’s up in the App Store today.  Apple you have not ceased to amaze me.

iPhone version 1.1 just hit the app store! Download and install ASAP. This version surfaces minglers nearby as well as shows you who’s been there. We also threw in some bug fixes because nobody likes app crashes.

Mingle! iPhone version 1.0 just hit the App Store today and we’ve got another major update queued up and submitted to the App Store for approval.  It would have been an hour ago but we hit an annoying snag.

“Invalid binary”

When I saw that I thought to myself, “Murphy’s law”.  I’ve never seen that or ever experienced it before.  We typically generate 3 different build targets so I thought just maybe XCode was confused.  After an hour of fiddling around with provisioning profiles, cleaning the project multiple times, playing with settings, etc.  Guess what the root cause was?  It was an innocent change to the App ID, enable iCloud.  So I must have missed the warning label somewhere or didn’t put 2 and 2 together and realized that if iOS5 isn’t in the wild yet iCloud would wreak havoc on all things that I know to be true.  Anyways, if you ever come across “invalid binary” upon constant resubmission to the App Store double check that iCloud is “not” enabled.

http://cl.ly/0g3x1y233I2g0N0l1t1t

Mingle submitted to the app store…BOOM. #startup #hopingitgetsthroughthe1sttime

Some say you can really see the quality, depth & passion of your team during the final lap. In that case, our team is second to none. It’s absolutely amazing when you get a couple guys that are so aligned in their single-mindedness to do one simple task: deliver. 

We have an internal dev MVP build completion slated for this Thursday. Of course, continuous tweeks will be coming but its beyond any doubt that we’ll have something unbelievably solid in 2 days. Truth is, the latest dev build is the best yet and worthy of the public but we definitely want to put our best foot forward.

A couple things I’ve noticed that helps in creating an well-oiled teamwork environment that would make any swiss watch jealous.

1. Love what you’re doing - It’s important to build a team that’s driven by personal goals and passion. The only way a product will have a chance of success is if every member needs to eat, live and breathe their portion of the product. Passion can burn 5-6 hours in a beat and it often drives people in being the best in their expertise. That’s extremely important.

2. Defined roles - The same way each position in a basketball team has a purpose, your team should too. If Kobe Bryant was allowed to play any position he wants, there would be no team chemistry. By clearly defining who owns what, efficiency becomes the norm.

3. Communication - A team can consist of the most talented and passionate developers but without clear communication, all is null. Every team member needs to be heard. Even the quiet ones. By allowing each member to exercise their voice and opinions, this opens the door to true team dynamics. However, this could also lead to noise if there is no singular vision…which leads to my final point.

4. A single vision - Whether its a milestone, product release or any other deliverable, it’s important that the team is fully aware of what that immediate goal & vision is. Without having this, free discussions can be a tedious breeding ground for bruised egos and other team suffocating diseases.

So if you’re about to create a team for a new awesome product, remember the points above and before you’ll know it, you’ll have a product release date set. 

And we’re live! Just the website that is.

http://www.minglesocialapp.com/

The Mingle iPhone app is coming in a few days so stay tuned :)

“What?! He’s doing what with who?!”

Social networking and privacy has always been the yin & yang of the web. Too much privacy controls defeats the purpose of easily sharing social information. On the flip side, complete social transparency leads to unfortunate firings, breakups or stalkings. 

Facebook is too familiar with this delicate balance of forces. Under their unpublished mantra of “Innovate & ask for forgiveness later”, they have released a bevy of social features. Sure, they’ve been on the receiving end of relentless attacks but look at their numbers. Over 600 million members and climbing.

Adam Mosseri of Facebook gave a talk at last year’s UX Week about the data principles that drive new features, called “Data informed, not data driven”. He talks about how important analytics & feedback are to their product team but that data helps evolutionary & incremental growth and revolutionary growth cannot stem from it. (Here’s the link to the must-watch video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKZiXAFeBeY)

I’m actually a believer of Facebook’s product principles and have always believed that most times, users won’t realize how much they need a new product.

But that mindset cannot be migrated to hyper-local social networking. 

When it comes to a hyper-local context of social networking, privacy is an absolute must. When users are no longer protected behind their monitors in the confines of their own homes, stupid messages or creepy people can instigate harmful physical consequences. 

Startups like Mingle that are building products for the hyper-local social niche must build products with privacy controls. And they also bear the responsibility to make it immensely easy to use so users would actually use it. What good is it to build out an impressive privacy feature set only to have nobody use it because its a pain? 

However, we cannot build something completely idiot-proof. If someone decides to leverage any product to reveal everything, well, good luck dude. 

We here at Mingle, believe that privacy could be fun. We made sure its built into the fundamental layer of Mingle so well that it doesn’t even feel like its part of the privacy feature. We are building to provide social value while providing a safer way about it. 

Whether its Mingle or any other of our fellow startups, privacy needs to be implemented in a fun & frictionless manner. And yes, that can be done. Our users need it. We need to keep them as safe as possible. 

Our team of 3 has been working feverishly around the clock to bring private alpha version of Mingle! Mingle is definitely going to shake up some waters…