Rypple.com was born on Monday November 3rd, 6:47am weighing in at 2lbs 5ins. Rypple and its parents are doing well. Cigars anyone??

This is a short reflection on the delivery process and the final feeling of serenity that this new service has brought into our family.

Gestation of this idea took 9 months (interesting coincidence!). During that time, we improved our service significantly by creating a prototype and getting feedback from our alpha users rather than designing in vacuum. To our alpha users: Your help was truly essential in bringing our service concept into the world in a form that people would love. Your acceptance of this idea reinforced our belief that our bottom-up solution will leverage web 2.0 to change how people get insightful feedback to improve their professional, academic and other types of relationships.

We had our first Rypple Meet-Up to thank our users, and as a token of thanks, we will host many more Rypple Meet-Ups for our users in the future.

Many have asked what it takes to get a start-up idea like this off the ground. We spoke at length about that at Professor Greg Wilson’s class at the University of Toronto. There are many things, but most important of all is an unyielding commitment to the cause.

As an anecdotal example of the level of unyielding commitment that is required, the dev team can tell you ad nauseum about how they dealt with last minute unforeseen hosting solution provider issues on a Sunday while trying to ignore a loud construction crew remodelling a nearby office and another crew releasing noxious fumes into the air vents! It was so bad that firefighters had to come in to deal with the poor air quality issue so the dev team could go back to work fighting pre-birth fires!

Now that rypple.com has been alive for more than a week, we are starting to see its true potential. Like proud parents, our commitment to raising rypple.com into adulthood is getting stronger by the day as
we get excited with every little baby step we take. Although we know that we will hit many bumps and bruises along the way, we are excited about the future and hope that you will continue to give us invaluable feedback and help us guide rypple.com‘s growth.

Here are some things that people are saying about new rypple.com:

Once you start, you’ll never want to stop!  I have already caused “Rypples” with my clients, my colleagues and my friends. This is a fantastic tool to gain insights in a way that’s fun, quick and easy.  Michal Berman, Consultant, embarkonit.com

The UI is great…. Very easy to understand what I’m required to do to use the service. Fantastic! Pema Hegan, Founder, Gigpark.com

…and far too many more to list!