xiha life

TechCrunch Europe just came out with the announcement from Xiha:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/xiha-life-secures-1m-and-adds-jaikus-engestrom-to-board/

This is also the very first Vigo -deal, making it the pilot case and first fruit of the whole Vigo growth company financing and acceleration programme. As I mentioned in my last blog entry I have been in the Vigo steering group since last fall. Glad to see the programme working and in action.

With more proper funding Xiha is quite certainly hiring. So keep on eye on the job postings, especially if you are well versed in the art of PHP programming, statistics science and agile methodologies.

Cool stuff! Yet another good finnish startup gets a real chance at going out there and shining like the star they are!

Gratz to Jani + team for closing this at a very demanding time.

Xiha Life (www.xihalife.com) is a multi-lingual social network enjoying 1M+ monthly unique visitors and expanding rapidly.

XIha has been making revenue by selling casual games from their website (amongst other models). Recently they slashed their game pricing;

http://en.xihalife.com/b/webmaster/blog/new-game-pricing/

..to half or less than half of what it used to be (from 20 EUR to 7-10 EUR)

www.arcticstartup.com wrote about it here:

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/02/06/xiha-life-drops-prices-to-attrac...

..saying that "If you look at pricing on a larger scale - it doesn’t make much sense to try and sell casual games at 20-30 dollars"

And Xiha's case would seem to prove this; since making the change the average revenue Xiha gets from this source has gone above the average. Which can only mean that lower prices actually broaden the "market" and more consumers than ever before are buying the products.

It is just about as classical pricing strategy dilemma as anything could be; figuring out your optimal volume versus your optimal price tag is rarely a cakewalk. Questions like; would you business need 10K transactions at 10 EUR each? or 100K transactions at 1.2 EUR each? are really hard to work out in practice.

Consumer Internet services and online communities however offer an ideal experimental ground in this regard; they either love what you are doing, or hate it. Sometimes the response is lukewarm and you can't tell. What ever the case there is usually an immediate reaction to everything you do; the results being instantly visible in your business and key metrics.

Ilja Laurs (http://www.mobileattitudes.org/) the CEO GetJar in our Slush panel (http://tane.li/2008/panel-slush) really stressed the importance of having good metrics and KPI's in place from the beginning when you are building your online business. Very much agree with that; figuring out your KPIs early and building a culture of daily check on them is important and can help you make smarter decisions in situations where the visibility otherwise is near zero (which it almost always is with Startups).

Way to go Xiha Life!

www.xihalife.com a finnish fast-growing startup with a bit of an unusual background has announced that they have closed a significant financing round with a chinese investor.

I am involved in Xiha as an advisor and a small owner.

Xiha is a multilingual social network that's available in over 40 languages and has more than 800 thousand (close to 1M) uniques a month from over 200 countries in the world. The company and the site is founded by finnish-chinese couple with an impressive background in the gaming industry.

With the investment Xiha is capable of hiring a few new entire teams to work on the service, and to open up offices in Zürich, the US and in China.

The big growth opportunity lies in multilingual people that are pretty much all over the map globally; in the US alone there's about 37 million people who are immigrants and know at least a second language. Many people are pretty fed up being forced to have their social networks in one language only. I personally have this problem in Facebook; mixing together english-only friends with my finnish-only friends doesn't quite work all that well, and Xiha hits the mark in this particular usecase with laser precision. In this blog post I talked about my first company Taika, and back in 2000 we solved a social networking presence/microblogging problem that the Facebooks of today have still not really solved; we came up with a simple usable and fast way to send different status messages and microblog entries to different contact groups simultaneously. Xiha totally solves this from the language point of view. Get in there, register and try it out for yourself.

CC Attribution: Vanessa Pike-Russel@Flickr

What's really impressive is that Xiha's rate of unique user growth is over 20% a month; with kind of unusual markets like Turkey, China, Brazil, and France. Xiha is expected to reach over 1M uniques by the end of the year, and keep on growing strong after that. The company was founded only last year - so it's gone from zero to 100 pretty quick.

Here's Xiha's founder on Xihalife.com. And this would be me in there as well.

I see Xiha as being fresh, unique and really in a speed-train-like growth towards possibly becoming a really well known success case. Xiha's primary revenue model is digital content; like casual games, etc. There's more than a 1000 PC and MAC games available.

Want to learn something about making successful social networks? Register to Xiha and go for the "gold member challenge", found here:
http://en.xihalife.com/gold/ -that's something that sort of reveals the gaming background of the founder. It's a challenge that motivates the user to go through a series of fun tasks (or "quests" as a World of Warcraft player would call them, right?) and the end reward is a gold member status. Works like a charm - go try it out and take notes.