On 17 October 2014 I was proud to be one of a large group of people that broke The Guinness Book of World Records for The Most Number of People Attending A Business Speed Networking Event At A Single Venue. 

Prior to this day the record was held by Australia and stood at 475 participants where each participant networked with 21 people. 

How Did It Work?

The event was hosted by Entrevo. They sold tickets to over 600 people for Their Brand Accelerator Day at The Mermaid in Puddle Dock (Blackfriars, London) to take part in the event. They needed at least 500 people to show up to ensure that we had a chance of breaking the world record.

10 minutes prior to the event we were still 20 people short. The CEO of Entrevo, Darshana Ubl, and her team had been going crazy calling no-shows for the last hour trying to get to 500+.

The Process:

• Prior to the start of the speed networking event the room that had been hosting a few opening speeches had to be completely emptied
  


• Then everyone who was to take part entered the room and filled it up like water, i.e. all the seats in the lowest rows had to be completely full before higher rows could be filled
  


• Participants were set in groups of 24 to 30 people; where you sat automatically set the "group" you were in
  


• The plan was that you would network only with people in your "group" to maintain order
  


• Everyone had a log book with 22 spaces to fill. You needed to talk to 22 people for 3 minutes each as part of the event
  


• No one was allowed to start filling in the logbook before the official start as signalled by a horn operated by none other than Entrevo Co-Founder, Dan Priestley. However, we weren’t told prior to entering the room and when Darshana made that announcement up to 25% of the room had already started filling in their logbooks! (I’m proud to say that I wasn’t one of them); those logbooks all had to be scrapped. I thought they might not have enough extra stock but fortunately they did. 
  

Anyhow, long story short, the Entrevo team managed to get 510 people into the room prior to the start; Darshana went through how the rows would network with each other and speed networking began.

It's 10.30 p.m. and given the day I have tomorrow I really should be in bed but I just felt I had to write a testimonial for Weebly, AGAIN!

Here is my first review, written in early 2012 - two years ago.

The web-building service that Weebly provides has developed enormously in the last couple of years. These are my favorite things about weebly:

 1.  Easy To Use

There is ease of use and then there is weebly. Whoever came up with the user interface has a mind like Steve Jobs. Weebly is super intuitive and you can figure out how to use it without using their FAQ pages and without any coding skills whatsoever. When I started using Weebly in 2010 I figured out what to do immediately.

 2.  Fair Pricing

Their pricing is ultra fair. I have been subscribed to Entrepreneur magazine for a few years now and every now and again there's an advert for a new drag and drop web builder. I usually go to the website to see how they compare to Weebly and EVERY SINGLE TIME they are charging more than Weebly but offering less.

I get so incensed by it! This brings me to my next favorite feature...

 3.  Great Variety of features

You can do whatever you want to do with Weebly without having to write any code. Changing fonts, colors, headers, the features of the blog side bar is ultra easy. You can change the entire look and theme of your website at the click of a few buttons and I have done that several times myself without any stress.

 4.  Fast Rate of Development

Weebly are developing new features all the time and my business has been growing with them. Importantly, weebly allow customers to suggest new features and they take suggestions seriously.

 5.  Customization

A lot of people ask why I prefer weebly to WordPress. This is the biggest reason: when I visit a WordPress site I usually know it is WordPress. Many of their themes have a similar feel. I have tried to use WordPress in the past and I don't think they are nearly as easy to use as Weebly.

Conversely, Weebly is so customizable you can make your site look very different to any other site out there. I run over 10 websites with Weebly and they all look very different.

 6.  Mobile friendly

The mobile version of a Weebly-based site which comes as standard is second-to-none! This applies to both the general webpages, blogs and eCommerce. I think them coming into eCommerce later paid off rather than backfired because they appear to have learnt from the mistakes of all the eCommerce platforms that came before them. That brings me to my next point...

 7.  eCommerce

I have been struggling to decide whether or not to use the recently launched eCommerce feature on Weebly. I have been using sellfy.com for digital goods for over a year now and they are quite good. I also tried DPD and they were quite good too.

A friend recommended 3dcart very strongly but I thought they were awful. Even with a First Class degree in Economics from Cambridge I was struggling to use 3dcart. It was not easy.

I thought that being so new Weebly’s eCommerce facilities would be far too basic for my needs. I deliberated over it for a couple of weeks and ultimately thought to myself:

• Do I trust weebly to have released a platform that will be easy and quick to use?
  
• Whatever the current state do I expect Weebly to fix bugs quickly and release improvements rapidly?
  
• Do I like the look of the stores that I have seen using Weebly’s eCommerce platform?
  

The answer was yes to all three questions so I bit the bullet and paid the $469 fee to use the platform for two years. The amount sounds high but if I consider the fact that I am paying $135 to MailChimp monthly, it's not much at all - it's $19.94 a month. When Weebly create an email management system they have a good chance of getting that business too because I don't feel MailChimp's pricing makes sense at all...but that's another story!

After two days going through Weebly's eCommerce thoroughly, I don’t regret it. In fact, for suggesting a feature improvement Weebly gave me a couple of extra months for free! That brings me to my final point:

 8.  Awesome customer service

From the start, Weebly have responded to emails in 24 to 48 hours. Although they have grown massively, they still respond promptly. As someone with a small business growing faster than I can believe I know how tough it is to maintain that kind of responsiveness so I really appreciate it.

IN SUMMARY...

...If Weebly was a man, I would say we were engaged before and with me buying into the eCommerce platform – we just got married! This is a tool I believe I will be using for life.

Weebly makes my life easy. It has simplified my life for coming up to four years now and the day I discovered Weebly is one of the best days of my life – and trust me, I have had a very good life! lol 

Let me just say I felt a mixture of inspiration and shame!

Shame that I have friends who say "I'm not good with technology" and inspiration to work hard on learning how to build apps (I signed up to a course two weeks ago).

How did this transpire?

I was at the library. 

The old lady called up the Librarian to ask how she could do something. The Librarian failed then called another Librarian who in turn failed. The old lady insisted that she had done the very thing she was asking for help with on that very computer earlier that afternoon.

After 15 minutes, I couldn't stand it anymore and being the nosey busy-body that I am, I asked if I could help.

It turned out she wanted to print a panel of pictures and she wanted to bring up the "print Wizard" that she had seen before. I tried a few things and within seconds I thought I might not be able to help her but I'm nothing if I'm not persistent. In about three minutes I solved her problems.

I had observed that the old lady was rather confident in her use of computers and I told her so. She said, in a slightly posh voice, "I have one at home you see, I'm rather daring."

I asked her where she'd learnt and she said she took a course in 1997 and also took a course on Photoshop at which point she produced a picture of her with Stalin. It still hadn't clicked that it was photoshoped. 

"When was this?" I asked.
"Well for him, it's 1951 and for me it's 1968".

Guys and dolls, if you ever utter the words, "I'm not good with technology", Triple shame on you!

We all have to grow old but we never have to stop learning!

Who called his son Kunta Kinte Ali (all first names). He's a Southern European married to a West African.

Any thoughts on the name choice?

p.s. I am yet to watch Roots, all I know is that when the barber in Coming to America referred to Eddie Murphy as Kunta, it was derogatory.