Official Scoutle Blog

Well.. A very good but also very kind friend from Canada (known as The General) has been correcting the over 2000 words, sentences and stories. It took him a lot of time and I am truly very, very grateful. Although I had to adjust all his corrections a bit due to a stupid little mistake I made in the translation application I wrote to make this work, this is truly great and hopefully a very welcome update for all of you.

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.

Most likely you will find my current emotions in all innovation books… The current early adopters are getting a bit impatient. Although I understand it, it’s so hard to fight or to make them feel different with the amount of time I find in a day.

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.

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?

I worked 7 days a week, full time on Wabble. Wabble was the name I gave this project for temporary use. By the time I went to bed, I couldn’t stop thinking of new features or how to improve it. I also thought about a name… so many names passed my head but I needed a name that was not listed in a dictionary and domain names being still available.

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.