What Happens When Fred Wilson Sends His Entire AVC Community To Your Blog

I woke up later than usual on Monday morning and had over 100 emails. That is not normal. Most of them were from Disqus. I had planned to have a later start to the day, and found out Fred Wilson not only mentioned me and one of my recent posts on his blog, AVC, but asked his entire community to comment on my blog — not his. This was Monday, August 26, 2013 — in a nutshell, here’s what happened:

• Fred’s community listened, resulting in 153 comments and counting. (link here)
• The most traffic my blog has *ever* seen in one day, by a razor-thin margin.
• A day later, AVC.com is still the largest referrer to my blog, more than Twitter.
• The quality of the comments were at least 4-5x better than the original post I wrote, if not more.
• I made a new work connection and we’re talking by phone tomorrow.
• I helped a founder think through an unsatisfying consumer product journey and demo day she just had.
• I spent about two hours replying to as many comments as I could. It was fun and I learned a ton. I don’t know how Fred does it daily. (I love Disqus, and while I love the ability to moderate comments via email, I think it’s impossible for readers on phones to follow the discussion. Hopefully, the good folks at Disqus can make comments look more like native tweets when reading on mobile.)
• @FakeGrimlock started trolling my blog on this post and other posts. Hilarious commentary, worth reading. And, FakeGrimlock gave me a nice endorsement for my blog, here.

Overall, it was a terrific surprise and fun to experience what it’s like to have all this discussion and learning online. I can’t believe that Fred has had probably thousands of these kind of experiences online, over the years, and it was clear that his community engages, debates, calls people out but in a respectful way, and is there to learn. It was something I have never experienced on the web before. Thanks Fred! And, now back to your regularly scheduled blog programming.