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About one week after launching Scoutle, May 8th, I started with a new, full-time job at Springer (English | Dutch). I was given a great opportunity there and am still very grateful. However, after the TechCrunch post, Scoutle took a huge jump and I can tell you this… You can’t have a full-time job when your startup has a speedy start.

I was working from 09-17 at Springer, rushed home and continued my day from 19-01 to work on Scoutle, knowing that some things had to wait till the next evening. There are a lot of things you need to fix as soon as possible in the first weeks after launching, even things you thought were just 100% right. As you can imagine, these kind of working hours are not something one can keep up… The weekends were even more crazy. At a certain point, I just didn’t want to answer the phone anymore… There are way to little hours in one day.

But well… After two weeks, I resigned but promised to stay until the end of June. I left with good understanding, which of course also is something valuable. So now, July 1st, I can focus myself on Scoutle again, 100%. Which is a great relief and helps me get a little more sleep as well. I’ve planned and had several meetings already, throughout the country because it is about time a final business model gets written. I have been contacted by and met several interested, and interesting, people that offered me to help and with help, I mean serious business. This I take very seriously because now it’s time to bring Scoutle to the next level… Let’s say, 100.000 users. And if possible, by the end of this year.

I am now working on a complete new version of Scoutle, having new features but also, a complete new design to help people understand and start using Scoutle quicker and easier. Also, this will help getting a team together. the me has to become we soon, these things can’t be done on your own.

So… serious business but I can’t wait to get started with it. I hope to get together a team soon, find some investor(s) and partners and launch the new version of Scoutle… all this, somewhere in the beginning of September. If you still have some suggestions or tips I should think of in the new version… don’t hesitate to contact me.

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.

I have not finished yet and will have to check variables used in the sentences but I think tomorrow I can finish it up.

It is very cool friends are so helpful. In this stage, all the help you can get is very welcome and needed. I sometimes think “No, I can’t ask him to do that.” or “No, I will not just start talking about this even though he knows people that can be useful.” However, if I want to make this startup a succcess… I will have to drive myself to it a little more.

Thanks again General!! And you even offered to help out by yourself. Very, very cool.

I spend a lot of time reading and replying reviews. Scoutle has had a huge rush because of all the press attention. But that press attention is gone as fast as it came. This was a very good start and test. It made me work very hard to optimize the scripts. However, in these Internet times one demands so much more in such little time that it’s hard to deal with. Of course, I am very happy with the current number of users but it needs to be let’s say 10 times as much to start working.

Current users claim to “attract only little more traffic from Scoutle”. However, Scoutle doesn’t want to bother anybody. Scoutle doesn’t spam all users to visit your blog, only suggests your blog to others that are likely to be interested. And it only suggests, which is a passive form as well, to current users. This may not be thousands of user and besides, after three weeks, I can’t deliver you thousands of new visitors every day. Don’t forget that users that found your blog through Scoutle may just as well bookmark your blog and come in directly, without passing Scoutle!!!

The benefits of Scoutle may not always be seen in your statistics. Scoutle will work better when the right amount of users is reached so I would like to ask all early adopters to have some patience. What I do take serious is a complaint that I found on a forum today. First of all, I would like to ask you to drop me a line first with any complaints you have, so I can fix it and won’t have to find it out myself. Anyway, the complaint was about users spamming other users to Connect. Without any form of common interest and users that just spam again.

This is a serious threat to Scoutle since Scoutle is all about finding interesting blogs and getting more interested users without having to do anything. What I will do, is maximize the number of open Connections. I hope this will make users think twice before “wasting connection requests”. If you reject a request, this will have a form of influence as well.
So again… Traffic that Scoutle brings may not always be visible in your statistics and Scoutle is still in beta with, when comparing to other networks, a very small network at the moment. Scoutle should not be harmful in any way so this I take very serious.

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!

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?

At first, there was only text and one logo. The pictures were introduced around January. So much programming, testing and thinking. Now I finally had a project, even though it was extremely hard to explain without having something to show, so many people offered to help me out. The algorithms, making a video explaining the project, people helped me translate, test, think and sometimes forced me to leave the computer for a moment.

The problem was… I couldn’t finish. I wanted more features, more things to do, more options for users… Networks were introduced in February although I wanted to go online that very same month.

On the other hand… Money was getting a real issue now. My girlfriend gave up the place she rented and took mine so I would not have any rent to pay anymore. My parents helped me out a bit and I made some websites for clients to pay the bills. I had to buy an license for Flash and rent a server. There was no budget for marketing or press releases.

But… Scoutle was developing! Still, people were not able to understand it since they couldn’t see anything but everybody was waiting patiently. I can’t say it enough… support, even when people say nothing, is really important.