Yesterday I sent out a FeedLounge newsletter to the people who had filled out the form for more information/beta test. I included a brief synopsis of what we’re doing and working on, and also offered alpha spots to the first 100 people to reply1.
I somewhat underestimated the response that would get. Scott called me about a half hour after the e-mail went out:
What the heck did you do?
Huh?
There are 500+ unread messages in my Inbox!
Oh, yeah… that. 
At this writing, I still have 500 replies to read and they keep coming, even though I posted that we were full on the FeedLounge blog about 10 minutes after I sent the e-mail. We’ll see how things go once these new folks have gotten settled in - we might be able to let more in.
One of the things I asked in the newsletter was how much people would be comfortable paying for the paid features of FeedLounge. This was an intentionally vague question as I was curious where people would go with it.
So far, the majority of people have indicated that they are willing to pay for a service like FeedLounge assuming they like it and feel there is sufficient benefit over free options. While this is certainly not a sampling of the general internet populus, it does give us confidence that we are indeed building a viable service.
- Since we have more capacity on the new alpha server. [back]
Popularity: 4% [?]
Pascal Bourque adds this Comment:
Alex,
Will you reply to everyone, even those who did not make the top 100? Or post on FeedLounge’s blog when the 100 spots have been filled, so people that did not get a reply will know for sure that they did not make it…
Reason I’m asking is that I’ll be away from work (parental leave) for around a month and I will need a feed reader to use from home. I’ve been hoping for weeks to make it to FeedLounge’s alpha/beta in time because that is the reader I’d like to use!
July 20th, 2005 at 8:12 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Once invites have been sent out, I’ll be posting that on the FeedLounge blog.
July 20th, 2005 at 9:44 am
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
FeedLounge Investment
I continue to get responses trickling in from last week’s FeedLounge newsletter mailing. Many of these responses include answers to our “what is a fair price for FeedLounge” question. All of the feedback is very valuable information for us to have -…
July 26th, 2005 at 12:54 pm