Updates on YongoPal

Things have been busy, and I haven’t had the attention capacity to blog much.  I just wanted to give a really brief update on what’s been going on at YongoPal over the last month, or so.

• About a month ago Jon and I invited a friend of ours, Daron Hall, to join our team as our UX/UI Design Lead.  Aside from making tweaks in the scheduling application to simplify and improve the user-experience and contributing graphic design work, he carried the lead on specifying our new Partner Portal.
• The YongoPal Partner Portal has been fully designed and mapped out, and development will begin by early next week.  This tool will allow our partners, both institutional and individual, to track revenues and commissions originating from students whom they have referred.  It’s designed to be extremely flexible, so the terms of each partnership can be negotiated individually, and it will play a critical role in driving early revenues.
• This week, the YongoPal scheduling application is finally being in-housed.  Support My Web will make the final fixes, we’ll be able to upload our content, and hopefully we’ll be populating the site with conversation partners in the next two weeks.
• This week we’ve been interviewing applicants for an internship we’ve made available.  Applicants have all been native Koreans, mostly on F-1 student visas, since we’re trying to find someone we can use to copyedit Korean language web content and handle customer service correspondence after we launch.
• I’ve begun work on a business plan that we may try to take to competition in the spring.  While we have made it our express intention to bootstrap this entire business from the ground up, the development delays have set us back in our goals somewhat dramatically.  We’ve realized we should, at the very least, plan for the possibility of having to raise money down the road and that now is a much better time to get started with those preparations than post-launch, when we’ll have customer service to contend with.
• I’ve been making contact with potential partners, trying to generate interest, though it seems that most are withholding their enthusiasm until we have a populated site to demo.  I’m hoping we can have a few locked down before the end of January.

Everyone is feeling really energized this month.  We are entering an incredible market with a unique, and directly monetized, service to meet a clear demand.  We have an intuitive new web tool, an incredibly solid team, and a clear plan of action for meeting our revenue goals.  We’ve also managed to accomplish everything, up to this point, on a budget of under $10,000.  Something tells me that 2010 is going to be a great year for YongoPal!