
Polybit makes mistake. Owns up. - iamdeedubs
Update:
I rage posted this as I thought it was widely inappropriate and tone deaf to the community they are counting. As always to sides to every coin and I appreciate the response from Keith.<p>&#x2F;Update<p>Hey Amir,<p>I noticed that you’re a stargazer on the apex&#x2F;apex repo, which made me think you’d be interested in the serverless space, so I thought I’d reach out.!<p>I&#x27;m Keith Horwood - I&#x27;m the lead author of the API framework, Nodal, and I created stdlib, which aims to make building serverless microservices as easy as possible - without ever having to worry about scale.<p>You can build your own services or integrate with existing ones from our thousands of users. Here&#x27;s an example of a markdown service we use to generate documentation on our website: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stdlib.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;stdlib&#x2F;markdown<p>Here&#x27;s another one from someone in our community to find the name of a city based in the USA based on GPS coordinates: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stdlib.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;thisdavej&#x2F;gps<p>Anyway - I&#x27;d really appreciate it if you tried out our Developer Preview for a project of your own: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stdlib.com&#x2F;<p>Or you can check it out on GitHub here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;poly&#x2F;stdlib<p>I&#x27;m confident that you&#x27;ll find it as the fastest, easiest way to build and manage microservices.<p>Let me know if you have any questions!<p>Best,
Keith
-- 
Keith Horwood
Founder and CEO,
Polybit 
polybit.com
======
keithwhor
Hey. Keith here.

So first of all, I want to apologize. This is a _huge_ mistake on my part, and
I take personal responsibility. I have been cold e-mailing people directly
literally for months (getting people to test out your project is hard work!)
and we've been very lucky to have found super positive community members and
feedback.

That is not the case here, however. We've been growing massively since we
presented at AWS re:Invent. As a solo founder, I've been torn between hiring /
building product / talking to investors and I took a "shortcut" \--- we hired
some growth consultants to do some cold outreach for us. There was a mix up,
e-mails were sent out with wrong names (etc.) at a larger scale than I'm
comfortable with and I was just notified about it as of this post.

I'm really sorry to you and anybody that was affected by this mix up. I'm
thankful you brought this to my attention. As per cold outreach, I will focus
on owning the process myself as much as I can on the personal scale I'm
accustomed to. If you have any suggestions as to how we can improve stdlib to
increase exposure _without_ cold outreach, I'm more than happy to listen.

If anybody reading this was affected by this e-mail, feel free to e-mail me
directly - keith at polybit dot com. Please remind me in the future and I'm
happy to discuss giving you some free platform usage once we're out of
Developer Preview.

Thanks again for bringing this up --- and truly sorry for any inconvenience.

------
SallySwanSmith
Is the only thing that was widely inappropriate and tone deaf to the community
the fact that it was a email to golang folks about a nodejs project or the
fact that it was just spam or something else that I'm not picking up on?

~~~
rajington
I forgive him but this is what I received if you're curious (about 15 emails
across 2 accounts within a couple of days):

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 8:19 PM, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: one
last attempt... let me know if you'd like those extra credits and if I can
help in any way.

thanks again, so much, for joining and I hope you get a lot of mileage out of
our software and services!

\- Keith

On 2016-07-23 00:19:59 UTC, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: guess I
caught you at a bad time, would love to talk more if you do get the chance!
it's just a few questions and it means a lot to us. :)

\- Keith

On 2016-07-20 00:19:59 UTC, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: hey!
didn't hear back from you, would still love to know all about you and hook you
up with some more credits.

Aside from the free credits, feel free to reach out to me any time --- this is
my personal e-mail. :)

Cheers, \- Keith

On 2016-07-17 00:19:59 UTC, Keith Horwood <k____@p______.com> wrote: Hey,

Thanks so much for signing up for Polybit and checking it out, and happy
Saturday!

I'm Keith Horwood, author of Nodal
([https://github.com/keithwhor/nodal](https://github.com/keithwhor/nodal)) and
founder of Polybit. The response we've seen to Polybit so far has been nothing
short of amazing, and you're part of that. Thank you. No, really, it's been a
lot of hard work to get to where we are today and your support makes
everything worthwhile.

We're trying to learn as much as possible about our users and community ---
it's important we can support everyone --- so I'd like to offer you some free
platform credits. Would just like to know a couple things, a short e-mail
response will go a long way. :)

1\. Did you know about Nodal before checking out Polybit? 2\. Do you plan on
using Polybit for personal purposes, work projects, or both? 3\. Where do you
work? 4\. Is there anything you'd like to know about us?

Let me know and I'm happy to add 1,000 credits to your account. By the way -
if you sign up for our community Slack with the slack command on polybit.com,
you'll get an additional 500 credits.

Cheers, \- Keith

~~~
keithwhor
For the record --- this was a series of emails I sent out after users
registered for the original version of the platform we launched in July.

It was feedback from users here that led us toward stdlib [1] and where we're
at now. Probably the most valuable email responses I think I've ever received.
I hope you understand at some level that I have to batch email or I simply
don't have enough hours in the day to talk to everyone - and I do want
everyone's feedback. :) I think I've personally responded to absolutely
everyone who's given a response - negative or positive - hundreds, at least. I
wouldn't be here without the help and support of others so I want to listen to
everyone as best I can.

[1] [https://stdlib.com](https://stdlib.com)

