Update: Ask500People is launched and sleep proves elusive.
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007After months of work we are finally off and running and boy does it feel good. The site is Ask500People.com - a tool for tapping into public opinion in real-time.
I hope you like it.
It’s 3:23AM by my laptop clock as I start writing this. I can’t sleep.
The East Coast is just coming online, and in a few hours we’ll have a much better idea if Ask500People is going to grow by word of mouth, and if so how fast.
Instead of an initial marketing blitz we’re doing a soft launch, telling a few friends about the site and hoping that word spreads. If it does take off, we’ll be happy we started off slowly because we’ll have more time to handle growth issues. There are technical challenges that we’ll encounter only once we start growing, and it’s easier to handle them when things are still moving slowly.
We told friends about the site to get things started, and initially we recognized everyone who came by to check it out. Ah there’s Jeremy. Oh, and Kim. Hey Kim.
After awhile we noticed a few people we didn’t recognize, which meant word was spreading a bit. “Hey, anyone know username X? No? Coooool.” On Tuesday we added a simple web counter so we could easily watch traffic and referrers:
Here’s visitors by hour. You can see where the counter was added to the page between 6-7PM PST yesterday.
Ok, I’m off to try to sleep again. (Yeah, right!)
