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Polybit makes mistake. Owns up.

11 points by iamdeedubs ↗ HN
Update: I rage posted this as I thought it was widely inappropriate and tone deaf to the community they are counting. As always to sides to every coin and I appreciate the response from Keith.

/Update

Hey Amir,

I noticed that you’re a stargazer on the apex/apex repo, which made me think you’d be interested in the serverless space, so I thought I’d reach out.!

I'm Keith Horwood - I'm the lead author of the API framework, Nodal, and I created stdlib, which aims to make building serverless microservices as easy as possible - without ever having to worry about scale.

You can build your own services or integrate with existing ones from our thousands of users. Here's an example of a markdown service we use to generate documentation on our website: http://stdlib.com/services/stdlib/markdown

Here's another one from someone in our community to find the name of a city based in the USA based on GPS coordinates: http://stdlib.com/services/thisdavej/gps

Anyway - I'd really appreciate it if you tried out our Developer Preview for a project of your own: http://stdlib.com/

Or you can check it out on GitHub here: https://github.com/poly/stdlib

I'm confident that you'll find it as the fastest, easiest way to build and manage microservices.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Best, Keith -- Keith Horwood Founder and CEO, Polybit polybit.com

6 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] thread
keithwhor
Hey. Keith here.

So first of all, I want to apologize. This is a huge mistake on my part, and I take personal responsibility. I have been cold e-mailing people directly literally for months (getting people to test out your project is hard work!) and we've been very lucky to have found super positive community members and feedback.

That is not the case here, however. We've been growing massively since we presented at AWS re:Invent. As a solo founder, I've been torn between hiring / building product / talking to investors and I took a "shortcut" --- we hired some growth consultants to do some cold outreach for us. There was a mix up, e-mails were sent out with wrong names (etc.) at a larger scale than I'm comfortable with and I was just notified about it as of this post.

I'm really sorry to you and anybody that was affected by this mix up. I'm thankful you brought this to my attention. As per cold outreach, I will focus on owning the process myself as much as I can on the personal scale I'm accustomed to. If you have any suggestions as to how we can improve stdlib to increase exposure without cold outreach, I'm more than happy to listen.

If anybody reading this was affected by this e-mail, feel free to e-mail me directly - keith at polybit dot com. Please remind me in the future and I'm happy to discuss giving you some free platform usage once we're out of Developer Preview.

Thanks again for bringing this up --- and truly sorry for any inconvenience.

SallySwanSmith
Is the only thing that was widely inappropriate and tone deaf to the community the fact that it was a email to golang folks about a nodejs project or the fact that it was just spam or something else that I'm not picking up on?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
rajington
I forgive him but this is what I received if you're curious (about 15 emails across 2 accounts within a couple of days):

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 8:19 PM, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: one last attempt... let me know if you'd like those extra credits and if I can help in any way.

thanks again, so much, for joining and I hope you get a lot of mileage out of our software and services!

- Keith

On 2016-07-23 00:19:59 UTC, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: guess I caught you at a bad time, would love to talk more if you do get the chance! it's just a few questions and it means a lot to us. :)

- Keith

On 2016-07-20 00:19:59 UTC, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: hey! didn't hear back from you, would still love to know all about you and hook you up with some more credits.

Aside from the free credits, feel free to reach out to me any time --- this is my personal e-mail. :)

Cheers, - Keith

On 2016-07-17 00:19:59 UTC, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: Hey,

Thanks so much for signing up for Polybit and checking it out, and happy Saturday!

I'm Keith Horwood, author of Nodal (https://github.com/keithwhor/nodal) and founder of Polybit. The response we've seen to Polybit so far has been nothing short of amazing, and you're part of that. Thank you. No, really, it's been a lot of hard work to get to where we are today and your support makes everything worthwhile.

We're trying to learn as much as possible about our users and community --- it's important we can support everyone --- so I'd like to offer you some free platform credits. Would just like to know a couple things, a short e-mail response will go a long way. :)

1. Did you know about Nodal before checking out Polybit? 2. Do you plan on using Polybit for personal purposes, work projects, or both? 3. Where do you work? 4. Is there anything you'd like to know about us?

Let me know and I'm happy to add 1,000 credits to your account. By the way - if you sign up for our community Slack with the slack command on polybit.com, you'll get an additional 500 credits.

Cheers, - Keith

keithwhor
For the record --- this was a series of emails I sent out after users registered for the original version of the platform we launched in July.

It was feedback from users here that led us toward stdlib [1] and where we're at now. Probably the most valuable email responses I think I've ever received. I hope you understand at some level that I have to batch email or I simply don't have enough hours in the day to talk to everyone - and I do want everyone's feedback. :) I think I've personally responded to absolutely everyone who's given a response - negative or positive - hundreds, at least. I wouldn't be here without the help and support of others so I want to listen to everyone as best I can.

[1] https://stdlib.com

iamdeedubs
This is nothing really. If you sign up for a New Relic trial. There sales people, hey Dom, will email you pretty consistently and then start using language like "I’m looking for a courtesy response.". I owe you nothing...