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…you get pitched by a company asking you to blog about them.
This morning my inbox was greeted with an email from Majal at Prosper.Com
The company has apparently had a recent mention in the NYTimes, so there!
Apparently I’m a ‘topically relevant’ blogger, so I’ve been invited to mosey-on over to Prosper’s website and nose around, commenting on what I like and don’t like. Majal, who has only just started working there, also invites me to email any of the ‘C’ class employees (CIO, CTO, etc.) and engage in conversation. Which is a thoroughly nice thing to do and I am sure they have time to converse with an Australian blogger.
I shall check out the site and report back to y’all. You take care now, ya hear?
(but even at its worst I doubt I will be able to construct anything so corruscatingly brilliant (and here and here and here) as my main man Jenkins)
Update: why would an Australian be interested in a website that offers e-bay like loans that can only be offered to U.S.A. citizens? Could it be that they are ‘clueless’? Like Sprint before them, did they not bother actually reading my blog (which they claim they did) and seeing that I am in Australia — which, if I remember rightly, is the opposite side of the world to them?
File under ‘clueless’.
[Update 2: Wow! the CTO, John, just posted on this blog and apologised for the mistake in contacting me. Re-file under 'clued-up'. Well done, John!]
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
You’re right. Our bad. Sorry. Unfortunately, we’re open to the U.S. only right now. I think she may have just liked the blog, or perhaps skimmed it carelessly and missed the banner that pretty clearly says “Austrialia”. I’ll remind her to be more careful.
–john
CTO, Prosper.com
Hi John,
Thanks for the response — this puts you back firmly into the ‘clued-up’ category! Well done — did you find my post via a Technorati search?
You popped up on my NewsGator feed.
-john
Lee
1. Would Prosper, well, prosper over there with the Aussie psyche?
2. Perhaps one of your entropreneurial colleagues, reading your blog, might decide to launch her/his own version?
The Power of Us could lead those ways…
(I have no relationship with the firm,but several at the TED conference were complimentary about their biz model)… and I will be speaking aobut how they could forge “Smart Partnerships” to leverage their vlaue and visibility
Good luck to John et al with Prosper. I’m not sure how a conservative country like Australia would go with it, after all it took eBay a long time to get going here.
Having said that, eBay is now huge here; perhaps an Aussie Prosper could take off… Best of luck to the hard-working entrepreneur who decides to give it a go — because it WILL be a lot of hard work to get it up and running in this very cynical, hard-nosed, US-wary country.
Sprint could learn something from this. When I sweetly — ok, as sweetly as I could, given my nature — cattle prodded them about their marketing efforts, they responded with a machine generated form letter. You go the CTO, personally.
Must be that Aussie charm, old man.
Aussie charm? Is that an oxymoron?
I just think its a sign that startups are potentially slightly more ‘clued-up’ than old companies. Or at least their CTO’s… the man has a watchlist in NewsGator, showing both tech savvy and web2.0 savvy. May there be more like him.