If you know about any other press related ‘Scoutle moments’… let us know!

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So, not only a special day.. but actually a fantastic day!

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We celebrate this anniversary by launching a new and far more intelligent widget, called Dynamic. This new widget is actually a small version of your personal Scoutle blog profile. Also, in this new widget we allow your visitors to navigate directly to other blogs, bypassing the Scoutle profiles.
Of course this will drive less traffic to the Scoutle website but we are more interested in helping you, our users, to get more visitors. Of course we hope you will help us and the Scoutle community out by writing/blogging about Scoutle and invite all your friends to join as well. This will help you get more traffic as well because the more people/Scouts can find your blog, the more visitors you can welcome.

We would like to recommend all our users to replace your current stage with the new Dynamic widget. The Google Gadget and other plugins are ready.

Coming weeks we will launch new services and we STRONGLY reccomend you to submit your RSS Feeds inside Scoutle or you may miss some features and traffic!

Today a video-interview came online with Scoutle Founder Godfried van Loo at the Dutch website nuzakelijk.nl

To watch, go to:

Bedrijven van NU : Scoutle

Today a big article about Scoutle has been published in the Dutch newspaper “Financieel Dagblad”, let’s say the Dutch Financial Times. A nice article I’m very proud of. They have also made a nice illustration of how Scoutle works that we may use to create one for ourselves to show (future) users.

The reporter also contacted CEO of Blogcatalog and is quoted to “find Scoutle a nice invention”.
A nice article that will get a nice place on the wall here! Buy the paper today, read it online at www.fd.nl or read it here:

Scoutle.com in the Dutch newspaper “Financieel Dagblad”

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.

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.

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.