killer startup?

as part of our marketing efforts i had written about buddystumbler on a site which allows the community to vote on startup ideas - killerstartups.com

the buddystumbler team obviously believes that our vision and idea has merit and potential. we have a good idea on how the site will grow in functionality and provide value to the user community over the next few months. the hardest thing about building this vision is time, considering all of us have full-time jobs. but even harder is to market and spread the word around. we do believe if we build something the community finds useful the site will grow.

however, other folks on killerstartups.com also thought that our idea has merit and will go far. that's nice validation.

i guess only time will tell.

rails 1.2, bug fixes, architecture updates, and invitations

Although it may not seem like it, the last couple days have been busy for Yim and I. After we implemented search by city, we later realized that clicking on next page would point you to all results. Quite annoying...

Well, we fixed it this past weekend and things really blew up. Apparently the blind search stopped working which slowed down our sign-ups dramatically (as well as overall system activity).

We finally have all the problems licked (and yes, if we only ran our unit tests before deploying these fixes we would have caught them).

On the architecture side, we've finally moved up to rails 1.2 and made some configuration changes with our e-mail delivery. We've done our best to make sure e-mails still work and the site in general is stable.

In the next couple of days, we'll be making some more changes to our e-mail infrastructure. We're planning to integrate the Plaxo Address Book API for our invitations, so that users can finally perform so-called "mass invites."

As part of our sign-up process, we'll also begin asking users to spread the word. In the early days, we used to prompt people to invite friends - but back in those days, we had less than 100 people and we were told it was presumptuous. Once we've rolled out these changes, both new users and existing users can invite their friends that are already in the address books of their gmail, yahoo, msn, or outlook clients.

We're hoping this will help generate more word of mouth so that eventually we can stop advertising on search engines altogether.

Because of all of these changes, we're really leaning on the user community to inform us if they see any problems with the site.

Please let us know if you see issues, and happy stumbling!

all quiet on the western front - until this weekend

I know things have been a little quiet since the server move. Truth be told, it took us a little while to get things setup. Our new hosting provider has been great though. If any one needs a host who understands Ruby on Rails deployments check out hostingrails.com. For the geeky, the site now uses three mongrel instances and features a capistrano deployment process as well.

Things won't be as loosy goosy as before where Yim and I would just hop on the server, pull the code and bounce it for an update - but we hope to avoid those situations where we perform a server update, make a mistake and then scramble to bring the server back up. We're also looking to integrate a more formal bug tracking system and possibly open it up to the user community to report issues.

This week, we hope to finally roll out the search by city feature which folks have voted for. From there, we'll begin the long steady march towards a new UI for buddystumbler. Yim may restart conducting user polls as well.

As some of you have noticed, the site now has reached over 1000 people and we're pleased as punch about this! System activity comes and goes but generally speaking we've seen steady growth on the positive side. We've seen more people sharing the site with their friends and we can't say enough that we need this sort of word-of-mouth advertising. As much as we can do to make buddystumbler a nice place to hang out, in the end, it's the community that makes or breaks a site.

Some of you have noticed that I've not been on IM as much as before, the main reason is that my real job has become quite hectic. So, unfortunately, I've needed to buckle down and focus. However, if you do see me online after work hours and I don't message you first - please don't be shy.

Finally, as we prepare for the next buddystumbler - I'd like to encourage the user community to send us new ideas on how they think the site could be better. Do you want other features? The ability to blog? The ability to post more pictures? The sky is the limit... but you need to let us know. :) Just use the contact us link at the bottom of every page.

Happy Stumbling!