crowdfireapp

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The Future of Instagram on Crowdfire

Crowdfire has always been about helping you go big online.

When we started building Crowdfire, we were focused on being a social trimmer, allowing you to follow those who follow you and unfollow those who don’t. It was a way for users to streamline their social media, eliminate spam, find out people who really cared about what they had to offer and start a community with that single connection. It was the first step toward creating genuine engagement.

And over the years, as our product kept evolving, we continued to discover what really mattered to our users, and to us. Growth.

Last month, we got word from Instagram that third-party applications providing one-on-one relationship discovery to users were no longer being supported by their API. If you’ve been following us on our recent communication about Instagram changes, then you’ve caught wind of Crowdfire no longer supporting the following features for our Instagram users:

Non Followers

Fans

Recent Unfollowers

Recent Followers

Friend Check

Whitelist

Blacklist

All Following

Admirers

We had a few conversations with Instagram for some more clarity on this, allowing us more time to make the changes, primarily so that users on our paid plans would not be immediately affected by this.

It seemed like a big blow at first but after the dust settled, we gained some perspective.

By mid-November, we were already working on a beta version of Crowdfire which was to be rolled out in a few weeks. This development by Instagram merely accelerated the evolution of a brand new Crowdfire. We wanted our users to start using our growth-oriented features to truly experience organic growth on their accounts.

What is Crowdfire, then? Crowdfire is your super smart marketing sidekick.

In this whole ecosystem of social media expansion on Twitter and Instagram, it’s difficult to find the time and energy for individuals and small businesses to invest in concentrated marketing efforts that will bear effective fruit — and this is what Crowdfire will help you achieve! This means less time and work for you to expend on social media. Instead, we’ll guide you with just a few steps and get you more exposure to your target audience — all it will take you is a few minutes.

Many of our users have already been switched to the beta version and are well on their way to experiencing organic growth through our content recommendation and content publishing features.

So, what’s so special about Crowdfire’s beta?

Well, it’s got a new and improved interface providing users an easier and more efficient way to manage and grow their social presence.

The pièce de résistance of the new Crowdfire though, is the bot.

Think of the bot as your friendly marketing sidekick who analyses millions of online data-points to create actionable, daily marketing plans (prescriptions) which are specific to your business/product/brand that take less than 5 minutes to complete.

The bot will ping you once everyday with prescriptions for that day. All you need to do is follow the steps for every prescription. The bot also learns and becomes smarter with each subsequent use and turbo-charges your marketing on Twitter and Instagram (Facebook and Etsy integrations coming soon!). It is backed by proven algorithms which have been back-tested for months, that guarantee results.

This is how we’ll be prompting better engagement within your Instagram community.

Since Instagram’s decision provided an impetus to our already under-production model, we’ll be moving Crowdfire out of its beta version sooner than expected so that everyone can experience the whole new Crowdfire.

Our mission is to help individuals succeed online and most of us are starting to figure out that getting only your follower count up is not true success (though it’s one of the many factors taken into consideration for measuring online success).

As Crowdfire matures further, we hope that our users will start seeing success the way we envision it for them — getting traffic to their blog, selling more on their online stores, getting more viewers and listeners for their YouTube and SoundCloud channels, etc.

For everyone out there who is a writer, an artist, a seller, an influencer, a small business, a freelancer — Crowdfire cares about helping you cultivate a community that is centred on your brand. We care about helping you find your target audience — real, genuine relationships and connections who care about your essence, who care about what you have to say and what you have to offer. We’ll be stripping away all the fluff and all the spam, and showing you the way to a new-found harmonious, structured and coherent online growth.

We’re laser-focused on being your super smart marketing sidekick. We’re driven to help you establish authentic connections and nurture relationships, so you can constantly grow and evolve and make a difference to your community in your own uniquely talented way.

We are ever grateful and ever humbled by your faith in us, and we won’t let you down. Thank you for being a part of the Crowdfire Community.

Together, Let’s Go Big!

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts on what’s new on Crowdfire. Meanwhile, we’d love to hear your thoughts on these developments in the comments :)

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Crowdfire’s 2016 in Review - Initiating Lift-Off

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

― Neil Gaiman

The year 2016 for Crowdfire has been…eventful, to say the least. Now that we’re boldly marching through the first week of 2017, we thought it befitting to take a moment and reflect on the last year.

These past twelve months, we’ve grown leaps and bounds. We’ve encountered a few setbacks (both minor and major), we’ve cracked some first-rate comebacks and, though all were memorable, let’s prepare to #throwback on the most significant moments.

When we built our very own Crowdfire Chrome extension

We’re always on the lookout for making it easier for our community to share. And what better way than to have a powerful Chrome extension in your browser? Not only did we make social sharing an easier experience, we made it child’s play to share any post from anywhere, to be posted at the Best Time.

Since the launch, we’ve seen tens of thousands of user posts across Twitter and Instagram using the Crowdfire Chrome extension.

Enter the BOT

Crowdfire made a quantum product jump in August of 2015. We went on a work-cum-vacation to Daman (the western coast of India, few hours journey from Crowdfire HQ) which resulted in the genesis of Crowdfire’s chat bot — your super smart marketing sidekick.

This was an all-hands-in decision which promised to change the course of Crowdfire and our 16 million peopled community. We started full-fledged work on it in September 2015 and the first ever prescription was done on 24th Feb, 2016!

We’re still working hard on refining and perfecting it, but it’s out there and we’re proud of it. Read more about how it came to be here.

Crowdfire Expands

As we kicked into the third quarter, we augmented our team strength big time. We’ve added 27 people across all tribes. Yep, we kicked up the stakes and made aggressively important additions across our Engineering, Product, Design and Community teams, all through the months of August and September. We’re now 65 people strong.

Delving deeper, we’ve introduced a Tribe culture at Crowdfire, and categorically placed teams working on projects into Tribes and Squads. This has dramatically improved parallelism, productivity and focus.

For example, within the Community Tribe, we have a Content Squad, a Social Media Squad and a 1-on-1 Engagement Squad.

A lot more details on this in upcoming blog posts (stay tuned!)

Here’s how we’re shaping early 2017 for an all-new Crowdfire

1. Community feedback is now at the heart of the product feedback mechanism at CF. We have our ear closer to the ground.

2. We’re working hard towards our goal of providing world class support at scale, supporting millions of users across our iOS, Android & Web apps. We also do close to 8,000 interactions via Email & Twitter. All this while keeping the team lean and interactions personal.

3. We’re pushing the entire company to be more data-driven, where every decision is backed by hard data. We’re consciously avoiding the temptation to make decisions on the basis of intuition or personal experience. It’s tough, but the process bears fruit to spectacular results.

4. Crowdfire’s new branding is under development. So far, Crowdfire as a product kept evolving but Crowdfire as a brand never did. We’re now working on creating an identity that fits Crowdfire as it is today, and as we want it to be in the future. This includes a new visual identity entirely, that we will then start bringing into the product.

5. The Design team now works directly with product managers and tech, in specific Squads within Tribes, and less with each other. This brought about a change in the reporting structure which made design more in sync with product and less of a separate bubble where the design team would interact only with each other.

6. We’re instituting significant communication changes and fostering laser focus on marketing design. This will include external touch points like the landing page of our brand new website, the way we look on social media, and on the App Store and Play Store.

7. We’re paying more attention to technical debt: code is being written both for quick deployment and long-term maintenance.

8. Responsibility is being moved further down the chain with developers being responsible for their own projects while the infra team provides support. We’re distributing control to all our people.

9. We’ve moved to a fully dockerized ecosystem, which has made Crowdfire faster at deploying features and better at scaling to millions of requests.

10. We’re writing and compiling better, more comprehensive technical docs, leading to faster iteration times.

And most importantly, we’re having more fun than ever as a team, growing and learning and working together.

So, what’s next?

A lot has happened over the past year. We’ve completely changed the way we worked, without losing the essence of what it’s like working in a startup. Safe to say, we’ve kept the corporate chokehold successfully at bay.

And this year, with the combined strength, knowledge and abilities of our team, we’re bringing you a whole new Crowdfire.

We’ll be your marketing sidekick that will help you grow online everyday. We will work with you and help you get there using your website, social media and online advertising; just like a living-breathing marketer, except, we fit in your pocket.

If you’re a:

Writer who wants more readers,

Artist who wants more fans,

Seller who wants more sales,

Influencer who wants more reach,

Small business who wants more customers,

Freelancer who wants more clients,

then Crowdfire is for you.

Now, we have some exciting projects lined up over the next few weeks but to give you a broad outline, you can expect some brand new integrations on Crowdfire. Platforms like Facebook, Etsy, Shopify, Pinterest are all on the roster. So watch out for this.

We’re at the edge of the runway and we’re ready for the skies with one thought and one thought only —

We’d love to hear how your 2016 went, or, if it’s not too early, how 2017 is shaping up for you! Comment away!

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JustUnfollow is now Crowdfire!

On our fifth birthday we are becoming more awesome! We are changing to Crowdfire!

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During building the product you show your designs to fellow buddies to review it and they generally look at it for < 5 sec and come up with their own conclusions.

Now problem is for developer and designer that whether to consider its valuable feedback or not. The inherent problem lies in that...

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Children see magic because they look for it!

Happy Children's Day :)

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1. We have all time overloaded fridge

2. We do a lot of things to get relaxed. For example “Jung ki raat” ( counter strike)

Not only computer games :P :P

3. Almost every weekend we go for movie. (In my office people are movie addicts).

4. Once a month we go for...

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JustUnfollow is now on #iPad, Download now! http://www.justunfollow.com/mobile 

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TGIF! We here at JustUnfollow HQ are having fun, what about you?

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Reblog if friday is already here for you!