My First Post...on Zipingo's Birth

Well, it took me 4 months, but here I am!  I'm excited to blog for the first time about Zipingo.  And, I intend to do so regularly going forward.  I'll use this first opportunity to introduce myself and give a little info on the birth of Zipingo.

I'm the business leader at Intuit for Zipingo. One year ago a research team out of Intuit Boston called the iLab was concluding its customer research that validated the big customer problem concerning finding the best, most reliable local businesses.  It's one of those things that everyone has a story to tell you about.  And we had our own personal stories.  I've had a roof leak problem for over a year now because picking a great roofer is nothing better than a shot in the dark.

So I signed up to take the research results, build a team and, at record speed by Intuit standards, define and implement a solution to the local business problem.  And so Zipingo was born on July 27, 2005.  From about mid January to about mid March, I worked on defining the product and assembling a complete yet lean team.   By early June, the ability for Quicken 2006 users to enter reviews through their software was completed and in beta.  Then we spent June and July building version 1.0 of the Zipingo Web site.

In order to give it a whirl, we announced it internally and asked Intuit employees to give us feedback and let us know what problems they encounter...that was kind of like an alpha release for a few days, if you will. And boy did we hear about problems with the site!  Then on August 1st, Zipingo became officially available to the public.

More to come...

~ Hisham