In our experience, it’s rare to get so much love all at once, to have the entire industry turn its head and, for a second, notice a startup doing something different, and yet, last week, it happened at CircleBack. And, in the process, we learned a lot, a lot about what professional users and reviewers value right now, how important the contact problem really is to them, and what they want and need and expect from a contact management app.

From PCWorld, we learned that users want control, that, if forced to choose, they prefer accuracy to convenience. Though we’d previously worried that CircleBack’s contact updates were too manual, we were called a “micromanager’s dream come true,” perfect for professionals who want more control over their address book accuracy than other contact updating apps allow.

Similarly, we learned that professionals aren’t just bored by the tech-y artificial intelligence that powers CircleBack. When The Next Web announced us as the “world’s first artificially intelligent contact manager,” our Twitter feed was flooded with hundreds of retweets from professionals excited by our technology. And imagine our pleasure, our profound excitement, when Gizmodo echoed these sentiments. According to them, CircleBack is a “fever dream” realized, an opportunity for professionals to “reclaim their contacts” with an address book that’s always “up-to-date and completely filled out.”

We also experienced the most amazing “address book decay” analogy in the world. In the introduction to his glowing review of CircleBack, Vince Font of the Notebook Review wrote: “the electronic equivalent of milk in a carton, your contacts list requires plenty of TLC in order to stay fresh.” And with that, our minds were blown. That someone could phrase the problem so eloquently, could give light to the vulnerability of the problem we’ve been working on for years, for someone else to see the issue in the same way we do… we were just delighted.

To all of these publications, and to our faithful users, we want to offer our most sincere thanks. Your feedback, your write-ups, your conversations surrounding the contact management space: these fuel our fire and determine our direction. Without your support, your voice, we’d truly be nowhere. It’s an honor to have you all on our side.