You may have noticed us mentioning a product called mixin in our social media lately. There’s a good reason for this: we’ve been scoping out a relationship with the company that goes beyond the usual ‘hired gun’ deal most consultancies offer web startups. As part of our due diligence around the deal, we’ve been using the product… a lot!
At first glance, mixin might look like another micro-blogging service. At Pollenizer we’re very familiar with a whole constellation of social media, micro-blogging and sharing services because we use them every day to keep our disparate and geographically-displaced team on the same page. So what’s the big deal about one more?
Well, until now we’ve seen nothing quite like mixin. Nothing quite as interesting, redolent with potential and abundantly useful for solving real-world consumer problems.
The Lausanne-based company describes its product as “social peripheral vision” and that’s a great three word summary. In a world where our work and social schedules change several times a week — sometimes several times a day — there’s a need for something that pulls together all our event-based information from elsewhere on the web and brings it together in the one place, accessible from almost anywhere and anything.
In a world where we want to make the best use of every day, there’s a need for quick and simple ways to propose an activity and let our friends/colleagues collaborate on when and where that should happen. And in a modern life in which we maintain rich relationships with people we sometimes never see for months at a time, we increasingly choose micro-blogging/status-updating services to keep in touch with friends and loved ones.
Roll that all up, and you’re talking about mixin. “Social peripheral vision” is a way of making all that functionality available, without maintenance becoming a chore; making it easy to scan and get a gist of what’s happening, fast to add something new, quick to share, and easy to undo or change. Think Batman (the TV series) fight sounds: “Bam!”, “Ka-pow!” and “Zowee!”
Introduced to the Mixin team through the company’s mutual investor connections, both Mixin and Pollenizer are very excited to announce that we’re embarking on helping the business and the product further develop its core functionality, customer acquisition and commercialisation.
So far, the experience of working with the mixin team has been like a high-speed train flashing through the alps — it’s all happening so fast, so smooth! The mixin blog reads like any product geek’s dream of weekly new features. Jon from the Pollenizer team is already in Lausanne working on the backend while I begin contributing to the front-end, and we’ve just learned that our entry for mixin is a winner in the annual startup competition held by international Top 10 MBA school, IMD. [gasp!]
As with a few other key clients, Pollenizer has taken up an equity stake in mixin to make sure we’ll be applying everything we have to make this product the biggest thing in daily planning since the Gregorian calendar. We’re delighted to add a Swiss company to our European client list (ski slopes, chocolate, cheese… what’s not to like?) and we’re certain that mixin is going to make all the early/late Skype calls worthwhile soon!
Enough from us, here’s mixin’s Nicolas Dengler presenting the product and the business at LIFT08: