A Guiness for Kiva

Jess is in Swaziland.   My Dad, Mike Flannery, is in town.   Last night, Dad and I went out to the Liberties on Guerrero  -- a couple of Irish lads at the local Irish pub. 

After a few Guinness , we were back home.  My laptop lives on my nightstand.  I checked in for one last glance at Kiva stats.   We were out of businesses and there was no way to make a loan.  This is the first time this has happened since January '06. 

Ms. Winfrey, you sold us out.  For you, I thought I would summarize the stats below. 

Last Week's Averages
-- 100K page views
-- 10K visits
-- $40K in loans raised
-- 250 users per day


Monday, September 3rd
-- The Today Show
-- The site stayed up
-- 24K visits
-- 331K page views
-- $97K in loans raised
-- Transaction cap was on limiting users to $25 per loan
-- 2089 new users


Tuesday, September 4th
-- The Oprah Winfrey Show
-- The site crashed 3 times for 20 minutes each during peak traffic
-- 94K visits
-- 992K page views
-- 4388 new registered users
-- $145K in loans raised
-- Transaction cap was on limiting users to $25 per loan
-- Thousands of email addresses collected during the crashes


Wednesday, September 5th
-- The day after The Oprah Winfrey Show
-- The site stayed up
-- 60K visits
-- 865K page views
-- 4067 new registered users
-- $153K in loans raised
-- Transaction cap was on limiting users to $25 per loan
-- We sold out around 10 PM PST  (we are still mostly out)

I don't have time to explain the strategy that went into creating this chain of events.  Rather, I'll just explain how I feel about it.  I'm ecstatic.  I don't think we made many mistakes this time around. 

At a high level, the strategy was guided by the following beliefs 1)  We  are no longer terrified of running out of businesses and will not sacrifice our best thinking around risk in order to avoid a shortage and 2) We are not going to overspend on infrastructure to handle temporary press events.   These lines of thinking contributed to the situation we are in now -- sold out of businesses with a website that went down a few times for short periods of time, but generally held up.  This is remarkably different than a year ago when we were on Frontline and down for 4 days.

I'm proud of the team.  Mike is proud of me.    Sam, Zvi and John:  You guys are heroes.  Same goes for you Ms. Winfrey.