Official Scoutle Blog

I just found an online article of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad that refers to Scoutle. Although the article itself is not about Scoutle, who knows one day in the near future it will.

Scoutle, een ander nieuw Nederlands initiatief, selecteert net als The Filter automatisch. Scoutle, bedacht door Godfried van Loo, richt zich op webloggers. De site maakt gebruik van ‘robotjes’ die het web afstruinen op zoek naar gelijkgestemden. Bloggers kunnen met behulp van Scoutle andere bloggers vinden die over hetzelfde onderwerp schrijven. En lezers kunnen met Scoutle weblogs vinden over onderwerpen die ze interessant vinden. Scoutle gebruikt e-mail, rss-feed, of Twitter.

(Scan NRC Handelsblad 20 juni 2008)

Read the article

Yesterday, I had a pitch at the Mediapark Jaarcongres. About 600 people in front of me and on my left, five investors/critics that would ask me some hard questions after my 4 minutes pitch.

My day started at 06.00 meaning I had a great 4 hours of sleep, due to several reason. We had a breakfast session with one of the investors (great opportunity to ask questions) and the congress started around 10.00. I met some people I knew from my former job.
Around 14.00 it was my turn… Having explained Scoutle to mostly about 3 persons at the same time, I was pretty happy with the fact a huge light was blinding my eyes a bit. I could hardly look to crowd and it did actually made me less nervous, although it must still have been clear this wasn’t a daily routine.

The investors couldn’t really say anything since I could not present them a complete business model yet. Fortunately, I had already announced this in my presentation. Although I do have some ideas I still need to research them before I bring them out in the open. But they liked the idea, I received some compliments on being there on my own and having achieved what Scoutle has become already and are curious and interested to know how Scoutle will develop. One of them said my ambition of having 100.000 users next year was a bit low. To have that number go up, I would really need a bigger team and some investments of course but it is good to know an investor would like to hear more. They also stated that it is a bit hard to understand how it works and the website is not able to answer to this in a short period of time. I know this, I do need to work on it. I can’t just say “If you try it, you will understand it.” even though Scoutle is free to use.

But, they concluded with enthusiasm and one said to contact me later on and kept his promise.

After the presentation, people actually came to me and offered me help, free hosting and partnerships and such but also some just came to compliment me or talk about business models and their thoughts. Funny part was also I could see that during the questioning, new users registered! There were a lot of laptops with Internet in the room.

Hopefully, more press will write something about Scoutle in the near future. I hope printed press, like newspapers and magazines would. This will bring Scoutle over to those that may not read the digital versions.

Now, one day later, I have also received emails from other blog-related websites that want me to come over and see if partnerships can be arranged. All that, from just 4 minutes and a presentation.

Proud and nervous. Coming Tuesday I will present Scoutle to the Dutch Media specialists at the MediaPark JaarCongres. Still working on the presentation but there are so many other things to do. Hopefully, the press will start writing (in a positive way) about Scoutle so I can reach more bloggers that may not follow latest Internet trends all the time.

Yesterday I was contacted by interested and large blog communities. After one month after launch, this is a very nice thing of course. Hopefully in the future I can tell you more about this.

It seems like every positive thing that happens to Scoutle is followed by a less happy one. A huge number of attacks on the server yesterday slowed it down like crazy. I could only look at this. These attacks are a very common thing to happen. I almost get used to it. When looking at the log for the first time I had the idea the whole world was against me. However, I will need to find a way to deal with these attacks in the future.

An interview in MarketingFacts, a well-known and respected Dutch marketing blog, has just been released. An interview is a lot more personal than an article about Scoutle itself. Also, because it is MarketingFacts, it made me a bit proud but also a little nervous at the same time. I hope this will bring in more Dutch users but also to get more feedback on how to improve Scoutle. Maybe even from people in the place I live that may not know me nor Scoutle. How cool would that be!?
It’s a long story though but well!