Before Baydin, Alex and I started another venture. Without going into too much detail it was a mobile, social game with an end goal of making users feel camaraderie with their fellow guys and gals. Who doesn’t want to make friends and feel the exhilaration of potentially meeting a significant other? We were on a mission to do great things for society, and by society, I mean the 18-30 year old singles who feel alienated after graduating from college and moving into a new city. You know who you are.

At first we were a bit reticent to talk about it. This was the hot segment at the time. What we discovered was that there are very few people who will steal your idea and do something with it. The important part of that last statement is “do something with it.” Turning a concept into reality is hard. Ideas have their own value but it’s worth exchanging that idea for feedback.

We discussed the product concept with our single friends. What we found was that they supported us because they are our friends. However, the concept did not resonate with them because it did not meet their needs. They would have had to change their behavior to use our product. Techno-geeks would have done this but the majority would not. We wanted a large, vibrant, diverse community. The problem was that many of our single friends had limited leisure time and wanted to spend that time actually talking to their date over dinner instead of playing a video game with him or her. Finding a significant other is haphazard enough so they wanted to get to the essence of it immediately.

Our mobile, social, game was retired and we re-directed our effort into a new direction. We’re still talking to people but this time we’ve made it a little further. Our alpha, Baydin ForONE was released on Thursday. It is open to limited users. If you want to be involved in something great, sign-up and we’ll put you on our alpha testers list.