Waking up to a mad morning
We woke up this morning in a bit of a situation. We opened up our company inbox, and discovered some 140 emails waiting to be answered: they were invite requests.
We decided to start as "invite only" mainly because we wanted to establish a 1:1 connection with our users. That's also why we asked you to actually send us an email, rather than filling in a form with your email address: we wanted to see how you would ask for an invite, have a look at your company's website and blog, and possibly start a conversation with you. We decided against having an automatic system to send invites by email for this very reason: we wanted to actually read the invite requests; we decided that we would stop requiring an invite when it became impossible to send them manually.
Well, we definitely had more that we could chew this morning. There we were: three of us trying to keep up with several invite requests per minute, wondering when and if it would eventually ease off, another one of us checking on the servers. What happened was that there was a review of Apollo in The Next Web.
The number of requests did eventually ease off (although it went back to the normal, just about manageable, flow of requests). But, it was quite funny: I generated the invites, and everybody in the office sending invites like there was no tomorrow.
Well, this is my chance to say "thank you". Thank you to you, our early adopters, who are giving us the best feedback ever. Thank you to Brad McCarty, who gave us a really good review and reminded us that breaking all the rules sometimes pays off. Thank you to everybody at Applicom, who sent tons of invites and took time to discuss every request and question that came by in the meantime.
Thank you all, for accompanying us in this great start.
Andrea