Thoughts on invite only

Hello friends. Something is eating at the back of my mind, and I was wondering if you could give me your input — or let me just write about it and you can absorb (or ignore).

You see, my plan was to launch Scribbles on April 1st for anyone to register and get blogging — and you know, it's probably ready for it too. It has come a very long way since then, and even hit the upper limits of the server, so now it's been battle tested against virtual bare metal.

Right now everything is going good and expectations are set. I always add stuff, but my stance is that things might stay the same — I say this because I knew I wanted to launch a lifetime plan a few weeks ago, so I didn't want to disappoint anyone in say 5 years, and it still looks the same, with the same features.

I've been happy with onboarding everyone manually over the past few months, with great conversation happening at a personal level, and that got me thinking.

You see, I am planning on making Scribbles invite only — say what? Hear me out.

The idea is actually quite simple. If I allowed anyone to sign up, it would loose some of that personality that I so want — a face behind the product. That face could be me, or it could also be any of the amazing bloggers already using Scribbles.

I don't want to do any marketing, nor do I want to optimise for "SEO" on the homepage — no, I'd rather have a "word of mouth" system.

On top of that, it allows me to gradually grow, like everything else, and that is important for me especially early on. It allows me to gauge how much support I'll be getting and how much load to expect and adjust accordingly with a close nit group of bloggers, nearly 140 of you already BTW.

There is also something else that I haven't shared, and to be honest it's really stupid, and to be fair, it's a very long road to get there (if at all). However, I have an arbitrary amount of maximum users in mind for Scribbles, and once that's hit — well...

I am a business of one, and I want to keep it that way without stretching too thin for now.

With having an invite only system, and making this not a free service, I hope that Scribbles will host good quality content across the internet, whatever small fraction that might be. Seeing the Explore section light up with great posts already gives me hope that it is possible (even though I added "shorts").

Let me know your thoughts — you know where to find me.