We did a press release today, announcing the launch of XIHA Ltd in Finland, as well as some information about the service. On purpose, we did the press release only in Finnish. Please see couple of articles below:

plaza.fi/edome/uutiset/sosiaal...o-suomalaiselta-pelikonkarilta
www.digitoday.fi/viihde/2007/1...F6+Xiha+ponnistaa/200727200/66

If you are a journalist reading this, please go to corp.xihalife.com/home/press.php to sign up for future announcements!

We have officially started recruiting! If you have experience in PHP programming or web design, please contact me!

So far I've posted the ads (4 positions) to following places: (the ads should be live tomorrow)

www.mol.fi
www.jobcontractor.com
www.jobstep.net

They are all free, but should reach a lot of people. For example, you can see Job Contractor ads on sites like Sektori.com which covers our target group pretty well (I guess).

But that's probably not enough, as the economy is hot in Finland and unemployment rate has reached a 17-year low at least in Helsinki. All of the sites above are free - I'm exploring some additional ones - but I need to consider paid-for also, like www.oikotie.fi (890€), www.monster.fi (690€) or even www.linkedin.com ($145). That's not cheap - might have to consider posting just one ad to those, instead of four.

Likely the most efficient way of getting the right people is to do some guerrilla marketing (like, for example, chatting on IRC at #naqu) and more importantly, activating my and Jani's personal networks for recruiting.

Anyways, we are living busy and exciting times!

Last Thursday I submitted www.xihalife.com to KillerStartups and was positively surprised when Jani informed me already on the next morning that they had written a review about us.

And it was pretty sweet too! Check it out here and don't forget to push the Killer button on the left
www.killerstartups.com/Social-...ul-MultiCulti-Social-Networks/

(I don't seem to know yet how to post a link on this blog... there's so much to learn still for me...)

OK - KillerStartups is not quite Michael Arrington's TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com), but it's a newer site and have a slightly different perspective - from the actual user's, not the "Web 2.0" industry's - which is great.

To better utilize the buzz from the review, I decided to post it to several Bookmark Sharing sites which KillerStartups lists under each article using a AddThis button. Let's see what happens, if anything.

Some of the sites were down or just too damn difficult to use, but I was able to post on most of them. For some reason, Digg.com had blocked KillerStartups so I couldn't post the link there (I guess some others had the same idea as I did...)

Anyways, if you are interested, go see these and spread the word!

del.icio.us/juhani
www.facebook.com/p.php?i=500082711&k=6VBTP6WRSWTB2FEEVEX3
joneshki.stumbleupon.com/
juhani.newsvine.com/_news/2007...ful-multiculti-social-networks
www.listio.com/web20/story.php?title=Xiha-Life-1
www.technorati.com/faves/jpolk...ser=jpolkko&start=0&show=blogs
bookmarks.yahoo.com/pages/fid/628
mystuff.ask.com (don't know how to link to the bookmark)
slashdot.org/~jpolkko/
www.simpy.com/links/search/xihalife
www.backflip.com/members/juhani/14371153
www.mister-wong.com/user/jpolkko/
www.netvouz.com/juhani
www.diigo.com/user/Juhani
segnalo.alice.it/juhani/ (The site is in Italian)
www.dropjack.com/user.php?login=juhani&view=history
www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=25554642
myweb.yahoo.com/myresults/ourr...rsrch&prssop=My+Web+%28beta%29
favorites.live.com/ (don't know how to link to the bookmark)
blogmarks.net/user/juhani
www.netscape.com/story/2007/09...ful-multiculti-social-networks
www.fark.com (what a crappy site...)
www.rawsugar.com/user_account/...rofile?search=&username=juhani
www.linkagogo.com/ (don't know how to link to the bookmark)
ma.gnolia.com/people/juhani
bluedot.us/users/juhani?st=tag...networking%22&show=95869931416
www.blinklist.com/juhani/

Submission didn't work on Reddit, Feed Me Links and TailRank.

Learnings so far:

1. The web is damn fragmented nowadays (but you should never underestimate the network effect in the long run and thus the hours spent in this submission project will likely pay back some day)

2. My "24Mbps" ADSL-connection feels so slow (high latency) that it's driving me crazy

3. Somebody come and get me out of the house on Saturday afternoons!!

Hey there! I'm Juhani and I'm taking care of the business here at XIHA Life.

I will be blogging about how we progress from the business and marketing perspective... For me this is kind of diary also and I will be quite open about our guerrilla marketing efforts and what kind of response we get.

Anyways, I will keep these short and sweet - hopefully you get something out of it too! Feel free to post your comments and message me whenever you have questions or advises - everything is warmly welcomed.

Cheers,

Juhani