My company announced a new service this week called Express Feedback. I won't go into great detail (you can follow the link if you're interested, but unless you're in the customer service business you probably won't be), except to say that we've devised a dramatically improved way to do call recordings and satisfaction surveys in a call center.

We would have preferred to have a few more weeks to put some more gloss on our marketing, but there's a major trade show next week, and we wanted to get the announcement out before the event. In any event, everybody works faster under deadline.

The result is that this has been a tiring, but exciting week.

We've been cooking this up since July, and expect to go into pilot phase by the end of October (a very preliminary date, to be sure), with revenue at the beginning of 2006. For the past six weeks or so, we've been talking about it with a handful (less than a dozen) companies, and going into the announcement we had three pilot sites already signed up. We consider that very positive early feedback, especially since we expect that a significant fraction of pilot sites will go on to subscribe to the service.

So when we made the announcement on Wednesday, we already knew that Express Feedback was probably a winner (another reason, by the way, why I am dead-set against the Cult of the NDA: early feedback from prospective customers is probably the most important marketing tool in existence).

Within 24 hours of our announcement, we had another two pilot sites lined up, and a couple more companies expressing a lot of interest. These are not small clients, either: of the five pilots we have so far, three are major household names--the kind of customer VC-backed startups love to list in IPO prospectuses. Both of the tentative pilot companies are also Fortune-500 sized companies. Any one of those big companies could give us enough business to be nicely profitable.

Then, just as a topper, one of our smaller pilot customers told us that they plan to ask for a budget next year to subscribe to Express Feedback, at twice the level we had pegged as their maximum. Then they dropped a hint that they might go up to three times the already-increased level. This before we've even set final prices (though we gave this company some idea of the range we expect).

All I can say is, um, wow.

After nearly four years of struggling, this is what it feels like when things start coming together.

But now the pressure really begins, since we have to finish developing Express Feedback, build infrastructure, and solve various unanticipated problems, all before the momentum and interest runs out. I think my developers are starting to really feel the heat now. This project matters.

As hard as the work ahead is, though, I'd much rather have this problem than the opposite. This is fun.