iJiny Blog - the Jiny talks!
On your marks, set, GO!
Monday, Aug 18th, 2008Puneites, watch out for iJiny.com posters around town! They're coming near you, very soon.
New Look!
Sunday, July 20, 2008After somewhat of a hiatus from blogging, we're back. We've been hard at work with many refinements and changes to the look. We're now back with a spanking, brand new iJiny.com look! It's much more refreshing, bright, and staying true to our core, keep-it-simple. We've also been prepping for a public launch - posters n all. This is an exciting time! We will also have a few cool, helpful features rolling out in the coming weeks.
Got Wish?
Monday, May 5th, 2008Check out the new Wishlist feature we just added! You can now make a wish by simply entering a keyword in the 'My Wishlist' section after you log in. Every night, we will go through all Ads posted within the past one day on iJiny and look for Ads matching your wish term. If we find any, we will send you an email with a link to these Ads. This will make your job of finding what you're looking for convenient and much easier! You can also specify a low and a high price and we'll only look for items in that price range. No need to look through all Ads and search through them again and again. Just make a wish and let us take care of the rest :-)
You can of course, at any time, change your wish or delete it if you found what you wanted, or no longer want us to send you emails. We hope you like this feature!
Post-Beta News
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008Word has started spreading about iJiny and that makes us happy :)
As it goes with any Beta release, we ran into some issues post launch - the major one that caused some grievance to users being that emails from iJiny were not being consistently delivered. We have been working furiously on this and are happy to report that we have addressed the problem. You should have no trouble receiving sign up, post ad, or contact ad emails now. We apologize for the pain this has caused to ya'll :(
As for other news, we are working on some cool features that you should see soon. So stay tuned. And as always, if you spot any bugs, insects, or issues, tell us about it on the Feedback link.
And if we may, please help us spread the word by telling your friends, family, uncles, aunties, enemies, bosses, teachers, crushes, and others about iJiny.com! :)
Launched BETA today
Sunday, April 5th, 2008We launched the BETA version of iJiny.com today. We are excited to have one and all use it. And because it is in beta, we will appreciate any feedback on part of the site. Let the comments flow in, and in case you spot a bug - capitalize your emails ;-).
Dashboard
Saturday, March 15th, 2008After you sign in to iJiny now, you should see a new dashboard area. This will give you a sort of a sneak preview into your activity on iJiny. Soon we'll add some other cool stuff here.
More cities and a better look
Friday, February 29th, 2008A rare leap year Feb 29th post. There won't be another one like this in 4 years! Anyhow, we rolled out a cleaner and better looking interface to change between cities today. We also added more cities.
iJiny First Look
Sunday, January 20th, 2008We formally sent out a "beta invite" email to some of our friends and acquaintances today. Almost instantly, we started receiving encouraging and positive feedback as well as some very good suggestions.
We hope to consider all feedback we receive and better the iJiny experience over the coming weeks. As soon as we feel comfortable with the status quo (which for a startup is ideally never!), we will do a formal, public launch. Stay tuned!
Welcome to the iJiny Blog!
Saturday, January 19th, 2008We're happy to launch the iJiny blog today. What started as just another idea "worth exploring" about 6 months back is now nearing fruition and we could not be happier! We spent the better half of 2007 relentlessly working on it's design, development, and content. After spending many a nights, weekends, and holidays mulling over, discussing, arguing about, and working on it, we are now ready to share it with others.
Tomorrow, we will be giving a selective first look to some of our trusted friends. We hope that they will provide us with valuable feedback and constructive (or destructive - we don't mind that either!) criticism.
We will keep you updated about iJiny happenings on this blog. Hope you check this space frequently and let us know if you'd like us to talk about something.
Genesis
Sometime in the past...The idea behind iJiny dawned upon us one fine (has to be fine, eh ;) evening. One of us was looking to buy a classic 1980s model Yezdi bike and had been looking for it all over Pune for a few weeks. Making the rounds of the many garages and a few odd individual sellers in Pune in the sweltering heat and dust, he eventually had no luck finding one. Well actually, he did find one but the seller bailed out at the last moment. It was an exhausting and frustrating ordeal to say the least! That's when we realized something was just not right about it. There had to be a less painful and better way. When he also mentioned the fact that he had paid 15,000 Rs. to his broker to look for a flat for him, that was the ultimate trigger. We decided to start working on a website that would let people buy, sell, and advertise stuff for free - from the comfort of their chairs. And so we started...
Of course, being young and restless we set ourselves an aggressive schedule of launching it in one month - on the birthday of the yezdi-hunter. It was a preposterous thought to begin with and unsurprisingly, we realized our naivety soon and revised our schedule to basically, have no schedule! We consistently kept working at it for many days on end, and lo and behold, a few months later we had arrived at something satisfactory.
Now obviously, like most explorers discover sooner or later, we weren't the first to arrive on the scene. This concept and model is a huge success in the US and is used by millions there. In India though, the story is a bit different. We found that while there are only a small handful of websites that do something of this sort, their experience left us wanting more and frankly just didn't cut it (at least for us). So while we don't claim to be the first, we definitely intend to make an impression and offer a great experience.