Progress Report

Well, the publicity machine has finally kicked off, and we've been covered in quite a few places.

Kakiseni

ArtSentral


and a few other lovely blogs by lovely people :)

Also, the traffic on our site has been absolutely fantastic! Given the lack of promo (the publicity only kicked off last night), we've already gotten over 1000 hits, and more importantly, our site has registered 123 AI template downloads already! So that means (potentially) 123 entries for our contest, which is way above what we were expecting for our first 3 days. Thank you to all the lovely people who helped us spread the word - not only the sites and the bloggers, but our friends and family who have been spammi... er... "informing" their friends and family as well about the contest.

One thing we want to stress to the people who've downloaded the template - since it's the first time we've released it to the public, ANY feedback is good feedback. Is it easy, confusing, pretty, ugly, pretty ugly... anything! Leave me a comment, or drop me an email.

Muchos gracias!

UPDATE (22 June 08):
We now have coverage from two big ones!

Klue

Lowyat.net

As a result, our numbers have doubled across the board.

These are the stats from Sunday midnight 22 June, which makes it exactly one week since we started.

305 AI template downloads
2125 hits from 754 unique visitors

Thanks so much for your support and keep spreading the word!

We are live! (Facebook rocks!)

Foldees.com is finally live!

After posting it as my status on Facebook, and sending out a few messages, we immediately started receiving a bunch of traffic. Do not underestimate the power of Facebook.

To be honest, It's all very exciting right now... we just had congratulatory drinks all around here at the Foldees office, so now it's fingers-crossed to see if everything goes alright. About now, the only thing putting a damper to our spirits is the fact that your URL bar doesn't display www.foldees.com, instead showing some IP address of our actual server. This is a problem we're working to solve, but in the meantime, now that the cat's out of the bag, start thinking of some wicked greeting card ideas!

If there are any issues at all, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@foldees.com. However, apologies in advange for our response, which might take a wee bit longer for the next 24 hours.

The Foldees team will be taking in a good night's rest.

Finally (Almost)

It's almost midnight on Thursday night. We've just gone through a last round of checks for our contest submission process, and decided on the exact text in which we're going to spam our friends and family about the opening of Foldees.com to the public.

Finally. We're going live.

I've never had to endure a wait like this before. Programming a website as a small team is not an easy thing to do, and I, coming from my media background, am used to getting a product (my magazine) out to the market at the beginning of each month. It's been about six months so far of coding.

However, when you get down to programming a website, it's alot of testing, tweaking, re-coding and testing again - even for the smallest button or textbox. The best part is, if everything works the way it's supposed to, your best measure of success is that no one notices.

What motivates me is the thought that we're doing something really special. Allow me to say this outright from the start. Me, and everyone on my team is a Threadless slut. Personally, I have a collection of perhaps 20+ shirts from the world's favourite crowdsourcing portal.

The genius of crowdsourcing is based on the fact that everyone has at least one good idea. These ideas seldom emerge when you're sitting in a cubicle listening to your colleague play Enrique Iglesias on repeat. They come when you're in the bus, or at home. Almost everyone i know has once said something to the effect of "Dude, I got this great idea for a...". The problem is most times, you don't know what to do with it.

Well, we aim to capture that market, at least in terms of greeting cards. Of course, we're starting out small, with a small team, a small server, and a small cosy little website. But we've got big plans. We believe that there are thousands of designers out there with great ideas for greeting cards that will fill the void in design that currently exists between cutesy pet photos on the shelves at Hallmark shops and a soulless e-card.

In making this possible, I'd like to thank my team for their dedication, MDEC for putting up some funds to get us started, and YOU, in advance, for helping us create the best source for the coolest greeting cards in the world.

Soon.