Okay…thanks, that’s enough and I meant on the arm!!  No seriously, It’s great I’m really not dreaming…the site is live and has people on it!!  I’m honestly in shell shock and the only reason I’m able to write this blog post is because I finally managed to get a little sleep and my brain functioning again.

WoW!!  I definitely want to first say a big thank you to the development team and acknowledge how amazing they are.  They always come through and deliver and remember—we are spread out across the U.S., Canada and all the way to Australia.  The team is unbelievably dedicated, talented and slightly crazy so we all get along wonderfully and have a good time together, although communication is normally only via short Skype calls and IMs.  It’s actually a lot of laughs and fun to work through all this hard work with them…there’s some serious collaborating going on and real team work.

Next…today was an amazing day in part to all the encouragement and support I received from all my friends via Pownce and Twitter.  I was active in keeping everyone posted of how we were doing and I tell you what…when we sent the invites shortly after 5pm EST today (5 January…it’s already past midnight now) it was completely unreal how quickly people came and accessed the site.  We had a booboo with the age request and we got feedback on that right away.  I also made quite a few new twitter friends.  

And I know have a lot of new WhyGoSolo Friends…hooray!!  (Side note—my profile is a great gateway to browse people right now, under my friends area, until we get the search features up and going)

The DC Tech Community support behind WhyGoSolo has been top notch—we’re really coming together and man, that’s awesome—we’ll get our mark on the map…watch out SF, NYC and Boston!!

Some Interesting Numbers

We had a little over 300 people signed up prior to launching—I personally think 300 was a great number (hint, hint recent movie) and out of those 300 about 1/3 of the people are based in the DC/MD and VA area.  Out of the 300 we have a little over a 100 people now with profiles on WhyGoSolo. Since launching we have received 42 new requests for invitations. Keith has educated me that 42 is a pretty important number…and apparently is— The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything… I’d say things are in our favor then ;-)

What was also really sweet was having someone Upgrade 25 minutes after launch.  That’s right, 25 minutes after launch we got our first revenue…none since then but hey, we’ll get more in due time.

At some point, I’ll really realize what’s going on and take a step back and enjoy this, but right now I’m thinking: “Getting people on site was the easy part…getting people to come back and USE the site is the challenge”

I’ll be posting a lot in the next couple of days to talk about the features, answer questions, keep everyone posted on what’s going and to keep the start of this nice buzz going!!

In closing…just want to say thank you again to everyone…I feel the love!!