I can’t believe that Fanpop has been live to the world for a month now. It’s been surreal watching the site grow with new users registering each day and fresh content being added all the time. We’ve been blown away by the attention we’ve gotten in the blogosphere (you can follow along with all the fun over at The Fanpop Spot. I guess it’s still a little weird for me to see Fanpop come up in headlines on my Google RSS Reader from sources that I’ve been reading for a long time now like TechCrunch, Mashable!, John Battelle’s SearchBlog, Emily Chang (more…)
Archive for the ‘launch’ Category
Our First Month
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006TechCrunched!
Friday, August 11th, 2006Wow. That’s all I can say. Not even live for a full week, and I get contacted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch. It’s almost surreal nowadays seeing our name show up in my Google Reader feeds and reading about us on places I check every day for the latest and greatest in the wacky web world. First it was MOMB, then Mashable, then eHub by Emily Chang, and now TechCrunch. Needless to say, I was nervous, but Marshall was totally a nice guy (who says the press are all sharks!). It’s been a crazy past two days since we were contacted by him through our site.
Fanpop in the Blogosphere
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006Fanpop hasn’t quite been online for a week yet but already we’ve been privileged to have received some encouraging feedback from several blogs. Since we don’t yet have a media relations page, I thought I’d highlight some of the coverage here.
Mashable’s Pete Cashmore reviewed the site on Monday and had this to say:
“For some reason, I really like Fanpop. I think it’s the instant accessibility for the average user - everyone’s a fan of something, and it’s a really simple way of expressing your personality by associating yourself with brands. What’s more, the design and usability are impressive…”
“…I think Fanpop is pretty neat. I see this as another StumbleUpon - simple, fun, and easy to explain to the average Internet user.”
On the whole, Pete really seemed to “get” the site. Read the full review here.
Chris Durr of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a nice write-up today on the PI’s new social networking blog. He writes about Fanpop in the context of MySpace stating, “Fanpop doesn’t have that stale taste of a wannabe MySpace site.” And notes that “what’s unique about Fanpop is that it offers content as well as functioning as a fan site.” (read the rest of the article here).
And the Oscar goes to…Fanpop!
Monday, August 7th, 2006Okay fine, so we haven’t won an Academy Award or any award for that matter. But you have to understand that being able to launch this site to the public and finally let the world see what we’ve been pouring ourselves into for the past several months of our lives is a pretty big deal to us. And a lot of people deserve a ton of thanks and shout outs for supporting us and getting us to this momentous occasion. Think of this as the author’s note at the end of completing and publishing a novel. Without the following people, we wouldn’t be here. Plus, this might be the closest we get to giving a speech, so here goes:
Open for Business
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006At 6:44:36 PST on August 1, 2006, we opened our doors to the world. It was a restless night for all of us as we have eagerly anticipated this momentous occasion for months now. Amazingly, we actually launched according to plan! Go figure. 
But when you have a team as smart and dedicated as I get to work with, nothing manages to surprise me anymore. I’m so proud of these guys for pulling together and making this dream a reality.
What’s in a name?
Monday, July 31st, 2006[actual contents of super-secret, internal fanpop email]
From
Subject: fanhound!
it's available!
FanhOUND and a dog as our mascot!
doooood
Coming up with a name for a business is a pain. And coming up with a business name AND an available domain name? Doubly so. Early on we considered going the Web 2.0 route. Had we done that you might be surfing on a site called “Oogloo”, “Mondoblotto” or some such nonsense.
Hello world!
Thursday, July 6th, 2006I suppose, in all my life, the overused (at least in computer science circles) phrase “Hello world!” has never held more significance than it does now. For those of you unfamiliar with the ulterior meaning of this phrase, “Hello world!” is generally (if not in fact, then at least in spirit) the output of the first piece of code a programmer writes. In some sense, it is the birth of something new - the result of the first execution of a creation in a new language. Naturally, the program that spits out “Hello world!” is pretty useless, but it is the first wobbly step up a set of tricky new stairs that leads to something — big.
Tap…Tap…Is this thing on?
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006Wow, I can’t believe it but we’re actually live! Well, semi-live that is since only our friends and family have access to the site. After 8 months of planning, coding, testing, not sleeping, and lots of big dreaming, we’ve finally made it. I’m really excited to show our beta to real users. I am constantly amazed at how much 4 guys in a living room can do. I got all choked up when we got the site on the live server and started using it and showing it off at parties.
The four of us plan to use this blog regularly to communicate with our users and get suggestions and feedback. We would love to hear from all of the fanpoppers.
This blog is going to be part journal of our adventure and part announcements to our users. Fanpop is all about sharing the stuff you care about with other people, which is what we plan to do with our blog. So have fun with the beta everyone!