CandidCapital

It's a nerve-wracking business; waiting to see whether a new web service can grow virally!

We started to open up the Psonar website to users from the wild last week (perhaps not-so-wild, since most had come via mailing to our own and friends' Facebook contacts). Nonetheless, the majority are users whom we don't know directly and who haven't been aware of Psonar previously.

We've been letting them in in batches, typically 50 at a time, to make sure that we don't overwhelm the system and can identify and rectify any problems without a catastrophic loss of service. The data looks encouraging:

with 71 users logged-in so far from 124 invited to do so. Among them the service has already identified over 110,000 tracks they will be able to manage through Psonar.

We do need to walk a tightrope, however. One that's well described in Sarah Lacy's excellent book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 where she highlights Friendster's inability to scale its server infrastructure on the one hand - leading to profound user frustration - and the million users that signed up for Skype within a month of launch.

While the latter seems eminently desirable - a global VoIP service for a million users can't be delivered, in the words of my business partner (and the CTO of Psonar) Rich Urwin, "on one or two virtual servers in the Amazon Expandable Computing Cloud", which is all that we, like most start-ups, can afford.

So it's a game of "slowly, slowly catchy monkey" - where we demonstrate user traction to potential investors so that they gain the comfort needed to fund us so we can support more users. Hope we can pull it off - I'm dreading the next Amazon bill!

20 August 2009