Fleck Buttons
Originally uploaded by Boris

We will give these buttons away tonight to people who will sign our suits. We only have a hundred of them…

It is too early to be up but the time difference forces me awake. I spend the last 30 minutes browsing the blogs of some of the Beta testers we invited. Here are a few links to articles posted by them:

“I am impressed by this level of foresight and have the feeling that this is going to be yet again another service the quickly becomes popularized by viral marketing and by the masses of web users.”

PureVC: Fleck

This one is in dutch:

Frontrunner

And this one is in French:

Fleck : beta test privée - Denis au fil du web

“It makes the Firefox Browser even more useful, and it is fantastically cool. It will change the web.”
Speaka’s Plain English » I have the Fleck Beta. It will change the web.

Other news:

I will do a radio interview on Dutch radio somewhere today:
De Log van de Eeuw: 16 november: Succesvolle internetondernemers

We are scheduled to present Fleck at LeWeb3 in Paris:
Startup room planned schedule : Loic Le Meur Blog

We are number 9 at the most anticipated companies list:
MoMB: most anticipated - Most Anticipated

If you google “Fleck” we are now the second result being found. Good enough? I hope that Fleck.com will be the number one result soon.

Fleck Businesscards.
Photo by Boris.

Ironing shirts, packing bags, looking for my pasport, where is my ticket?

And printing and cutting 250 businesscards.

Not that we will need those because we have 4 white suits and 64 color pens so people can write their emailaddresses on us.

Did I forget anything?

In the past hour I have invited the first 100 beta testers. They are bloggers, VCs and friends. Over the following days we will invite more beta testers every day until the 16th when everyone will be able to test it.

It feels almost unreal that we are actually inviting people to test Fleck after all the months…

‘Matt’ left a comment in the post about the Fleck Extension that we are currently testing. He said:

been following this for months and it’s just puff, I’m out. Wishing you well, and hoping to be proved gloriously wrong

Just yesterday I was looking at the first Fleck.com blog post. It was posted in December 2005! Seems like years ago. When we first started we had a vague idea of what our software should do and we just started. We bought the Fleck.com domain and started coding. Pretty soon we started talkingh with investors and everything seemed to go pretty smooth. Until things started to slow down.

Then, about a month or two ago, we restarted everything, threw away ALL the old code and started from scratch. Since then we have invested a little/lot more of our own money and are now finishing up everything for the closed beta tommorow and the public launch on November 16th in New York during the Techcrunch party.

So is Matt right?
Do I blame Matt?

No I don’t and yes he is. Looking back it might have been wiser to just tell everything we were doing and not create such a hype around Fleck. Then expectations wouldn’t have been this high and people wouldn’t have been disappointed even before we launched. And naturally we are worried that people will even be disappointed after we launch! Fleck is a very cool tool but probably not a Google- or eBayKiller or anything fancy like that.

So those are some of the things we think about while we are finishing up things: how do we deal with disappointment?

Well, the answer I hope is that we should just deliver a product andd let people work with it, as soon as possible!

The good news is that we have 300+ people subscribe to us via RSS. We get 300+ visitors a day and we have 3000+ people who are signed up for the Beta. We should be able to have at least a few thousand people testing Fleck (Extension, Bookmarklet of Web-Based version) once we go live on the 16th…

I would like to invite you to download and install the Fleck Firefox Extension today.

Before you get all excited about using Fleck I must tell you that the Extension you are about to download won’t do a lot of usefull stuff. It only redirects you to a certain page which will tell me that it works.

The extension has version number 0.1 and it should work in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 and on most platforms. If you see any errors or room for improvement please let us know by leaving a comment here. That way everybody knows what goes wrong and what are the known bugs.

And now download the extension.