Thank you, Slashdot! Win a Connectify Pro License!

Posted by rhaldar on October 25, 2011 under News & Announcements

We wanted to take a moment during our birthday week to thank the Slashdot community. Slashdot was instrumental in helping us bring Connectify to tens-of-thousands of early-adopters who downloaded the first Connectify Beta, way back in 2009.

While we’re celebrating Connectify’s birthday this entire week, the day we consider our actual “birthday” is October 27th, 2009. Of course, there was a beta floating around the office for a week-or-so before that, but on that one day, Connectify went from being an app that a few of us used on business trips, to a piece of software used by thousands of people around-the-world. A short post on Slashdot was the turning-point for Connectify, and the blogs and sites that quickly picked up on our application from there, helped Connectify grow by leaps-and-bounds in a matter of days.

The original Slashdot post. Clickthrough to enlarge.

Admittedly, we’re all geeks of various stripes here at Connectify. And when our group of software developers and engineers had a working version of Connectify finished, they simply did what came most natural, posting Connectify on Slashdot, the go-to messageboard for the technically-inclined. Thinking back, I’m sure no one had any expectations for this Slashdot post (besides, perhaps enjoying a bit of nerd-cred for the nifty app we’d developed). So, our team was understandably amazed by what happened next.

Connectify website analytics (October 25-November 9, 2009) Clickthrough to enlarge.

The Slashdot community championed Connectify, “modding-up” that little post about our software to the front page of the site, where the early-adopters of the tech community took notice. Sure, we had our share of negative commenters chiming in (welcome to the Internet, folks), but all the chatter only continued to push our servers to full-tilt, while users all over the world downloaded Connectify. We could hardly keep up with the demand. It didn’t take long before major tech blogs like Lifehacker, GigaOM, Engadget, ReadWriteWeb, and PCWorld began posting about Connectify too. With this early support from the Slashdot community, and coverage across these influential tech news outlets, we were able to reach users like you, who have come to rely on Connectify. In fact, since that first Slashdot post on October 27th, 2009, we’ve been building steam steadily. Today, Connectify has over 4 million downloads and counting!

Looking back, there couldn’t have been a better start for Connectify. We’re not the type of team that cares much for being the flavor-of-the-month, and besides, back in 2009, Connectify was the leanest of lean startups, and a “marketing budget” wasn’t even in our vocabulary. Instead, we’re fortunate to have been supported by our own community over at Slashdot, and adoption of Connectify has been growing organically every since.

This week, as we celebrate Connectify’s 2nd birthday, we wanted to give a special shout-out to the Slashdot community! You helped us spread-the-word, and bring Connectify to users all over the world.

Today, we’re giving away a free Connectify Pro v3.1 license to a lucky user who follows us on Twitter and tweets @connectifyme telling us how they first heard about Connectify!