Welp, after months of silent development where it looked like I dropped off the face of the planet, I’m proud to announce my latest venture VITY is live for its “official” private beta! With VITY, we (yes, WE) plan to empower advertisers and social influencers to connect with each other, make their own promotions, collaborations, and deals,  and generally make social marketing as painless as humanly possible. And this is the world’s first peak at all our hard work (sigh… yes. OUR work).

It started back around early October 2014, or thereabouts. Right when I was knee deep in getting MojiTrac  ready for its own Functional Beta actually. The timeline’s sorta fuzzy,  my memory sucks from a healthy and fun life, but it’s a combination of a buddy waxing about a “what if” and a new friend mentioning a problem she was having that we all collectively knew we could solve. Your classic chicken or egg problem. Regardless, whether it was Stephanie telling us about how weird it was being a model and gain social advertising, or Jacob pontificating about a marketplace to connect advertisers and social influencers, the idea took hold pretty fast. We can do this. Pretty fast too…

So, who the hell are “we”? We are a partnership between me, Eric Lamb (mithra62), my friends at Mineral,  and a couple (*voice tails off in mumbles…*). I’ll let them introduce themselves if/when they want to, but for now, suffice to say VITY is a partnership with a team of developers, designers, and management, ready to “shake things up” (<= edited for “professionalism”). If you want to check out the ol’ bona fides we’re pretty easy to track down.

So here we are. Ready for beta. A private beta, so this is just between us for now, ok?

If you’re reading this, first, thanks! I can’t tell you how excited I am to have users FINALLY in the system. About damn time. To say this has been a trial is an understatement. The messed up part though is that regardless of how tough it was to get here we’re not even close to being done. That’s where you come in. VITY works great for us! We,  internally, freaking LOVE it. But what the hell do we know? Every ugly baby has a parent who thinks it’s beautiful so we figure we need your help to pretty this baby up.

Second, know that everything works.  This isn’t one of those “we’re broken but whatever” type previews. VITY works. What you see should be functional. Does it work well? We think so, but you tell us. Does it look good? Absolutely. Does it look good on every device and setting that users in the wild use? No clue. How’s it work for you?

Last, keep in mind that at this stage VITY is a constant work in progress. We’re FAR from done here. Even while the beta’s going on we have new features and functionality planned for release and will keep you abreast of any changes to the platform so there shouldn’t be any surprises.

For feedback, we have a little widget off to the side that’ll allow you to give notes, take screenshots, highlight trouble areas, and so forth. Anything you want to let us know about please don’t hesitate.