Slow creeping growth… Does that even sound like a good thing? Yes! After months of reworking the idea, tweaking the usage flow, and streamlining the interface, we have advanced out of stagnation. During our monthly review today, we officially declared that we are indeed seeing some pickup.

Stagnation (stage cleared)
Slow Creeping Growth (current stage)

And due to that, we all had a few beers at 4pm and a lovely dinner afterwards.

Must have been funny seeing a table of guys drinking to ‘Slow Creeping Growth.’

Cheers.

This past week I visited some family in Asia. For lunch one day, we went for a meal of spicy noodles and pork dumplings at a small family restaurant. When we were done eating I raised my hand to ask for the check. A second later, a waitress said “980 NT” (which comes out to $30) and approached with 20 NT change in hand, correctly anticipating a payment of 1000 NT (there is no tipping there).

Now, that is what I call great service. No need to flag down the waitress for the check, wait for her to calculate the check, and then wait again for her to bring the change. The difference was completely in the anticipation.

At Spokeo, anticipating the problem is how we operate. We provide a demo to explain the concept. Then we try to preempt difficulties with tooltips. If support is required, we try our darned hardest to resolve it in 1 email.

I seem to be making a lot of analogies these days. In a previous post I compared Spokeo to a car/boat/sled. What’s next?

Once in a while I come across an awesome user. Sometimes this user helps us nail down a feature set with his feedback. Sometimes this user writes an FAQ section more clearly that we originally wrote it. This time, flameape was able to find two bugs that had escaped our testing team and thousands of our users.

Very good work, indeed. And thanks for everyone’s patience and understanding!

Our website has been live for 8 months, and I have to admit, we’ve been terrible in customer service. We’ve read your feedback only to do… absolutely nothing about it. We’re ashamed about this episode, and before you give up on us, let me explain.

Let’s pretend for now that Spokeo makes cars. 8 months ago we thought we created the most awesomest, the most fuel-efficent, and the most comfortable car ever, but we forgot to put wheels on the car. Some people thought we had made a boat and suggested that we add some life vests, while others thought we had created a sled and wanted warmer seats. We realized our mistake, hunkered down, and added the wheels.

In short, our website was so lacking at that point that we needed to fix major issues with it before we could adopt your feedback. Now, our ears are wide open.

We’re working on Twitter support right now in response to this review, and Twitter support will be completed within a week. Tell us what you want, and we’ll build it.