[secorp]

We are doing online backup and storage. We have an open source project (http://allmydata.org) that we are building a commercial product (http://allmydata.com) on top of. We have a fair amount of beta users (10K) and have our new architecture beta release due out mid-February. We will then be fixing any major issues, testing usability, and then going full release.

We've had good feedback from our users which has helped shape our usability and also which features were important to them (like having ftp access for example).

Hope this helps, Peter

[robmnl]

Hey Peter, how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users?

Appreciate your sharing.

[bootload]

"... how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users? ..."

Firstly reliable data backup is a real problem. Anything that can help solve this for users is going to attract attention. Writing your own backup script that reliably backs up your data with RSync and remote servers for example is doable but wastes time and effort. Secondly you can download the software, try it out, change it. But most consumers are not developers and are not interested in playing with software and hardware themselves so they look for a company that provides the service.

So the key bits here are

- Solving a users problem

- Show don't tell.

- Provide a service that users can use if they don't do it themselves.

- Have something that will continually attract new users (articles, software, discussion, etc)

The technical bits make for a good read and can be found here ~ http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/architecture.tx...

[robmnl]

that's really good insight, thank you.

[secorp]

Currently all word-of-mouth. For our commercial product we will be doing some standard key-word advertising and an interview round about the company and project.

One thing I meant to mention earlier, we are self-funded so far.