Sometimes truly amazing, unbelievable things happen. We work away, unrecognised and unrewarded and then out of nowhere fortune favours us and we have the most incredible luck. We have just experienced such a moment at Valentte.

Last week we had 22,000 people on our newsletter list. It has taken us five years of exhibiting at shows and selling online to build this list. Painstakingly and slowly we grew it. We were adding a few more each week. After each show, Andy would open the subscription box from our stand, unfold the entries and then manually type each one into a spreadsheet, first name and email before uploading them to our newsletter software.

As of this morning, we have 47,983, and it’s still going up! It’s an increase of more than 25,000 people in less than three days — a quite extraordinary change. I keep having to pinch myself to check its real. It caused us a fair few problems while it was happening. If you visited our website on Tuesday, you might well have seen a “503-service-error” message indicating our website was offline.

Our server couldn’t cope with the number of visitors we were receiving. At some points we had 850 concurrent people trying to access it. I had to scramble around increasing its capacity and upgrading all the related services we use to process the sample requests. We got through it, and by about 3 pm on Tuesday our upgraded site was able to cope with the higher number of visitors.

So, what caused this good fortunate?

Somebody very kindly shared our free scent sample offer onto a Facebook page with more than 250,000 fans. The results were incredible. Thirty seconds after the share our website visitor numbers exploded and continue to be high, nearly five days later. We didn’t ask for this, know it was going to happen in advance, or do anything to seek it except to go about our regular business of encouraging the world to use Valentte products.

We have been incredibly lucky. There are no two ways about it. But what I would say is that we would never have received this lucky break had we not already done an incredible amount of hard graft first. We first had to create and build the systems that gave that original customer something to share on Facebook. That’s my message here, and it’s one you will have read and heard before.

You create your own luck.

When you are passionate about your dreams. When you dedicate your every waking moment to making them a reality. When you commit yourself and your team to making sure they come true. When you give it your all, working until you have nothing left to give and then doing some more.  Then I believe that you will find good things begin to happen. Lucky breaks will find you. Good fortune will come your way.

Long before others believe, you must believe it’s possible. Remember, we climb the mountain, not in giant leaps but one small step at a time. Today I would like to end with a massive thank you to the mystery person who gave us such good fortune. I hope one day to be able to help others in the same way.