A number of users have sent us emails since our launch asking us “How does TotSpot make money?” Fair question!
While, right now we are entirely focused on building a fantastic product and getting as many people as possible to join the TotSpot community, we do intend to make some money to make sure our developers are paid and everyone gets to eat around here.
So how does TotSpot work as a business? 3 ways we’ll be looking to make this work:
Proving that science is often catching up with common sense, the New York Times reports that Moms really like seeing the faces of their children:
Using a functional M.R.I. scanner to watch the brain in action, researchers have demonstrated that a picture of her own smiling baby activates the critical reward-processing regions of the mother’s brain much more strongly than seeing a picture of an unknown baby with the same happy look.
Pretty neat.
In an aptly titled (especially from TotSpot’s point-of-view) piece, ABC News reports that the United States is experiencing a new “Baby Boom:”
The National Center for Health Statistics — just reported a population milestone. In 2007, a record number of 4,315,000 babies were born in the United States. With more babies born last year than any other year in U.S. history, nearly doubling the number born century ago, signs point to a potential start of a new American baby boom.
The article forgot to mention that all of these newborn kids should have pages created for them on TotSpot ;).
It has been just over 1 month since we launched the public beta of TotSpot. Since then, nearly 8,500 pages have been created, about 50,000 photos uploaded, 15,000 firsts and favorites, and more. We’re really happy and it seems like you are too
Just as importantly, we’ve been delighted by all the feedback we’ve received (both directly and through the new help system at Get Satisfaction). Your comments and ideas (international support, photo tools) have powered our development process since launch and will continue to do so as we move forward.
In addition to patting ourselves (and you) on the back, we thought we’d use this moment to announce a slew of really important new features: Public Pages, a Theme Editor, and Photo Organizing tools.
Realtechmom is a new blog about all things mommy & tech. She wrote an excellent overview and tutorial about TotSpot. If you haven’t signed up yet and want to learn more about us, this is the guide we should have written for you 
Definitely consider adding Realtechmom to your must-read list. Besides writing about TotSpot, she has some great pointers on teething and, like us, she’s a big fan of Rockband. What more could you ask for?
Thanks Realtechmom!
Today, Wishpot, a site that’s made creating gift registries a cinch, announced the launch or their newest product: Wishpot Baby!
Like a traditional registry, the service allows you to compile a wishlist of all the things you want for your baby — only, there’s a social twist. Using their tools, you can draw on the knowledge of other mommy & daddy experts and involve your friends in the process too. It also removes the headache of creating multiple registries on multiple sites by centralizing the product catalog of several of the biggest online retailers. Finally, they have a set of nifty widgets (like ours below) to make sharing easy.
Their new Chief Mom Officer, Jessica Smith, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to over the last few days, puts it best in Wishpot’s press release:
“Wishpot mom experts offer expecting moms inspiration and advice as they prepare for their little one’s arrival, making the experience truly interactive, informative, and fun! Wishpot Baby provides parents with more options than ever before.”
In the coming months, as we continue to evolve the types of things you can do on TotSpot (remember, we’re always growing), we’ll be working closely with Wishpot to find the best ways to bring their social shopping services to our users.
In the meantime, definitely check out their site, and if you’re expecting, build yourself a registry!
TotSpot was named today’s ‘Cool Site of the Day’ by coolsiteoftheday.com. They’ve been picking cool sites on the web since 1994, so they must now what they’re talking about.
Check out the CSD Blog to give us a vote and sign up for future cool site selections.
Thanks for the selection!
Managing a product is tough. Which is exactly why we’ve been thinking about solutions to manage all the great feedback you guys have been sending in - our inboxes have been full, which is great! One of the problems with our old feedback system was that it was a dialogue between us and you - and when it comes to a product like Totspot, it makes sense to involve the whole community in some of these discussions.
So, we’re slowly starting to migrate our feedback system over to Get Satisfaction. They’ve built a great system for people (like you!) to share ideas and engage in discussions about Totspot. They make it really easy to see what other Totspot users have said, and discuss the ideas, problems and questions they’ve posted.
Well join up! Right now you need a separate Get Satisfaction account in order to post content over there. We know that’s a bit of a hassle, but once that’s done (and they make getting started real easy) you’ll be able to send in even better feedback (or discuss other feedback) right away! There’s even a few ideas and discussions on there already! Visit Totspot on Get Satisfaction.
Yesterday, we wrote about wanting to increase our support for our international users; today, we shift attention to our soon-to-be parents. We have received a flood of requests for ‘prenatal’ firsts, and we’re happy to announce that they’re now ready.
One of the things we’ve been most excited about in building TotSpot was the notion of building something that could be used by anyone, anywhere in the world. Eighteen days into the launch of our public beta, we’re thrilled to see a growing international community.
Today, TotSpot has registered users from 96 different countries, and we’ve been written about by bloggers in many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, French, German, and Dutch. For the curious at heart, below the break, I’ve also listed the top 20 TotSpot countries.
Too often, when a web application says ‘Hello World’ for the first time, it actually means ‘Hello USA,’ and we want to make sure that we make TotSpot a friendly place for users all around the world. With that in mind, we’ve listened to your requests, and under your ‘preferences’ page, you can now find settings for Timezone support & Metric system support (for growth charts!).
This is just the first of many steps we plan to take to ‘internationalize’ TotSpot. If you’re an international user, and you have an idea, suggestion, or just want to let us know about your TotSpot experience, we’d love to hear it in the comments below.