We did it again

Joe Fiorini, Josh Walsh, Jonathan Penn and I got together again this past weekend to compete in RailsRumble 2009.  Jon Stahl at LeanDog lent us the use of the LeanDog boat for the weekend, Apple Cinema Displays included.  We met up just before 8PM at the boat, ate some dinner, put up a Kanban board and began to Rumble.  48 hours later, we launched our app - http://loanit.to:

Another great thing about working from the boat, we actually had 2 teams competing from the same work space this year - oh, and the internet stayed up!  Here is a view of our original work space, we eventually moved to more comfortable seats:

We’ve got a few videos posted, and a few more to come, check out the Tumblr page that Joe Fiorini is managing for us.

Again, a huge thank you to the LeanDog guys, my fellow team members, and our wives for letting us defend our 2008 title.  Hopefully we make the first round of cuts by the expert panel and I’ll be blogging again begging for your votes - until then, check the site out and submit your feedback.

We’re spam!

Forwarded by Josh Walsh, from Gordon Daily:

MeetInBetween.Us After 2 Weeks || How We Survived Being LifeHacker’d || How We Won RailsRumble 2008

It’s been 2 weeks since we launched MeetInBetween.Us for RailsRumble 2008 and a lot has happened since my last post. On a day that I thought that would be like any other, Tuesday October 28th, around 1PM I got an alarm from our server at about the same time that someone on Twitter let us know that we had been written up on LifeHacker. I watched our server slowly crumble under the pressure, going down to less than 4MB of RAM free - but thanks to some very crafty design decisions, the site response time was still fairly acceptable.

As the day progressed, our site was taking ~10 seconds to load and complete a map calculation. We scrambled well and with the support of the RailsRumble Organizers and the awesome staff at Linode we were given a much larger server for the remainder of the competition. Tuesday night at about 7:30 I completed the migration while we hoped most people would be eating dinner instead of reading LifeHacker and within 10 minutes we were migrated and traffic kept pouring in.

Watching the Google Analytics data over the next few days was really fun; growing from 200-400 visits per day to over 5,000 hits on Tuesday and still averaging over 1,000 per day since. The increase in users resulted in some great feedback to our Support & Info email addresses as well as even more press. We were featured on The Buzzer Blog, CenterNetworks, Thrillist, Technology for Agents and many other personal blogs and tweets.

It’s been fun to watch something that we poured our souls into over the RailsRumble weekend get that sort of attention and gave us the boost we needed to start planning our next release. As much as the validation from the press felt good, it was trumped at 9:34PM EST last night when the following email was delivered:

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the winners of the 2008 Rails Rumble competition!

Overall Winners:

1) Great Lakes Geeks for Meet In Between
- http://meetinbetween.us

2) Scatapult for Qflip
- http://qflip.r08.railsrumble.com

3) New Media Logic for Riverdex
- http://riverdex.r08.railsrumble.com

It was such a tight race over the last 2 days of voting, there was no way I could call it until the email came in. I talked to Joe after it was official and he couldn’t believe it either. Qflip gave us quite the race - at the end of voting we were only 0.031 points ahead of them! Well done to Qflip & Riverdex and the rest of the competitors this year. The quality of the top 10 applications this year was amazing - to be declared the winner of this tight race has simply been unbelievable.

Our team will be getting together later this week to formalize the plans for our next release and I hope to share more with everybody very shortly. We’re hoping to be able to get together and knock out the next release in true RailsRumble fashion - MiniRumbles together in 1 office; hopefully we’ll be able to broadcast our future sessions via UStream.TV and possibly put together some fun and engaging events in the near future.

There’s still a lot of news to share with everybody, but it’s still premature at the moment, but check back soon. We’ll be announcing a magazine appearance with 10 other startups that I’ve been in contact with the magazine over, and a few newspaper articles as well. It’s been an amazing ride so far, I can’t wait to see where this takes us.

Now - what would a wrap up post be without some numbers? I’m a statistics geek at heart, so I can’t write a blog post about another weeks worth of celebration worthy news without also including celebration worthy numbers - so here we go:

After 2 weeks of being live we’ve had a total of 16,529 Visits generating 39,703 Pageviews (2.40 Pages/Visit - down slightly, but still within acceptable ranges). We have a bounce rate of 42.23% that we need to work on with some usability tweaks during our next release and are currently attracting 90.63% New Visits which I hope to drop and increase our returned users as we build up more data.

Foreign Adoption increased with the US accounting for roughly 12.5k visits followed by the UK (Bloody hell), Canada (eh?) and Australia (G’day mate). Within the United States we had visitors from all States (Welcome South Dakota!) - leading the way was New York with 3,154 visits and California with 1,764.

Firefox accounts for 58% of the visits, IE in second with 20% and Safari in third with 14%. Now that we can post bugfixes, we might want to work on IE6 usability since IE appears to be catching up ever so slightly.

The fun data - how many maps this week?:

Date	Addresses	Midpoints	Meeting Places
10/26/2008	353	105	30
10/27/2008	1430	431	72
10/28/2008	8198	2482	396
10/29/2008	8706	2618	430
10/30/2008	8148	2556	306
10/31/2008	3395	1045	166
11/01/2008	1017	306	54
11/02/2008	2583	777	149

That wraps up another amazing week - thanks again to the great RailsRumble Organizers, my team members and congrats to the rest of the winners at this years Rumble - looking forward to the next one!