Leveraging Peer Pressure: Social Agent Launch August 10

Its been one heck of a year, and I’m gonna use Paul Orlando’s Farewell speech night public announcement of Social Agent’s 3rd pivoted product to formally launch on Saturday August 10th. It was at the end of his speech and Paul had people from around the room (of about 100 people) choose to stand up and give themselves some peer pressure – set a deadline and say what you will get done by that time.

Steve Forte next to me reminded me that I had mentioned a go-live of our next pivot on August 10 – and egged me on to stand up and make it official.

Larry Salibra, my good buddy, was in the back of the room and snapped the photo attached to today’s blog (thanks bud), also tweeting out:

Michelini promises SocialAgent.me launch of new product August 10, 2013

No turning back now. But our startup team picked this date to unify all of. It helps reduce prioritization of tasks, wondering when certain things need to be done. Now when there is a question in the office of when a task should be done, its all based around this date of August 10. Can it get done by then, or will this specific task help deliver a larger goal or task that is needed to get done by then as well.

In addition to the launch of our new product – we will also celebrate a bit by going to Xichong beach about 1 or 1.5 hours away from downtown. I haven’t been to the beach all year, so may as well make it a public party on our launch date. **** Those of you interested here’s the official Social Agent blog post about the Launch beach party *****

So What is the Latest Social Agent Product?

My friends have been getting confused as our startup keeps refining our product to make the ideal product/market fit. What we are building now is a platform to connect businesses to Chinese sales agents, to help them find sales leads and customers in the Chinese market. Kind of like a freelancer website for sales and marketing professionals, starting in the Chinese market. (Shameless plug to our startup’s link – www.SocialAgent.me)

Setting dates, being public about it, this has definitely put pressure on me and the rest of the team. But pressure is needed to get stuff done, especially in technology. Because things can go on forever. And it will never be fully done, but by having a public launch date, helps us all to know whats most urgent, whats core, and hopefully set proper milestones along the way.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the developments, and even if you can’t make it to Shenzhen, China for the beach party, I am thinking of some fun social media competitions to make things more interesting.

And of course, I’ll be tweeting (as best I can from Mainland China)

Jiayou!