From a CS perspective, John and team were caught unprepared and that’s a no-no for any company regardless of size or maturity.

Within a few hours, the site which was new and still in development, went nuts and people were applying for their own invites like crazy. In a few weeks, more than 10,000 applications were submitted for approval! John had to jump immediately to get new servers and funding to cover all the excitement. So much for 200 testers.

I just heard recently that they’ve now approved those 10,000 and in 4 days, got 10,000 more. I don’t quite know how this is going to work out, but a lot of time has gone into handling all these approvals, opening and migrating servers, handling all the inquiries…the team is up for it, but it’s small and doing the best they can.

Still, 10,000 beta testers and growing. That’s a lot. WordPress certainly didn’t have that in the early days. Nor did anyone else. This is a lesson in the modern web. Don’t say anything public until you are ready to serve 10K users plus.

Woopra is up for it, so stay tuned. I expect great thing. Look how they handled the first few weeks!

I wrote up a video review if you are interested here:

http://jeftek.com/web/video-review-of-woopra-web-analytics/

Jef

But it seems that they are still buried under development tasks and beyond a blog post or two haven’t quite addressed the CS issue, although, apparently on Friday (4/25) they are starting a “mass approval process”

BTW, I tried to open a chat with you, but I think you had already bailed…

Cheers,

Julien

2) Used the contact form @ http://www.woopra.com/contact/ and asked when a reaction could be expected
No answer ever since

“…Although it’s not very apparent…” That was the whole problem. The buzz coming out of WC was all about the new product, and not that it was still in private beta, nor did the site indicate in anyway that it was in private beta.

Miscommunicating to your potential and actual customers can be a killer, which is what I was pointing out.

Thanks again for the commiseration, the offer and the explanation.

While I appreciate the ‘free’ aspect of Woopra and the challenges that brings, I still see CS as a problem. The word coming out of Dallas didn’t seem to include any information about it still being private beta nor was this message on the site anywhere. I would have been perfectly willing to wait if I had been communicated to in a clear way.

The sign up process didn’t make it clear as to the status of the beta either. In fact, on the first try it felt more like a broken sign-up process (something that was re-enforced the following day with the removal of the invitation code requirement) than it did a private beta.

I am relatively patient, perfectly willing to wait until they are ready to get me started on Woopra but they need to manage my expectations on that. The original expectation was set at 7 days and that came and went so the time budget, which they gave me, expired without any word from them.

I think I was reasonable, I waited 2 or 3 days after the 7 days went by before I sent a request to support and then waited another 2 or 3 days before I wrote the post. It’s important to note that after my initial registration confirmation email I didn’t receive any direct communication from Woopra about anything.

Thanks again.

-Clint

John Pozadzides was my co-organizer of WordCamp Dallas, and he approached me about a week prior bubbling with excitement to offer one of the first official Beta accounts. In the weeks since, I’ve stopped using all other stats packages and have the Woopra client running continuously in the background. It’s an astounding program that I have no doubt will only improve with time.

I was aware John had intended to preview or “tease”, if you will, our attendees during his session at WordCamp Dallas, but I did not know he intended to issue Beta invites to all 150+ people there. After I’d introduced him to Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell I had to leave them to attend to other things, and then found out he’d previewed the program for them and videoed it to boot for their video podcast, GeekBrief.tv.

In the video, John explicitly says that the program was only being rolled out that day to 200 invited Beta testers and that there would be a period while they scaled up to meet the expected demand. He requested patience and assured everyone that everyone who signed up would be given an account, but that it would take some time.

Now, your observation about customer service has everything to do with your expectations, and you’re entitled to your frustration, but keep in mind that this is a free program being offered by a company made up entirely of three employees at present: two programmers and one executive/blogger who is also the CMO of a large grid web hosting corporation. I know for a fact that he works 7 days a week for nearly 20 hours a day.

Yes, I agree their customer service is lacking, but the (premature) launch was barely 2 weeks ago! Please be patient with them.