Marcelo Calbucci

 

    I just published the new Seattle Startup Index on the Seattle 2.0 blog.

 

    After much debate, the list now uses both Compete and Alexa data, so the margin of error has just become astronomical.

 

    Sampa is now at 33, a drop of 9 positions. This drop doesn't worry us a bit, because of the new way we compute the rank now. For our own good we use Google Analytics and our own stats system and that tells a very different story.

 

 

 

   

 

    Is honest feedback something that you can ask from people, or, people cannot be taught how to do that? If somebody knows you, they usually will give you positive feedback to support your cause. If they don't know you, they are afraid of offending you, coming out as negative or simply have no interest in sharing what they really think.

 

    Here is Andy Sack (Judy's Book) writing about his meeting with Brandon DeCuir of Divvy, and giving him some feedback that you usually don't find out in the wild:

 

"...
They're trying a local social networking application that allows people in a location to share
...
I'm not sure if either of these ideas is really a great idea for a business (I don't think I'd pursue either of them) 
..."

 

    Wow! Actually, I retract the "wow". Andy is like that. I wonder why other investors, advisors, entrepreneurs, friends, employees, managers are not more like that. Why is it so hard to tell somebody what you really think?

 

    Entrepreneurs have tough skins. Be honest.

 

    On the past few months, a lot of people has asked me for my opinion on their new product, or their conference/event, or the business idea. I pretty much always send a length email feedback. However, from time to time I'm caught by surprise in a lunch, or gathering and somebody tells me what they are working on and I can't believe how lame it is, but I don't know how to tell them.

 

    I guess I haven't reached Andyness yet.

 

 

    Photography seems to be one of those hobbies the more you get to do it the more involved you get and the more people start to think your photos are pretty darn good and... "you should sell those". One might argue that most hobbies are like that.

 

    Until recently I always told friends to go to iStockPhoto, submit their pictures and see if they get any traction. After all, it takes a very short period of time to setup, upload and see what happens, no extra effort.

 

    Last year, a friend of mine (Kelly Smith) launched ImageKind, a place to frame and/or sell your pictures into framed art and/or buy framed art.

 

    Now I only recommend ImageKind.

 

    The reasons are very simple if you compare it to iStockPhoto. ImageKind is for consumers to buy pictures. iStockPhotos is for marketers, designers, PPT-makers to buy photos. ImageKind lets you decide what you want to sell. iStockPhotos decides what is a good picture and what is not.

 

    One of my friends submitted a beautiful artistic picture to iStockPhoto and it was rejected because just a small part of the picture was in focus, which was the whole point of that photo, but the iStockPhoto reviewer didn't get it.

 

    iStockPhoto revolutionized stock-photo transactions, making it simpler, faster and cheaper, but they are missing the whole "YOU" (user generated content) thing. They are an mediator where none is needed, just better algorithms to find what you are looking for.

 

 

    I just deployed the most risk piece of code on Sampa to date. It's a self-diagnostic app for our servers that try to recover in case of "issues". I should be cheering and every customer should be jumping happy that the service will be more reliable, so why am I so concerned, you might ask.

 

    Thank you for asking.

 

    My concerns come from seeing this self-diagnostic and self-recovery tools backfiring more often than it's useful. Take a big datacenter with a latest generation power generator. How many times your heard the story the first time the generator was needed it failed? How many stories of backups that didn't backup and when you need it failed? Or, the much worse case, when you tried to restore a single piece of data and it erased everything by mistake?

 

    If you worked on a datacenter you heard even more "stupid" stories of Cisco Routers or load-balancers doing crazy things to re-route traffic because they thought a server or router was down, when in fact it was a false positive. Or when Skype was offline for hours last week because they "recovering system" had a bug. Shit like this happens all the time.

 

    But last Friday we had a "bit scary" moment. One of our servers become inaccessbile and no site hosted on that server could be reached. It took about 2 hours to find out the server was down, for me to take a quick peak and diagnostic the service as a network issues, reboot the server and everything went back to normal.

 

    But what if it had happened at 11PM and we would only have noticed in the next morning? What if it had taken me 4 hours to figure out the issue instead of just a few minutes?

 

    This is where self-diagnostic and self-healing is quite powerful, but it must be done very carefully to avoid false positives.

 

    My experience with MSN Search downtime is that 90-95% of all downtime during a year occurs because of Network Issues, including: DNS misconfiguration, Router/Switch issues, Top-tier Internet traffic router going down, scheduled upgrades/maintenance that go awry, etc. Quickly diagnosing the issue is the number 1 priority for anyone maintaining servers. The next step is to quickly fix the issue.

 

    So, I'm building knowledge of issues like this and with time we will improve what things we diagnose, how the service reports them back to us and what things we can take an automated action to fix, like restarting a service or rebooting the server.

 

 

    Yesterday I went to the Entrepreneur Round Table at the Alliance of Angel. This is the new thing Alliance is trying to do: connecting entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs. Before it was all about connecting "angels investors" with entrepreneurs.

 

    The event was ok. I had some mixed feelings about it. The venue is good (there offices), the food and drink ok. There was about 1 hour of networking before the round table started and it was a bit packed so you couldn't really circle around. I talked with Jordan Mitchell (Others Online), Max Ciccotosto (Wishpot) and a few others faces.

 

     The most interesting part was the rate of entrepreneurs to angel investors of 100:1. Since there was just about 100 entrepreneurs there, the only angel investor was Geoff Entress. It was a funny situation after the Round Table ended, I went to Geoff to say hi (since we always meet at events like these anyway) and before I could blurb one or two phrases there was a line of about 10-15 people (a.k.a. desperate-entrepreneur-trying-to-raise-money) waiting to talk to him. I felt pressured at let him talk with them and a bit sorry for him. He'll probably be getting a dozen or so business plans, by end of the week.

 

    The Round Table itself was Andy Liu, CEO and co-founder of BuddyTV, and Sharelle Klaus, CEO and founder of Dry Soda, and Geoff Entress, Principal at Madrona, moderating it.

 

    Now, who has ever attended a round table about knitting and roadsters?

 

    Oh, right, that never happened.

 

    Besides Andy and Sharelle being entrepreneurs, the similarities ended there. There business model was completely unrelated to each other, the way they raised money was different (and it had to be), their product had no correlation. Any could clearly see that difference by the questions being asked, "What do you think about carbon-footprint on bottled water?", Sharelle being on top of her game would answer that, but she failed miserable at "What kind of affiliate deals you did on your Internet site early on?". She was mute.

 

    You get the point.

 

    As an entrepreneur with a very busy schedule (mostly working on creating a product and a company) I find myself irritated when I waste time with things that I shouldn't have. I didn't feel the AoA event was a waste of time, but it could have been (much) better if the theme was around a specific industry, business model or a more narrow topic.

 

    I gave this same feedback for another person organizing a similar event that I attended. If you want to create connections between entrepreneurs there has to be a common ground with these entrepreneurs. For me, and I know this might sound arrogant, but I want to learn from people that built or are building Internet companies, preferably with a "freemium" business model and doing Web 2.0 user-generated content. Sodas? I drink those.

 

 

    Two firsts for me today. I'm working today from the Seattle Public Library and I just tried the new Bloglines.

    I know, it's a shame that I've never been to the Seattle Public Library before. The building is new and it has become a landmark in Seattle. It has a quite modern architecture. Too modern on my opinion. And it has a lot of art spread throughout the space.

    The new Bloglines is a work of art. Not only it finally has some beautiful bits, but I'm very glad they didn't abandon the concepts they offered before. I was afraid they were trying to become Google Reader, which for me is just confusing. Besides the beautiful UI, the second most obvious aspect of the new Bloglines is the speed. Refresh to check for new content is amazingly fast. They finally got it how to implement AJAX. The downside is that it doesn't seem to work on IE6 (I need to have IE6 to test Sampa).

UPDATE: First of all, Clearwire had nothing to do with this. Second of all, John contacted and informed he got my email from a referral, so I jumped too fast to say this was a mass spam technique. It was just one person emailing a few people for business, like we do everyday with our friends.

 

    I just received a Spam Email from "my" Clearwire authorized representative in my region, John Kehrli.

 

    I just hate when companies try to Spam me. Particularly when I have no affiliation and my email was gathered through some shady technique, like scrapping sites for my email address.

 

    Dear Clearwire, this is a really bad start for you. Don't let your customer acquisition strategy be based on hateful methods.

 

    Yesterday was our all time record for new users in a single day.

 

    It was also the record for number of visits to Sampa.com, which always correlates to the number of sign ups, obviously.

 

    We are breaking so many records in terms of Visits, Page Views, Sign Ups, Unique Users, and other important data points that I'll refrain from writing about them every time it happens otherwise I would be writing twice a week on this blog. The obvious observation is that breaking records every week is what growing companies do, so it's not big news.

 

    I'll write every time we reach big number milestones, like 1,000 this, or 1,000,000 that, etc.

 

 

 

    Did you ever presented at the Alliance of Angels over the past few years? If so, they are organizing an Entrepreneur Round Table for the first time this Monday for people that presented at their luncheon.

 

    AoA is definitely trying to change to fit the "new world". Not only they have to adapt to the success Keiretsu is having, but also to all the successful entrepreneurs get together going on out there, like the Lunch 2.0, the Open Coffee, NWEN and others formal and informal groups.

 

    Anyway, if you are interested in attending the event it will be Monday, from 5 to 7 PM, but you must first confirm eligibility and presence with Rebecca Lovell ([her first name]@technology-alliance.com).

    We just released a brand new sampa.com website.

    We are also running an A/B Test with two images to see which performs better at converting new users.

 

    Does Sampa have the best customer or what?

 

    During Gnomedex I end up meeting lots of people and lots of informal conversations. Inevitably, one of my discussions will be about photography and I'll talk to the other enthusiast about iStockPhoto (not good) and ImageKind (good), and we talk about full-frame sensors, the usual geek photographer stuff.

 

    The person I was talking to was Ross Button. Not only he is an enthusiast of photography (with more than 80,000 digital pictures on his HD!), but he is also is a practical photographer and share some of his picture on SmugMug. He told how he takes pictures of a little league and send the parents a link with the password to access it and I told about the great features around email and privacy that Sampa has. So, he signed up for the service, but couldn't access his website. Oh, oh.

 

    He's not the first one to have such a problem. At least 1 customer every week has this problem and report to us, probably more than that have the same problem but doesn't report to us. Not to get too technical, but I always knew it had something to do with my own implementation of a DNS Server and something in the IPv6 stack on Windows. Uninstalling the IPv6 protocol on the client would make everything work.

 

    I Googled for it, searched MSDN, post a blog about it, pinged my friends at Microsoft, but couldn't find anything. For the past 3 months this bug had been haunting me. But as with any Startup, I have 1,000 things to take care of and I can't stop to dedicate my time to just one problem, so I stopped looking.

 

    But Ross was persistent. He is a techie as well and he kept banging the what's-the-deal key, and then... Bingo! KB Article 815,768 on MSDN: Application Cannot Resolve Some Domain Names. All that I had to do was to reply the AAAA record with an A record! Argh! (Too geek, I know)

 

    The point is...

 

    Does Sampa have the best customer or what? Yes, we do!

 

    Thanks Ross!

 

 

PS: All customers that were having problem accessing the site, the issue has been resolved. Thank you for your patience.

 

   

 

    I just put a long and thoughtful post on Seattle 2.0 about how to create a website that will meet your customer's needs.

 

    Here is a summary of the steps:

1. Identify the site customer
2. Identify what the customer wants
3. Create personas
4. Identify what you want them to do
5. Get a pen and paper and diagram your site
6. Start sketching the website
7. Layout, Text and Graphics
8. Go live, get feedback, repeat (free bonus step) 

    Let me know what you think and feel free to Digg, Dot-it, del.icio.us, link to it, etc.

 

    Check out the Seattle Times on Sampa Family Tree.

  

   

 

    Check out Mashable and their review of the Sampa Family Tree builder.

 

    The last few weeks have been really hard. I wanted to tell the people about our new feature but couldn't. This is one of the reasons that my blog has been at a low post per week rate and why the Sampa blog has been numb for more than a month. Sampa didn't even send the monthly newsletter in July (why bother our customers if we didn't have anything new to say?)

 

    Anyway, now the Sampa Family Tree is out there you can check it out.

 

    First of all, this is not your father's family tree (no pun intended). This is a new generation of family tree. Before, and for a millenia or more, family trees have been about how many generations back can you go, your pedigree, data that was only interesting for the Family Tree geek type.

 

    The new Family Tree is about the connecting the family. Is about having contact information for the members of the tree so they can easily access the family address book.

 

    Here are some of the highlights of the Sampa Family Tree:

• You can start your family tree by importing your Address Book.
• You have a Wizard that let you quickly start your family tree up to 4 generations in a single screen.
• Anyone can edit people's information or add new persons to the tree.
• Contrary to other Family Trees, all changes are moderated by the site owner (No 'funny' drunk uncle messing up your tree).
• The Family Address Book can be accessed in a single page, and is protected by our privacy system.
• The Family Tree works on your favorite browser, as well as on your smart phone (iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, etc.)
• Why add just 1 picture per person? You can have a "Picture Story" with up to 3 pictures for the person at different ages. For example, you can have a baby picture, a high-school picture and a thirty-something picture.
• You have multiple Privacy "knobs" for your family tree. Who can see it? Who can edit it? Who can view the address book? etc. It's not an "all-public" or "all-private" thing.

 

    For the geeks in all of us, here is what doesn't matter:

 

• The entire tree works with or without JavaScript. That is why you can see on "dumb" browsers, like Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. It basically took two code version, one on the server and one on javascript to make it work.
• The tree navigation is all AJAX.
• I took extra care to make navigation very snappy, by preloading necessary information, delay loading unnecessary and minimizing the number and size of HTTP requests.
• We still have lots of features to add. The list is long.
• Take a special look at the "Lookup Person" functionality. People will appear as you start typing the names insanely fast. How? No server call.

 

    The features clearly missing are:

 

• Import/Export family tree
• Geo-tagging (where was each person born, where she lives now)
• Different view modes for the tree
• Marriage information (date, location, etc)

 

    I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.

 

  

 

    The shorter version of this post is that I have a new Facebook profile. If you added me before you'll need to add me again.

 

    The longer version started just after FB launched their new Platform API. Sampa decided to fit the application to work inside Facebook. The first step to create a Facebook application is to get an Application Key, and to get an application key you need to install the "Developer" application into your profile. All Keys created would them be associated with that profile.

 

    It sounded quite weird for me because a Profile is a representation of a Person, and an Application is a representation of a product which is usually owned by a business entity. If I create a successful Facebook application and want to sell it later I can't do that unless I transfer my Facebook Profile as well, since the App would be deleted and all users removed if you remove it from your profile.

 

    So, I went and created a second profile on Facebook besides my own for "Sampa Corp". We launched the application and all was happy. Until someone on Facebook said Profiles cannot have company names so they name it "Marcelo Calbucci". Now there was two "Marcelo Calbucci" on Facebook and my friends were sometimes inviting one, sometimes the other.

 

    Today I decided to fix the situation. I deleted my original profile and "moved" all my information to the "Sampa Corp" profile, which was renamed "Marcelo Calbucci" and now that is my new profile.

 

    Yesterday night I went to the party at the Seattle Aquarium. It was pretty good. Good food, good drinks, the setting was great, weather was perfect. Although, when you are Brazilian and you say party it means lots of dancing, drinking and making out. None of that here, except by moderate drinking.

    So far I'd define Gnomedex as a networking event, but not as a traditional conference. The presentations yesterday were barely acceptable, except by Guy Kawasaki's. I'm wishing for something better today.

    Jason is an interesting guy. He certainly likes attention, either good or bad. His new startup, Mahalo, is pretty... pretty... lame. I see so many problems that I probably need more time to write a full blog entry about the things that won't work with it.

    Either way, when you start justifying a new business "we want to go back to 1994 feeling when all the sites were good" it's not the right start. Going back is never a good plan. Sorry.

    A lot of uninteresting talks. The comments and questions are even worse. Lots of useless, pointless and self-serving questions and comments.

    A lot of ego around here.

    Guy Kawasaki gave talk on the Art of Evangelism. Very good. Guy knows how to work an audience. I've heard many of those points before, but it's always good to hear them again.

    After that was lunch, and, OMG (my teenager side speaking)... The food was so good that is hard to believe this is a tech conference.

    Now the lunch panel is about to start.

    Robert Steele is talking about "Open Everything". The presentation started in a good tone comparing the expenditures of War and Peace. But then...

    I have a problem with anybody that is against proprietary technology. Most people are reasonable and believe that there is a place to proprietary and to open, more specifically proprietary and open source.

    When somebody tells me that "every code should be open", then he is not allowing me to decide what is best for my code or for my company, he's being a dictator. You can't talk about open transparency and yet force people to be transparent.

    You cannot force people into believing what you believe. That is communistic, fascistic, dictatorial, slavery.

    Robert Steele is clearly a very smart guy, he has a lot of good insights, but some of his opinions and suggestions are just fundamentally broken.

    Yesterday was the opening party at Gnomedex. Pretty interesting crowd made of geeks, lots of entrepreneurs, journalists and bloggers. The food was well above expectations for me. There was an open bar until around 9PM (after that we've passed the $2K budget). I've met about 15 or so people on the first night. So far Gnomedex is on track to be a very successful event for me.

    One thing that I learned yesterday after talking with a few startups is that some people don't realize how small their product/company is. There is this self-importance factor that a lot of entrepreneurs don't get it. I'll elaborate more on that later.

 

    But just for 3 days while I attend Gnomedex.

 

    I'm hoping to meet lots of interesting folks there and learn one or two new things about the world wild Internet.

 

    Yesterday I went to Ignite Seattle again. The event was insanely packed. The room was hot, the crowd was wild and the presentations were far better than the previous instances.

 

    The one thing I must say if you are going to present on the Ask Later sessions (20 slides in 5 minutes), is not to try to cram as much words in 5 minutes, but to deliver the best information about your topic in 5 minutes. Pick just 3 points that you want to get across and build on that. I see the same mistake over and over again, where people try to have 20 slides each with a different content and they try to speak as fast as they can for that content.

 

    I'll be at Ignite Seattle tonight.

    For the last 6 days Sampa's Alexa Ranking has been 46,465. Alexa computes the ranking daily. For the value be the same for a 6-day period would be such a coincidence that the universe would implode. The most likely case is they have a bug/problem on their system and the overall ranking is not being computed.

    Check the Seattle Startup Index 6 days ago and check Alexa today. Both rankings match. Weird.

 

    This Thursday, Friday and Saturday (8, 9 and 10 of August) is Gnomedex 2007. I'll be attending and I hope it to be valuable for the amount of money, but most importantly, the amount of time I am allocating for this.

 

    I polled quite a few entrepreneurs, investors and bloggers about Gnomedex and I've got some mixed results at the value of this event. I've never been to one, so not only I can't say if it'll be worth, but I need to go so I can tell my friends about it later.

 

 

Sneak Peek

 

    Now, if you are a blogger, reporter, journalist or geek and want a private demo of Sampa cool existing features, or some of the super cool new features we are working on, just shoot me an email and I'll be more than happy at give you a demo. The only requirement is that you have at least 1 reader on your blog (counting yourself, of course)

 

    For the first time today we reached 100,000+ pages indexed on Google for all Sampa sites. That is pretty awesome.

 

    I just got back from Lunch 2.0, an event coordinated by Joshua Maher where entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 companies get together for lunch and to discuss their companies, products, challenges and more.

 

    This event was held at Wishpot of my friend Max Ciccotosto. Not only they provided the space, but Max cooked the lasagna which was pretty decent. I think in Italy you must take a few semesters of cooking classes in college otherwise you don't graduate.

 

    As always on events like these you see the usual faces like Hans Omli (Entering Startup), Nathan Kaiser (nPost), but I've got to meet a few new people as well like Nathan McFarland (CastingWords) and John Musser, the all powerful owner of ProgrammableWeb.

 

    I also met Kabir Shahani, former BlueDot employee, now founder of Appature. He went from a consumer play (BlueDot) to an enterprise-marketing/sales management play. That is pretty far from one another on the high-tech spectrum.

 

    Three companies presented for a few minutes. Max gave an inside scoop on an upcoming feature for Wishpot (which I can't say otherwise it might spoil their big launch coming soon). Snapvine also presented, which is a product that is on a pretty "hot" space w/ mobile and teenagers. And the last company was ZenZui, which is an app for your smart phone that makes it look very much like the iPhone, although, to their credit, they have been doing it before the iPhone was launched and it looks pretty neat. I want to install it on my phone today.

 

    I hope to attend new instances of this event and help foster a stronger startup/entrepreneur community in Seattle.

 

    Nathan Kaiser from nPost invited me to participate (and present) at his Entrepreneur Round Table event that he's organizing -- this time was the second edition.

 

    This is a very interesting event where just a handful of entrepreneurs sit together to discuss one of their businesses. This time, Sampa was selected and everybody gave feedback on it. At this event I had the opportunity to talk to Tony Wright (from RescueTime), Matt Cassarino (CoolToors) and Nathan himself.

 

    For the longest time I have the feeling that nobody can help more an entrepreneur than another entrepreneur. It's a matter of empathizing with what you are going through, understand the obstacles and know the outcomes of certain decisions before you make them. If you don't know what doing X will do for your business, maybe another entrepreneur knows exactly what will happen.

 

    If Nathan invites you to participate, go for it. Not only you'll get to know a few new folks, but you'll definitely learn something new that you can do to improve your business.

 

    This is not about speech recognition or voice synthetisers. This is about why my computer doesn't send me an email when it needs some attention.

 

    Let me give you an example. The only way to find out if your computer is running out of disk space is when you try to copy or install something and fails, or if you go to your disk and check its usage. Now, it may very likely be that an event was logged on the Event Log, a very non-friendly tool that every Windows OS uses to record warnings and errors on the computer.

 

    Why not send me an email? When I setup my computer I would be more than happy to provide 1 or 2 email addresses for my computer to contact me if it needs some attention. Now, dear engineer that is going to implement this feature, I don't want to know that it lost connectivity with the Internet, or that application XYZ crashed, or all the other annoying notifications that every single application give to you.

 

    I want to know only the important stuff. Only the stuff that requires my immediate attention.

 

    Another example besides the disk-full would be when my daily backup fails. I have this external hard-disk and I created a little batch job that compresses and saves all my files on the external hard-disk. I tell my wife when the house is on fire to get the kid, get the cats and get the external hard disk and run. That's how important it is to me. Now imagine after the fire I found out the last successful backup was 2 months ago. The job was failing day after day yet my computer never told me.

 

    These are the events I would likely to be sent an email about:

 

• Disk is full
• Bad sector found on disk
• CPU fan or powersupply fan failed (or is about to fail)
• Room temperature is too hot or too cold to operate safely
• Backup failed
• Virus/trojan found
• Unusual Network activity (SMTP bot?)
• Unusual CPU activity (100% for too long).
• Critical updates not installed successful (or pending installation)
• Disk needs to be defragmented

 

    That would make my life so much easier and give me more trust into computing in general. Wasn't this what Trustworthy Computing was all about?

 

 

 

 

    

 

    Simple, just create a board for your organization with 35 members!

 

    Can you imagine what a metting or conference call of the WSA is?

 

    Why don't they create a board of 5-6 members and have 30 advisors? That would seem more logic to me... But wait, that wouldn't look as good on the resume of those 35 people and then Microsoft would complaint they only got an advisory position, while Google got a board sit, yada, yada, yada.

 

    We managed to increase our email confirmation rate from 69% to 85% in just three months. How did we do it?

 

    First of all, if you have not used Sampa, when you sign up on sampa.com we require that you confirm your email address (you get a message with a link) before you can start creating your site. This is quite common between some services, not on others.

 

    On our case, we must do that, otherwise spammers and sploggers (?) would be creating fake blogs and sites on Sampa and pointing at their content just to improve their ranking on Google and Technorati. So we can't really eliminate this hurdle on the sign up process. (Note: some blog platforms and site creation tool don't have that, and they get lots of spammers).

 

    Back in February/March, when we had less than 70% of users confirming their email address, we thought that was pretty high number of users that sign up for the service and yet never got to confirm the link. So back then I did an investigation to what was causing it and the usual suspects appeared, typos on the email addresses, fake email addresses, being caught on Junk Email, etc.

 

    Fixing a few of those, we've got our confirmation to go from 69% to 79% in two months. By 79% still felt quite low. I mean, 20% of the people that sign up never got a chance to try the service. That is very disappointing.

 

    Recently, our rate jumped from 79% to 85% (last two months) and I have absolutely no idea why.

 

    The point here is that you should assume at least 10 to 15% of the users that sign up for your service/site are using unreachable email addresses.

   

 

    We hit pretty far out of the park this month. Our unique visitor growth was 51% and our Page View not only hit, but surpassed the 1MM mark. One month we were below a million, the next month we blow past it.

 

    At this point we have enough traffic to measure with a very low margin of error how changes on the website (sampa.com) or the service (individual sampa sites) affect visits, page views, sign up, viral, etc.

 

    Notice that the number of Pages served *excludes* all search engines, crawlers, bots, feeds, email images, Ajax or any suspicious requests. We are very conservative on that front. They do include all traffic to our three categories of traffic: sampa.com, Sampa sites, and Design sites.

 

   

 

PS: With this kind of traffic, we know for a fact that would put Sampa on the top 10 Seattle Startups on Alexa, but we are #24. Why? One word, I mean, one tag: IFrame.