Official Scoutle Blog

Of course, it was great having so many more new users. The algorithms were doing OK, although I rewrote them a bit later on. But Scoutle needs a lot more users to work well. But now it is hard to get more press attention so new users are a lot more rare.

Scoutle has been getting more press attention and some of the bloggers in Scoutle have written about Scoutle and asked their visitors to use Scoutle as well. I made new Stages because some are not allowed to use Flash widgets in their blogs or just don’t like the animated Stage.

New users!!! Come and join! There is hardly any reason not to anymore!

Around 11AM I was working on a new feature (Scoutle Updates) when an email came in a new user just registered a Scout. I rushed myself to see who it was! It was Inquisitr from Australia. I was very happy Scoutle had reached the other end of the world

I continued to work and about an hour later another new user registered. That was two within an hour! Great! But all of a sudden… More, and more and more… about 8 new users every minute! I had no idea what was happening. I checked the Statistics, but they were not up te date. Where did all these users come from?

I searched in Google and found it… A post on TechCrunch was ‘to blame’ and that post was written by that very same Inquisitr.

Now, I don’t know how to describe that moment. I was kind of shaking a bit. I called people, couldn’t really speak well, I was laughing, I remembered the moment half a year ago that I almost gave up… It was such a weird but fantastic moment!
Now the real testing started. After some hours I noticed the server was getting very slow. I have never programmed so fast. I almost rewrote the way the meetings were stored but that still didn’t help.

I probably lost a lot of users in this period as well because the site was slow and things didn’t really work. It was the ultimate test but I just couldn’t work harder. I received emails from people I didn’t know, I got messages from people I had last seen years ago that congratulated me, job opportunities, companies that were interested in my user database and algorithms… It was crazy, but that moment made all those months worth it!

Of course, this was a very exciting moment. I registered the domains scoutle.com/net/nl in January and .mobi and .info in March. The nameservers were changed to the new server, I had to learn all sorts of things to make sure email would arrive (spf records, domainkeys, senderID program, reverse DNS). It was not aware of so much stuff to think about so that slowed things down big time.

I wanted to go online May 8th. Why? In 2006 I knew it would take at least one year to develop so 2008 was the year my startup would go online. Also this year is not a real coincidence… I wanted 2008 to become ‘my year’ because, and I know this may be a bit stupid, my birthday is 08-08-08 this year. So going online May 8th would give me exactly 3 months before the ‘critical date’.

So May 8th my Alexa Rank was about 20 million and nobody nobody knew from Scoutle. There were about 5 users… I posted some posts in blog forums and some were removed almost instantly. I can’t blame them… They didn’t like someone coming in and starting to advertise a website right away. One Forum however, Authority Blogger Forum, gave me the opportunity to promote Scoutle and the first users I did not know, registered. I was watching those registrations almost live…. It was so cool to see people that I never met were trying out a service with hardly any users.
The real early adopters that don’t wait until Scoutle proved itself…

I checked the database all the time but new users were very rare. I made a little script that would send me an email when a new user registered so I wouldn’t have to check the database all the time.
My email Inbox wasn’t very busy. I continued to work on the scripts and think of new features. I needed Beta testers before sending out press releases or I might loose interested users in case the scripts or server wouldn’t function the way they should.

Those were weird days… Why does nobody register and on the other hand, why do they?