Crowdspring Founders Say Sorry

[JonClarke]

Woke up to an email from the founders of Crowdspring.com this morning saying sorry for the problems the site has been experiencing this last week. Quite refreshing to hear a sorry. The site is a great idea to put creative work and ideas out to tender, so I hope it all gets better soon.

Dear friends,

As you've probably noticed, we've run into a series of technical problems over the past 7-10 days. Because of that, we wanted to take a break from our normal newsletter to bring you a personal message from both of us. So let us start by stating it as plainly as we can: we're sorry.

There's no way to sugar coat it - the site's performance as of late has been poor. We've failed to provide you the crowdSPRING experience you've learned to love and we are both disappointed and humbled as a result. Please rest assured that we're aware of these problems, and we are doing our very best to fix them promptly. Everyone at crowdSPRING is focused on these issues and we won't rest until we have them resolved. Period.

We'll spare you the technical explanation of the problems we're having but, in the end, they're almost entirely related to the increased usage that the site is experiencing and they've had a cascading effect, touching everything from our database servers all the way down to our email notifications. We should have foreseen this possibility and built things with more flexibility in the event that we needed to scale more quickly than we anticipated. We were so focused on our refactoring project (which will have us roll out completely new code in the coming weeks) that we underestimated the extent of our growth. As you know, we've added more hardware servers, but this didn't address all of the issues with which we are now dealing. And we're now paying the price. This is undeniably a lesson hard learned and one we do NOT intend to repeat or ever forget. And most importantly we're embarrassed that we've put our credibility on the line with you.

We'll give you an update within the next 48 hours on where things stand and, in the mean time, we're certain that many of you may have questions about these issues and how they affect your projects. We encourage you to talk to us - we'll do everything we reasonably can to make sure that our failure does not impact you, so don't hesitate to reply to this email, write us personally, or contact us through the site. We consider everyone who has supported us this first year a friend and it's never fun to disappoint your friends. You have our personal promise, and the promise of every person who works at crowdSPRING, that we will work tirelessly to make things right and to regain your trust.

Ross and Mike
co-Founders