Official Scoutle Blog

Today is a special Scoutle day. First of all, Scoutle has been online for over 8 months but also today web-log.nl (largest blogprovider in The Netherlands) now fully supports Scoutle by having developed a so-called ‘Scoutle-BlogToy’ for their users.

It may not be a surprise that we are very proud. Not only will it be a lot easier for web-log.nl users to add a Scoutle Widget to their blogs, but it also helps us promote our service in the country where it all started.

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

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!

Today, June 8th, Scoutle has been online for one month. One month ago, I didn’t know how to get started. I hoped to have 2000 active users by August 8 but had no idea how I was going to get to this amount. I figured I might just had to email bloggers, like personal spamming, but I started with some posts on blogger forums. What happened can be read in previous posts.

For now, I am very happy with the result of one month. A lot of stress, a lot of opinions, hundreds of new users and a lot of press attention. More than expected. I do however know that now is the time to hurry. Current users will probably expect a lot of things to improve and if I don’t install new features, they might even just leave Scoutle again. Even though there’s nothing to loose staying in. What I need now is a community adopting Scoutle and I need to find a way to reach people that are not up-to-date on the latest Internet trends. You don’t know about Scoutle if the news doesn’t reach you.

I hope I can find less Internet related press attention. In magazines or local papers and sports clubs for instance. I also want to contact university magazines but it takes a lot of time.

Should I focus on interviews, which is more personal, or should I go for the “Scoutle explanation” stories?

Anyway, I will now focus more on non-English natives. The small group of Japanese users are meeting each other all the time now. But as long as Scoutle has not been translated into Japanese, only those who understand English can use Scoutle. But where to get the money to translate the site in Japanese? I also think about German, French, Spanish, Portugues, Chinese…

But well, in one month a lot has been reached. Hopefully, I can write even better stories in a post next month!

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.

Of course, you will have to have an idea of how your startup would look like, what it does, why people need it and why they would use it. But to get going you just as well think of how to get press attention by the time you’re online.

I started to think about new technologies and what would be cool as well. I wanted to support OpenID. Pretty new back then so I thought it would be cool for early adopters to try my startup, even though I didn’t even know what that would be by that time. I also read about guidelines. I found out that for people with sight disabilities, image controlled websites are very hard to navigate. So that made me want to have a text-based website. One that would also work in the Lynx browser. I also noticed that language is a barrier but brings people together as well –> I wanted my startup to be easy to translate in more languages.

I researched all sorts of websites, mostly those that were succesful and the ones that could have been a great success but had failed. Why? For instance, I decided I wanted a special Press Room (A reporter may like the idea of you thinking of him and help him out). I noticed that advertisements can only be done when users can hardly see them. I did not think of any business model, even though so many books told me I should.

I wrote down things I hated on websites I liked. Advertisements, obligations, privacy concerns and such. Although I may have written down a lot, most of those notes are gone. I may have lost them. But writing it down helps you think.