Starting off with a b(ang)eta
On Tuesday February 21 the Sydney Morning Herald published a rather glowing article about us. We’d prepared for our first, small amount of public attention by creating a sign up form announcing that we were in beta, and expected about 500 people to wander by and ask for an account (about as much as our current server can handle). We weren’t, however, prepared for the tidal wave.
Three days later we had tens of thousands of signups, over 100 news articles linking to us; thousands of tweets doing the same. We’d made it to the top of Hacker News and the demo server that we’d thrown together 24 hours before launch was melting. OK, great start.
We love that our ideas have resonated with so many people. Thank you for such infectious enthusiasm and encouragement. It’s a great validation of the work that we’ve done so far and it makes us so, so excited for what the product is going to be. However, that amount of attention places different problems before us than the ones we were expecting.
So now … now we have to find a way to get everyone who signed up on, and that requires a lot of scaling. A lot of scaling, a lot of servers and a lot of coding. Scaling, servers and coding all cost money, so that’s what we’re scrambling to do now: while slowly letting people on we’re meeting with investors who can help us grow our business to meet the demand. And it’ll take a little while. The time that we’re taking to talk to investors is less time we have to work on the product, so we want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible and get back to the product.
As we mentioned, we’re slowly letting people on, but it’s slooow. We would love, love, love to share Fluent with everyone, but to get through our current queue will take a couple of months, so hold tight. We’re getting there.
