When we go on a blogging hiatus it’s usually because we’re doing a lot of client work. It’s been 20 days since our last post and that’s exactly what’s happened here. We’re busy! Thank you so much to all our wonderful customers for making this the case. The first five months of 2008 have seen a steady stream of records and growth for both our business and our conferences.

Usage records:

• By new user signups, February was a record month, twice our previous record in November. March was even higher and April was three times higher than November.
• By page views April were three times higher than in February.
• This month is our sales record. We signed up twelve new conferences. That doesn’t count all the unconferences that use our self-service version.

Conference Records:

• Web2.0 Expo set records with 2000 users and 10000 connections made.
• IA Summit set a record for page views per user at over 160. The average CrowdVine user at the conference spent 90+ minutes on the site. That’s not proof that we’re good, it’s proof that people want to network.
• One attendee at Web 2.0 set a record for most page views by someone who wasn’t spidering or screen scraping us: 2577.

Growth:

• We’ve got a nice foothold in web technology conferences (15% of Web 2.0 attendees had used us for at least one other conference) but you don’t need to be a technologist to want to meet people. So I’m excited this month to be branching out into marketing, youth, and education conferences.
• We’ve always relied on word-of-mouth. We don’t have a salesperson. Of the twelve new conferences this month, three were previous customers, four had used us as an attendee, and five were referrals from attendees or speakers.
• If you’ve ever read my personal blog, you’ve probably picked up that one of the major goals was for CrowdVine to be financially self-sufficient from the start. If this sounds like a strange goal you either live very close to Silicon Valley or very far away. When we were in beta we never had revenue booked more than six weeks out. As of today, we’ve booked 80% of every dollar we plan to spend this year including salary, hosting, contracting, everything. Not bad for a product that only officially launched last November.

So what’s next? We have two goals.

#1. We will improve our self-service product and we have an announcement about that tomorrow.

#2. Everything about the conference/meeting/event social experience is going to get better. We’ve made it much easier for people to meet. We’re going to make it even easier. And along the way we’re going to bring in some of the other social experiences at the conference, helping people share ideas and amplifying the conversation so that it reaches people who weren’t able to attend.