It's Over... or Just Begun -- The Launch

Well, I'd say it was a success. Though whoever knows what makes Day 1 of a launch successful? As VentBox went live yesterday, I crossed my fingers. The fun recap of the day is over on the VentBox Blog. For me, frankly, the experience was a little terrifying. Our servers hiccuped mid-morning -- right as things were really heating up -- which looked like this on the Google Analytics:

After the hiccup, things started looking better. I saw lot of traffic coming over from the Webware review, and then noticed someone "StumbleUpon"ed the site. About noon Mashable picked up the story, and all day people were "Sharing" VentBox on Facebook (you can too!).

One thing I'm enjoying is watching the LEARNING PROCESS of the users. Some people dive right in and "get it." Others come, browse, and never vent. Some just comment. This process of observation is fun because it allows me to get a sense of how to enhance the site; we're going to do a lot of tweaking in the coming weeks, but "how" and "what" are still to be learned from our users.

One thing to learn from is how users "hack" the site. Michael Galpert created his own static sharing tool (that javascript is really tripping people up) using a VentButton based on his Vent about an AIM 6.0 bug.

Anyway, I'm still on edge. I need to fix the contextual advertisement issue. (What? You don't want to buy Dryer Vents? Google seems to think you do.) Not that ad revenue is our "game plan", but I think having such poor matching of ads is a detriment to the experience. Any suggestions as to what ad service provide better ads would be appreciated (meaning, something that would ignore the word "vent", which Google CAN'T do!).

Thanks to everyone who's commented and sent me their great ideas!