Evidente. El Mercado de Predicción

Achieving “market” participation without incentives.  A personal experience.

Evidente.com launched what we called a Private Beta to allow a first interaction of a few selected users inside our platform. We closed on the 10th of June.

Our results where mixed. I wanted to share a brief explanation and follow up of the good the bad and the ugly of what we experienced over these past 2 weeks.

The Good:
•    We finally where able to try out the platform in real terms with real people and in real time.
•    The mechanics behind it are correct and the operations of the DB work fine.
•    The general look and feel got a thumbs up.
•    We learned how much effort it really takes to make people focus their attention for more than 5 minutes straight on one single aspect of our platform.
•    There’s no substitute to finally jump into the cold water to learn how to swim.

The Bad
•    Even as I could say there isn’t a BAD really BAD thing about our experience I could point out that:
•    We need to work hard on the “usability” of the markets
•    We took for granted things we never should have. We missed having clear  “titles” of the objects within.
•    The market dynamics are still a bit slow and we are working on allowing the users a more simple step to buy or sell contracts with a “one touch” or “buy it now” approach.

The Ugly
•    Market participation wasn’t as expected. We hoped to have at least 400 users on our initial Private Beta but people seemed to be a bit more distracted on other issues.
•    The speed of download needs to be improved dramatically and we are working on improving and optimizing the procedures and hopefully in a near future the servers structure.

We are learning and moving fast especially in the days to come as we continue to pay attention to details and focus on market usability. We have the right team and energy levels are high as to keep on moving.

A quick link that will fuel you in the morning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yetHqWODp0

Stay tuned.