Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released the totally new Yourville to the public.  After many months of hard work and dedication, the day is here that we unveil our Beta release to the public. We’ve been doing private beta testing for the last few weeks, to hash out any issues or major bugs. We think we got everything, but if not, please let us know here. I cannot even begin express how excited we are to introduce you to this shiny, new Yourville.  The new Yourville is NOT a redesign, It’s a complete re-envisioning of the community, its features and its future.

Here’s the rundown of what the new Yourville is all about:

Yourville brings you and your neighbors together to share and discover reviews of the pros and cons of your experiences with local businesses, as well as meet new people in your area, and gain insight into other important information in, and around, your region. Think of Yourville as a Yelp for those of you that live in, or travel to awesome locations outside of your home country. We’re currently available in Costa Rica only, but expect us to launch new countries in the first half of 2010.

Who’s using Yourville, you ask?

• You might be an Expat working or going to school in Costa Rica.
• Or, you just decided to pull up stakes and move to an exotic destination and immerse yourself into the local culture.
• You could even be a traveler going on a backpacking trip throughout Latin America.

Either way, Yourville is for you. You can now get trusted recommendations and share your experiences of local businesses and service in Costa Rica (more countries launching soon).

Go to http://www.yourville.com to check us out for yourself. If you don’t live in Cost Rica, that’s ok. You can still add reviews for businesses that you experienced when you last visited, or look for recommendations for a great Hotel or Bar on your up coming visit. If you live in Costa Rica, then you know how important it is to get trusted recommendations for businesses. Whatever your status is, we hope you discover how useful and fun Yourville is.

We would like to thank Vesess for all of their help with this project. We couldn’t have made it this far without them. Additionally, we would like to thank all of our current members and beta testers for all of their patience and dedication.

If you have any questions, please email me  cmullins (at) yourville (dot) com or use our contact form.

Well, last Sunday we launched the site live to the public. We did it kind of quietly because we still weren’t ready to handle large amounts of traffic. On average we’ve gotten 3 new members per day since Sunday. That doesn’t sound like much but it is, considering we haven’t really promoted it. We did, however, take advantage of the $100 in free clicks from the new MSN Ad Network. Actually, I had a coupon code for $200 worth of clicks but, apparently, it was only good for the first 2000 people. Either way, unless you have a really large budget, don’t expect to see much return from PPC (pay per click) advertising. We’ll keep experimenting with key words to see what works. Maybe, we can find a diamond in the rough. Beyond PPC advertising we’ve chatted with a few bloggers, did a Costa Rica Craigslist announcement, and participated in a few Yahoo group discussions. There is no magic button to push to get people to visit and join yourville.com. Online marketing is all about persistence, doing many things, and doing them routinely well. Additionally, we decided to not try and reach all Expats but, instead, focus only on one Expat community and then expand from there. I have experience with Costa Rica and aspire to move there in the near future, so that was the natural place to start. So, moving forward, here are a few things that we plan on doing:

1. Develop relationships with Costa Rica expat bloggers.
2. Contribute information relative to discussions at existing Exapt community sites.
3. Personally engage every new yourville member. Inform them of all the great features of yourville and encourage them to participate.
4. Encourage members to invite existing friends and family to yourville. Maybe come up with some sort of incentive program.
5. Do everything we can to make sure we have fresh content on the site daily.
6. Execute a PR campaign with the anticipation of getting local and national media to do a story on Yourville.
7. Evangelize yourville in every way possible.
8. Continue blogging and discussing business topics here.
9. Continue to explore other no/low cost methods for spreading the word about yourvile.com
10. Listen to our members and, continually, modify/change the site to fit the needs of the community.

The following are some great sources for online marketing tips, ideas and advice:

• Snap.com did a launch contest that encouraged people to submit their marketing ideas. It’s worth it to take a look at all of the ideas.
• Wickedfire.com is an Internet Marketing forum.
• Seomoz.org is a great source for all kinds of traffic-building content.
• Searchengineguide.com has some good resources on all aspects of Internet marketing.
• Threadwatch.org -Another good resource for all things internet marketing.

If anyone has additional ideas for us on how to reach more people, please let us know.

Technorati Tags: marketing, SEM, SEO, socialnetwork, community, expat

We finally went live with the Beta version of Yourville this morning. Our testing period went well and we received some great feedback from our test group. Now it’s time to evangelize and spread the word of the benefits of yourville. Thanks to everyone who has helped out so far with this project. We would like to invite all current expats, expat wannabes and curiosity seekers alike to give yourville a spin. If you have questions about yourville please feel free to contact us.

We’re about a month behind where we wanted to be for launch. However we’ve been hammering the site and trying to break as much as possible. So far everything is working great. We still have a couple of kinks to work out before we start inviting expats to be a part of the yourville community. Until then, here are a couple of screen captures for you.

Over at Mashable, Pete has a profile on a new site called Script Mimic that’s a directory of “clone” scripts. You know, say if you wanted to make your own MySpace you could go over to Script Mimic and find a no/low cost script that will help you do that. Before we settled on the script that we’re using , (and yes we are using a script), we researched several options. We weighed all of our options, including building what we thought we needed, partnering with an existing company or purchasing a script. We decided to purchase a script and customize it on our own, or get help through Rentacoder. I read a comment on the Mashable post and it looks as if they have a discussion going on the subject of building or buying. There will always be different opinions on whether you should build your own app with scalability and all of the features you want or find something off the shelf that closest matches what you want to do, and run with it. I’m of the belief that an engineer and a marketer will never agree, anyway, but when it comes to buying it or building it, they will, for sure, not agree. I believe that when you’re bootstrapping an idea, it makes more sense to customize a script, get your users and then expand from there. Let’s say I spend $500 total to build a website (which is more than what we’ve spent on yourville so far), get a few hundred people using it and get feedback from those few hundred people who let you know what they like or don’t like. Then, if you see that what you’ve implemented so far is starting to catch on, then you can start mapping out what you need – as opposed to what you think you need. Compare that to spending several thousand dollars on building a site, buying servers, doing focus groups etc. What do you actually accomplish by spending that money? You get a site that you think you need and a back end that can handle all the traffic that you think you will get. It never happens that way, unless you’re one of the select few that bursts out of the pack (YouTube, MySpace, Techcrunch etc.). Believe me, I’ve gone the route of investment, hiring a web team, consultants, CEO, buying servers and building something that I thought we would need. It didn’t work then and ,as a matter of fact, we spent a good portion of four years adding new features and dumbing down the original implementation. In the end, the company/site didn’t work for several reasons but, most importantly, it was because we spent too much money up front to build what we thought we needed, as opposed to what we actually needed. So, with yourville being close to completion, and the script we have performing well, I’m glad we made the choice to go the direction that we did. I use to go to this restaurant in San Diego that seated maybe 10 people and their was always another 20 people waiting in line to place an order to go, or hoping that a seat would clear by the time they got their food. Through the several years that I ate at that restaurant, they would expand as they could afford and/or find the space. I often thought that their problem would be a problem that I would love to have. It’s a matter of creating a product and then growing it as needed.

As we get closer to launching Yourville to the public. And, fully anticipate the site to not perform 100% all the time and or change on a daily basis. Does it matter if we proclaim ourselves to be in Alpha phase or does the general web public really care? I often see websites that carry a beta tagline with their logo for months or even a year. I generally don’t think any differently if the site is in beta or not. If the site performs well and keeps me interested then great. If the site doesn’t perform well, I’m normally pretty forgiving and assume that the site owners are aware of the problem and are working on it. Does anyone have an opinion on this? As it stands for now, we plan on letting our visitors and members know that we are a growing site and fully expect that the site will change as our community grows and voices their needs. I don’t suspect adding Alpha or Beta to all of logos will make much of a difference to anyone.

Like all new ventures, Yourville began as an idea. The new website would enable people from around the globe to communicate with their friends and families by using the latest on-line tools and features. That inspiration evolved from the notion that one of the most neglected spectrums of like-minded communities were expats those often overlooked folks who, because of business, or personal aspirations, have migrated to another country while still keeping ties with their native lands. So, we began to build what we believe is a feature-rich website designed specifically for expats where they could build their own community. In the process of selecting a name we must have brainstormed at least 50 or 60 different monikers that we thought might reflect what we wanted to portray. But, as we continued, we found that Yourville said it best. And so Yourville was born, a name that we believe says it best: Your, meaning it belongs to the community, and ville, which demonstrates the community our users will be continually building.

Then, came the design of our logo. That was the fun part. We enlisted the help of a graphic designer, and the resulting logo was exactly what we envisioned. Crisp. Colorful. And fun.

Now, with our name chosen and our logo completed, we begin an adventure that we hope will become a one-stop source for the expat community. Stay tuned as we further develop.

This is the first round of Comps.

After about 5 rounds, this is what we came up with.

In the process of creating a new web community, we wanted to start a blog to share our excitement and adventures with our users, clients, family and friends. In the coming days, we will be posting numerous entries about our newly found research, the applications we’ll be building, our startup process, what we hope to accomplish, and to document the planning, design, coding and marketing of this new website.

In today’s Web environment you don’t have to have a computer science degree (although helpful) to build a successful web application that will serve the needs of millions of users. This blog’s content will be coming from the perspective, not of technologists but, instead, passionate individuals who want to build the tools that will raise communication value among like-minded audiences worldwide.

Stay tuned, we hope you’ll like it.