Erli Bird is a website system designed to allow people to be among the first to ‘adopt’ or start using new sites and programs.
They provide news, as well as opportunities every week to get in on ‘startups’ that are companies or products and services that are just getting launched.
When I first checked out the Erli Bird site I was a bit baffled as to what it was and what the point of me being there was.
There’s no cute mascot to lead you on a tour through the site (not that I need it, but pop-up books were always my favorite) so you’re left to your own devices on figuring out what this site is and what it does.
Fortunately for you, my friends, I have blazed the trail and discovered the answers for you, described herein.
Erli Bird provides, essentially, chances for you to be among the first customers for startup companies or products. What does that mean, though? How does it work? Well, each week, Erli Bird promises to offer three to five new startup companies for you to try out. Each one will have a limited (usually) number of slots or available spots for new customers, so while there’s no standing in line, there is a limit to how many people can take advantage of each new startup. Now, I cannot guarantee that becoming customers of any of these startups is always going to be 100% free. Using Erli Bird to find out about them, however, is entirely free and that’s what I want to look at here, not the startups themselves (although many of them are free, in fact).
Erli Bird is an extremely interesting concept to me. While in the past people have often had bad experiences as first customers for startup companies or products, Erli Bird provides a sort of proving ground to act as a stepping stone between field testing and actual consumer data. Each startup, while gathering customers in whatever way they can, definitely benefits from Erli Bird’s involvement all the way up and down the line. While consumers can expect a more acceptable and less disappointment prone product, the startups can expect a more interested and invested grade of consumers for their first customer base. This is invaluable in bringing any new idea to life, much less to market, and Erli Bird does a nice job of bringing this kind of news and data to the average Internet user.
Currently, at the time of this post, Erli Bird has a sign up saying they are working on some exciting new things, and this could be a welcome enhancement from my point of view. While the site appears functional, it doesn’t endear itself to the eye or the heart. There’s little to recommend it, visually, but the concept is solid and presented in a fairly easy to understand manner. There are usually videos available to watch for each startup on offer, which provide information on the startups themselves and what they have to offer. Other than that, the site is pretty bare and simple. While this is nice because it doesn’t draw focus away from the whole purpose of the site, I doubt Erli Bird will become a mega site until it develops a more visually distinctive and engaging style.
While I wasn’t able to join any of the startups at the time of this post, I was able to explore the available information and navigate the site in general and found it to be of good quality without broken links or dead end threads. The concept certainly has potential and I look forward to seeing where it goes in the future. As a free source of niche news and information, I have a feeling it will be around for a while. Until next time, my friends.
Check out Erli Bird here.
