It’s official, we have over 1,000 active leenk.me subscribers!

Wow, over 1,000 leenk.me subscribers! I am amazed that this service has been as popular as it has been. And I still have a lot of plans for the future of leenk.me!

How it started

When I started the leenk.me service, I was seriously afraid that no one would be interesting in subscribing to the service. As many of you know, leenk.me started out as a plugin named RF TwitterPost. When we found out that Twitter was killing their basic auth API and moving to a strict oAuth API we did not know how we were going to handle it. We actually sent out a survey to all the TwitterPost users and asked them if they would be interested in a pay-service like leenk.me. A resounding majority said they would not pay for this service. But I took a leap of faith, put some money down on a server and started it up. Within the first day I was already shocked by the number of people who showed interested and subscribed. And now, not even a year later we have over 1,000 subscribers!

Who uses leenk.me?

I've seen a huge variety of clients. People who own WordPress e-commerce stores and want to Tweet/Facebook/etc. whenever they add a new product (or group of products). News organizations who want to send a message out whenever they publish a new story. Religious organizations that want to keep their followers apprized of the happenings in their congregations. Lawyers who send out weekly tips. Real Estate agency who want to keep you apprised of the latest real estate news. And yes, the occasional spammer or porn website.

I remember the first time a spammer signed up, they joined the Plus account and added over 100 domains. Luckily they weren't the cause of any major problems, but the first time the leenk.me service had an outage was caused by someone who tried publishing over 1,000 stories in less than a minute. Obviously, I never anticipated someone doing something so crazy :). So I've learned a lot about maintaining a piece of software like this. I've had to upgrade the leenk.me servers 4 times since I started the project. And this is why I charge for the plugin, though I am trying to keep the price as low as possible. There is a lot of money in keeping a server running.

What you never knew!

I've never gone public with this, only a few of my friends know... but I actually donate 10% of all my net revenue from leenk.me to the WordPress foundation. Why? Well, WordPress is an open-source product, I try to contribute to it by providing patches and opening tickets for problems, but sometimes I'm too busy to even do that. I know many business owners who use WordPress and are making tons of money from this freely available software. I think it is important to give back to the community that is enabling us to make money. After all, if the software continues to thrive, our businesses should continue to thrive. So, every time you pay leenk.me, you're actually contributing a little to the WordPress foundation. Of course, if you want to give more to the WPF, you can here: http://wordpressfoundation.org/donate/

I want to thank you all for continuing to support leenk.me. As always, if you have any trouble, let me know via my contact form.