It’s been an exciting first week for us here at Merecal. We launched the site on July 23rd, and since then have seen a lot of support from both people we know and people we don’t. Given that the former crowd may be a bit biased, we were especially excited to see the support from the latter group.
If you didn’t catch our tweet last Friday, we were almost immediately featured on Killer Startups in an article titled “Merecal.com – Stay Abreast Of The Latest Releases.” That, in turn, led to us showing up on other sites including, but not limited to, Most Built, Gabbr and a visual search engine called Ziipa.
Probably our biggest boost in the arm, though, came from someone who submitted our site on StumbleUpon. We saw a pretty big uptick in visitors after that, and so we are very grateful to whoever sparked that flame.
One of the other things that has happened in the first week is that our site has started to move its way up in search results at the main search engines. Obviously we’ve got a long way to go, and there’s a whole lot of content for those engines’ relentless crawlers to index (and it’s changing all the time), but we think that returning relevant search results when people are looking for specific new releases in books, Blu-ray, DVDs, music and video games is one of the keys to our success and, more importantly, to our users’ satisfaction.
Just as any proud parents would do, Matt and I have been watching over our baby attentively, making sure the site is running smoothly and not giving you any problems. We did encounter a few minor bugs, as predicted, and those have since been fixed. In addition to paying close attention to how the site is working, we’ve also been trying to pay close attention to how you are using it. Given that, here are a couple interesting tidbits from our first week:
- Books appears to be the most popular category on our site so far, followed by Music.
- So far, DVDs is the least popular category.
- Our lists of upcoming releases in all categories appear to be more popular than the lists of new releases coming out this week.
It’s obviously still very early, but it’s been fun to see some people putting Merecal through the paces this week. We’re hoping that those of you who registered have already or will very soon begin to see just how useful Merecal’s favorite-based notifications can be. We hope those of you who subscribed to any one of our numerous feeds this week are already seeing how nice it is to get fresh lists of new releases in your feed reader each day. And finally, we hope that those of you who browsed through the new and upcoming releases this week found something interesting in the process.
Either way, we’d love to hear about it, so hit us up in the comments below, or tweet at us on Twitter. And thanks for helping make Merecal’s first week as exciting as it was. We can’t wait to see what the coming weeks have in store.