THE SITUATION

You probably know someone who likes to watch wild birds.  They are a huge and very social audience in the US.  47 million people in fact.  20 million watch birds a mile or more away from their home. They spend $816 per year on their birding activities.  Big Niche as I like to say.

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Prior to BirdFellow, they managed their digital activities across several applications.  They kept checklists of observed birds in Excel, told stories on Facebook, formed community knowledge sharing through Yahoo Groups, uploaded photos to Picassa, and looked for bird information in out-of-date books or on eBird. I founded BirdFellow to bring all these functions together under one premium product experience. 

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OUR APPROACH

Over a year, five developers two visual designers, eleven writers, two editors, and twenty photographers created the first social field guide on the web.  

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THE RESULT

A dream come true.  We launched it June 18th, 2010.  BirdFellow.com is still live today.  What you see there is the 1.0, or the first iteration.  And still, the design stands the test of time.  And, the idea is more viable today than the day we first thought of it in 2008.  Think about it, Facebook only had 500 million users in 2010.  Today, they have 2.8 billion.  As a result, web-based social daily active use is as common as our daily coffee. 

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