Can I Get A Shizzow Beta Invite?

Right now we’re in private beta, and we’re only giving invites to the cool kids. I’m afraid that you weren’t cool enough to make the cut. I’m kidding, I’m kidding!

The big change today is that we are also issuing invites to existing users. The people who have been using Shizzow during week 1 of the private beta will now have a couple of invites that they can use to invite other friends. We are still asking everyone to limit the invitations to people in the Portland Metro area (remember that Shizzow is only valuable when you can find other people nearby to hang out with). We will do some careful scalability testing while people hand out these additional invites to decide how we want to proceed with future invites. If you live near Portland and don’t have an invite yet, you can hit up a friend to get one.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind right now about Shizzow:

• We are bootstrapped with no outside funding or revenue sources, so we can’t throw more servers at Shizzow if we overload it with too many people.
• It is currently a side project. In other words, we all have full-time jobs that pay the rent, so we can’t always devote as much time as we would like to Shizzow

We had to make a few hard choices about how we wanted to run the beta.

• Portland-only: We are limiting beta invites to people residing in Portland, Oregon for the first wave of the private beta. Since Shizzow is all about using technology to help people connect and meet up in the real world, physical location is very relevant to how people use the site. We needed to build a critical mass of people in one location, and for selfish reasons, we decided to select Portland. We will open it up to people in other locations soon.
• Few Participants: We don’t want to be the next Twitter fail whale parody site. We are starting with a small number of members ~300 and then plan to gradually add a few more people at a time to test our scalability. The initial set of members was selected out of the people that we see out and about getting together with others on a regular basis at a variety of local Portland meet-ups.

Next steps for the Shizzow Beta:

• A bunch of scalability testing
• Begin inviting more Portland peeps
• Expand focus to a couple more cities
• Get out of beta, and open it up to the anyone who wants to participate

We’re not evil monsters. If all of your friends are using Shizzow, and you were somehow missed on the invite list, you can enter the appeal process (2 forms of ID, stack of paperwork, first born, etc.) OK, kidding again; lighten up people. Seriously, just find me at one of the many local Portland events that I attend or email me, and tell me your story. I will get you an invite as soon I can. Your other option is to find a friend who has a few invites left and convince them that you are cool enough to join Shizzow.