Users beware – if you try out a brand new service in private beta, don’t get too upset when everything goes wrong.
On Monday we wrote about iMindi, a new startup that first showed its stuff at TechCrunch50 in 2008. In the post on Monday we gave out 1,000 private beta invites, which were apparently snatched up quickly.
Then, disaster. The email iMindi sent out, which contains the dreaded phrase “we accidentally deleted all the user accounts” sort of says it all. Brave souls can start all over again here. I know there are at least a few of you out there that are quite willing to forgive and forget.
Here’s the email. Credit to iMindi CEO Adam Lindemann for standing up and taking a beating.
Dear Friends of Imindi,
Yesterday, we were featured on Techcrunch and many of you were kind enough to sign up to the service. Unfortunately, we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers and then with some human error we accidently deleted all the user accounts. Darn.
We would ask that you forgive us and sign up one more time as members of Imindi. We will set you up with a clean account which we hope you will enjoy using to collect your thoughts and share them with like-minded people.
We are extremely embarrassed by this mistake and we have purchased more capacity and instituted safer backup processes to handle the increased demand to prevent a recurrence of this incident. It’s a private beta, and it will be a while before this service is ready to be launched in public but we hope that you will be kind to Imindi as she grows.
Below is the new invitation URL:
http://imindi.com/invitations/03711dda503b02868903efbed6649d59046952d9
Thank you again,
Adam Lindemann