About a couple of months ago I was sitting down and thinking about one of the companies we have under Netccentric: ChurpChurp.
ChurpChurp’s a sister company of Nuffnang and has been around for the past 2 years. Just like what Nuffnang does for bloggers, ChurpChurp allows any social media user to share brand messages with their friends on Twitter and Facebook and get paid for it.
It’s run by a group of my colleagues who call themselves Churpies.
Which ironically is exactly what the ChurpChurp stuffed toy is called too.
ChurpChurp as a company on its own has been a commercial success. Something always bugged me about it though That maybe it does what its meant to do (help Facebookers and Twitterers earn money) well… and that’s just it. Nuffnang for example always focused on doing much more than just helping bloggers earn money from their blogs. We helped bring bloggers together through our events, we gave bloggers opportunities to review products, go on trips and collectively we helped promote the ecosystem of blogging.
Sure ChurpChurp has a vibrant community of users that always come out whenever we have an event.
But what else can we do?
I didn’t have the answer. Until the 5th of October 2011 came. That was the day Steve Jobs passed away. I spent the morning reading tributes to Steve Jobs, watching his interviews and reading about his life. I read about him creating the iPod and how Microsoft tried to compete with the iPod with the Zune. I can’t remember his exact quote but it was something along the lines of “Microsoft failed to come up with a product as good as the iPod because at Apple, we all really love music. We’re not building it for the sake of making money… but because we’re building a product we love”.
That’s when it hit me. That we need to make ChurpChurp a product that we all loved. So I sat in our brainstorm meeting room with the Churpies that day and asked them what they like. The objective was not to build a product that will sell a lot of advertising. No. The objective… was to build a product that we would all LOVE to use every day.
Finally we came up with this idea of discovery. The first wave of the internet was helping people find what they wanted to find on the internet. That’s how search became so powerful. Then came social networking which helped people stay in touch with each other. The third wave though, will be about discovery. Sites that help us find things we don’t know that we’re interested in but we don’t know we’re interested in it yet. There are sites like that out there like Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Reddit, Digg and the list goes on.
So we decided to make ChurpChurp a site not just for earning cash but for discovery. If you want to go see a funny viral video or a cute picture that other Malaysians are looking at, you go to ChurpChurp. You can then share that with your friends or even share something of your own there if you find it interesting.
We also made it such that you can follow what your friends on ChurpChurp are reading or watching online too. Like I would be interested to know what Shorty and Ming reads. So we started work on the new ChurpChurp and because it was inspired on the day Steve Jobs passed away, internally we called the project… Steve.
A couple of days ago we launched the new ChurpChurp (or Steve). This is the result.
Our dream is to create a site that you can visit every time you want to read something interesting or even something that would make you laugh or cry. The Churpies even came up with an idea to encourage people to share the good stuff they see online. They’re giving away NINE Christmas presents to 9 lucky Churpers who share really good stuff on ChurpChurp. One of them by the way… is an iPhone 4S.
So check out the new ChurpChurp, take the tour… and read the cool stuff the Churpers are sharing there online now.
In the mean time, I know many of you are waiting for me to blog about my proposal to Shorty. Give us time to put everything together ok? Heh still waiting for some pictures from others.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space