I used to work in the media. We would get special treatment because companies knew we were opinion influencers. We didn't know it was happening, but the license key or other information would be their tip-off to provide us with VIP service. Quite often that prevented us from giving accurate information to our readers.

If you are a company offering products/services, this service is great because it lets you give the media, investors, etc. that special treatment that you might not ever give a "normal" customer. That can let you cover up for inadequate customer support, products and procedures that aren't quite ready, etc. Heck, you could even hide or show parts of the site based on the VIP status, so for example those VIPs would think some extra-pay service was part of the free offering.

Maybe I'm looking at the worst-case scenario here, but a company that decides to use this service is going to be tempted to give those people special treatment. Perhaps they can make some more money by letting schmucks like me pay to get on the VIP list so they'll treat me nice too.

Totally agree. Some people are just not normal Joe users. It totally makes sense to give a bit of a pop to those in your VIP list. Also gives something for these extra Joes to inspire to. This dynamic totally exists in the real world so its nice to see it starting to happen in internet land too.

Just curious, but do you think this gets creepy at any point? Is this your expectation if you sign up with your company's email for a service you're reviewing?

Only a few publications like Consumer Reports actually buy the stuff they review, everyone else goes to the vendor and asks for a review copy or free membership. If their support team asks for license info or if it's linked to your email (even not a company email) it's easy to tag that license as deserving special treatment. Sometimes you suspect it's going on but there's no way to avoid it, especially when there's some sort of "preview" arrangement before the public even gets to see it.

The socially acceptable edge-case here is interesting.

"Personalized Dynamic Product Offer" = "Personalized Dynamic Pricing"

"Price Discrimination" =? Ever become Just plain ol' Discrimination?

The regex that powers this is hosted here - anyone can fork it to add their own VIPs. https://github.com/juliuss/dc_autotag/blob/master/autotag.xm...

Quite a big list of investors & press.

This reminded me of something I did a while ago.

For fun, here's a never before seen concept of customer.io. We went in a very different direction.

"When fred wilson stops by your site..." https://img.skitch.com/20120823-b1hqqqssee4khwxjbm48nu4eyq.p...

We built a tool to create links for embedding in personal sales/marketing emails. When clicked, an XMPP message gets posted to the sender. We've found this is a great time to follow up with a phone call: "Hey, did you get my email?" "Funny you should ask, I actually have your site open right now" "Really? Great timing! So, what are your first impressions?" ;)

It's a winning idea to follow up when it's at the very front of the recipient's mind. The tool also gives you feedback if nobody ever clicks on the link, or if it gets passed around to other colleagues.

Simple. Do it today.

Umm, what's with the fake SSL favicon?

"World class security

We've implemented https so you don't have to."

Not sure if sarcasm or ..

Looks like they're just using the same favicon from https://www.dailycred.com/?redirect=false where that quote fits in truthfully

Thanks -- that's exactly what was happening. We've removed the favicon from our Tumblr blog.

This idea is pretty neat but I don't really understand how you detect your competition. Would they really register/login with an email based on their main domain and not use a throwable email or at least a personal one ?

Same for the media/influencer do they really use daily their work email to test applications/websites? When I was testing applications/sites most of the time I used a throwable emails first to check without fearing to be spammed later on my work email. But I'm not the target so maybe it makes sense for them?

Can we provide specific names you don't have to improve the list for everyone ?

Very Very cool.

I don't want to use your service (sorry!), since I don't want to have any other services inbetween my and the users, but I love the idea, and the regex list.

I'll implement a clone of this on my own side.

Thanks!

Looks awesome! Very cool idea.

Edit: Awww, have to enter CC number to try it? I'm afraid I don't know you well enough.

Edit 2: Oh ok I just tried logging in and it worked. No idea why I was asked for my cc number?

Edit 3: Ok sorry I'm confused, this isn't a service I signed up for? I read that, got excited and went straight to 'sign up' at the bottom. I can now see it's a regex open source list. Still useful though, thank you!

You can skip the CC (button on bottom left), We thought we'd try and put that in the sign up flow to see how many add vs. skip. :)

It seems their core business is to provide the oauth login. The feature with the alert is just a neat add-on.

I'm an investor, how can I block this from my iPhone/web browser/etc?

simple:

don't sign up with an email whos domain is on this list: https://github.com/juliuss/dc_autotag/blob/master/autotag.xm...

So, we'd have to share all of our users emails with your service?