Exponential Growth For Woopra

If there is one service on the net right now that is being hammered by user’s wanting access, it has to be Woopra, the analytics software which reminds me of Google Analytics on steroids.

John Podazides wrote a post today on the front page of the Woopra blog which explains some of the milestones the service has already reached since it was launched:

• We completed the mass approvals process early this week and now have well over 10,000 folks Whoopin it up!
• Great news for Mac users, Java for Mac OSX was finally released. It only runs on 64bit versions, so if you have an older machine your best option is still to run Woopra in Windows under Parallels.
• Lorelle announced a new series of weekly Forum discussions called Woopra Weekly. The first topic this week is “What do the numbers mean to you?” I’m really looking forward to these weekly discussions to better learn how to utilize information to more effectively drive my readership.
• Our friends at RocketTheme released Woopra plugins for Joomla versions 1 and 1.5.
• We released the brand new Woopra Sharing Access feature which allows users to grant access to their site statistics to other users. This feature has been highly requested, and it works great! I’m really enjoying it myself…
• I learned that the spam filter in the Forums was going nuts! There were a ton of comments marked as spam and not one of them was. So hopefully I’ve taken care of the problem, but it’s funny that no one complained!
• Meanwhile, we passed the 1,000 posts mark in the forums (up to 1,150 actually)! Considering there are only a small number of us, we still need everyone’s help to answer the newbie’s questions and help keep the forums friendly and open.

Near the end of the post, John lets us know that they plan on releasing another major client update within the next week, a new and improved WordPress plugin, a major overhaul behind the scenes to improve tracking servers and improve performance and last but not least, increased server capacity to continue scaling Woopra. In fact, one of the biggest problems Woopra has faced since it’s launch has been the unimaginable demand to beta test the service.

The original launch of Woopra was set for 200 users. Those invites were given out to attendees of WordCamp Dallas. Once word got out of how cool the actual service was and especially, once Woopra was featured on TechCrunch, there was a huge increase in demand. Instead of 200 users, Woopra rushed to approve over 10,000 users in as little as three weeks. Within a few days of approving those users, 10,000 more have requested to be approved.

According to John and a post he made in the Woopra Forums:

We need everyone to be a little patient with us (even Vindictive Bastards ) while we build out the entire infrastructure required to scale this project. We have people asking us to de-bug and release the client software faster (by the way 10k users is a big enough sample size, I assure you!), we have to work with Layered Technologies on getting more and more servers deployed, we are working on recruiting and hiring staff, we have corporate, legal, and financial issues to deal with - and I assure you we’re working on all of these issues literally around the clock.

It’s not that we want people to wait. If we had a Genie we’d wish that Woopra could accommodate everyone right now. But we don’t, so instead we’ll keep working as fast as we can!

So for those who are on the waiting list, just keep on waiting. Eventually, Woopra will catch up and approve your site and then everything will be well with the world.