We believe that if we’re not delighting the user at every step, we’re not doing anything right. We don’t believe in building a product and layering design on top, we strongly believe in a design-centric approach to product development; as such you will play a key role in our team. The proof is in the pudding – users love our site and we receive universal praise for our design. But we are pivoting and want someone to join us to help take us to the next level.

While our goal is still very much the same – to build the best tool for product discovery – the direction we are taking is significantly different. To give you a quick idea, the new approach combines elements of Facebook & Foodspotting (happy to get into the details at next stage of discussions). We don’t want to just hand you the product concept and have you implement it, you will be made aware of all the business goals and expected to design the project from business needs. You will be expected to understand the challenges, question them and be given space to find solutions.

We realize that this is quite an ask but working with a startup requires wearing the many proverbial hats. As the product becomes successful, we will bring on designers for the different specialized needs (UX, UI, Content Strategy etc). A great visual design & superb UX are critical for the success of this product. As such this project is the ideal playground for someone wanting to design a “Holy Fucking Shit” product.

We’re fans of the following for the design process -

We are an extremely passionate and committed team and want to work with someone who believes in our vision. We are based in Atlanta but travel to San Francisco frequently. As such, we strongly prefer someone based in one of these two cities. We mostly work from home and meet 2-3 days a week in our awesome brick loft office in the Highlands. If this interests you, please send an email to akshay@getcomparisons.com with a link to your portfolio. We are happy to have you speak with the designer we’ve been working so far to get an understanding of our working methods.

You’ll love working with us. That’s us below!

In a recent TechCrunch post, Tumblr was reported to have 6.5B pageviews per month. It’s a service that makes blogging incredibly easy and is growing at an insane rate. So, what separates Tumblr from the masses (besides their awesome Tumblr gifs)? We think we can answer this question using the data we’ve pulled from GetComparisons – and it might surprise you.

Since launch we’ve received over 45 different reviews on blogging platforms and it has quickly become one of our most popular categories. These comparisons cover the top 8 blogging sites on the web including micro-blogging platforms and content management systems. Based on our users’ experiences with these  products, here are the top five criteria people look for in a blogging platform:

1. Design & Customization

This is the most important criteria for users when choosing a blogging platform. This includes ability to customize templates, plugins, themes, specific URL’s, etc.

Content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Movable Type lead in this category, especially for professional users who prefer highly customizable blogs. Case in point: we’re currently hosting this blog using a custom WordPress theme and WordPress template.

2. Social Media Sharing

The ability to easily implement social media sharing capabilities into blogs is also high priority.  This specific criterion can be broken down into two parts:

1. Ability to automatically share new content when a post is written through social channels.

2. Giving readers the ability to easily share each post through their respective social media channels.

Tumblr and Posterous do a wonderful job of this by making both these requirements incredibly easy to activate without the use of plugins.

3. Community

Having an internal network of users to glean inspiration from and showoff your content to is key.

Tumblr has done a brilliant job of this. They have a highly active community that encourages user engagement through likes, reblogs, replies, etc. Their tag system is awesome because it gives users the opportunity to find content not otherwise available on their news feed and extends their influence and reach.

4. Ease of Use

One of the issues with blogging is that often times, the setup, maintenance and customization get in the way of actual blogging. When there’s no complicated WordPress plugin or messy code to deal with, micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr & Posterous thrive. Case in point: On Posterous, if you know how to email, you know how to blog.

5. Cost

Completely free or freemium – need we say more?

With these criteria in mind, lets take a look at Tumblr’s approach:

Tumblr’s a free service that’s incredibly easy to signup and get started on. Within minutes you can pick a clean and beautifully designed theme to use on your blog. You can easily upload your content, share it through Facebook & Twitter, and tag it so that someone else in Tumblr’s massive universe sees it and reblogs it. Within 15 minutes you’ve knocked off all five criteria. Therein lies Tumblr’s métier and the answer to our original question – What separates Tumblr from the masses?

It makes your thoughts look sexy and sharing them is easy as hell to do so.

Here’s a chart of  all the blogging platforms our users like ranked by attributes:

So when did I get the initial idea that eventually became Mokabla?

In a previous lifetime I worked as an investment banker. During this period I always found myself envious of those whom I advised. Why? Because they were entrepreneurs – creative, founders of movements and visionaries. When I looked at them, I felt inspired, when I looked at myself, I felt … well the opposite. I began itching to start my own business and end this self-inflicted daily torture.

I felt there was a glaring gap in the online advertising space that I could exploit. This gap was the inability of small businesses to get found online due to poor click through rates of their ads. As such, I began doodling a web application that would provide users with deals from small businesses (don’t laugh, this was a world pre-Groupon). The big difference was that my service would display ads about the deals, instead of displaying the deals themselves (don’t ask why, it seemed made sense to me at that point).

Anyways I was super excited about this idea since the sky seemed to be the limit from a revenue projection standpoint; so I dived into it with full gusto. A lot of money, sweat and time later, this business didn’t go anywhere. The closest I came to any revenues was on the fantastically formatted excel revenue model I’d built using my investment banking training.

Theoretically this seemed like such a great business, I was almost sure I’d IPO in a few years and bring the economy out of the funk (a la Google circa 2004 for those of us who remember).  I was doing this during the 2008 recession fyi. Funny thing is, the Groupon guys have actually executed on this vision, and might pull this off for real. I learnt the most important lesson for an entrepreneur with this failure, that ideas aren’t worth the paper napkins they’re written on without execution to back them up.

After almost giving up on it, I decided to give it one more shot. As part of this effort, I started doing research on some open source software that I wanted to use. As I dived deeper and deeper into this research, I realized that there lacked a good place where I could find comparisons between all the different applications I was researching. There wasn’t one source for finding side by side, apples to apples comparisons from a users point of view. The information was scattered across hundreds of different sites in varying formats. My solution: a one stop shop for comparisons where users would be able to make informed decisions pretty quickly, by reading meaningful content created by a network of intelligent individuals. Thats when I decided to pivot (a few sectors over), from a site for deals to a site for duels, aka Mokabla.

This is where the journey truly started

Below is a simple sketch that captured the initial idea and concept behind Mokabla. This became the basis of the site. I wanted the site to be clean, intuitive and communicate the difference between two items at a glance.

At first I thought I could build the application on my own and started researching tools I could build it in. After copious amounts of research on the best CMS/Web development framework for a project such as mine, I finally settled on using Ruby on Rails. Turned out I didn’t want to spend time learning it, so I started looking for a partner to build it with. This was a pretty lengthy and frustrating process. Anyways, after finalizing the team I started to create mock-ups for the entire site, which I designed in Mockingbird. Here are a couple of screenshots below.

When I originally started building Mokabla, I thought I’d launch the functional prototype first and worry about making the UI/UX better later on. I thought I’d be able to design a good enough UI/UX on my own. But my DIY UI approach led to a design which sucked more than a Dyson. I always wanted to launch a product that rocked users from the outset (sorry lean startup school!), so the bush league UI we had definitely didn’t cut it for me. Even though the prototype was completed and ready to launch last month (Jan, ’11), I wanted to wait until the site was re-designed.

I spent the next couple of months re-designing the site with the help of our stellar designer. Here’s a how our landing page looked prior to and after the makeover.

As you can see the difference was night and day, Marky Mark and Mark Wahlberg. Anyways thats Mokabla’s story in a nutshell.

And today, February 24th, Mokabla beta is finally live!

This is obviously just the summary of our story. For more details on everything I’ve mentioned above you’ll have to read How to launch a startup. It’s an unfiltered behind the scenes look at my everyday struggles to bring Mokabla to life.