EskomSePush
(Facebook, EskomSePush)
  • EskomSePush’s cofounder trended on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon. 
  • This after he changed the load shedding app’s servers to reduce downtime. 
  • EskomSePush surpassed 1.3 million downloads on Wednesday. 

“#DanTheMan” trended on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon when hundreds of South Africans thanked Dan Wells, the co-founder of load shedding notification application EskomSePush. 

This after users of EskomSePush - the most downloaded application on both IOS and Android - received a notification that it is running smoothly after Wells changed the servers. 

The application was down for large parts of the weekend when users received “we’re over capacity” messages after Stage 4 load shedding was implemented. 

“Thank you, South Africa, for all your amazing support and messages today,” Wells tweeted on Wednesday evening.

"We do this for the [love] and just want to make you smile.”

Wells and Herman Maritz cofounded EskomSePush in 2014 while they were building banking applications, and run it on a not-for-profit basis. 

Both have full-time careers outside of EskomSePush. Maritz said the application surpassed 1.3 million downloads and 800,000 daily active users on Wednesday - up from 400,000 in February. 

Also read: EskomSePush has exploded as SA's go-to load shedding app - it grew from 2,500 users to 400,000 in a week

Maritz explained that during a typical load shedding alert, over 10,000 users enter the application per second, which the server detects as spam. 

Dan Wells has since switched to new servers from different providers to see if it works better, he said. 

“Dan is working his ass off on this [and] it’s going okay now. Hats off to him," Maritz told Business Insider South Africa. 

EskomSePush cofounders Herman Maritz and Dan Wells
EskomSePush cofounders Dan Wells and Herman Maritz at the MTN App of the Year Awards in 2015 (Twitter, @MTNza)

The two said they have received requests from people who wanted to buy the application, but most were trying their luck. 

Maritz said they would prefer an investment where they could still run the application, with the partner helping with operations. 

“We enjoy doing this honestly [but] we really need help with operations,” he said. “So [a partner will help us to] focus on the stability and performance of the system.” 

“We have some features that are basically ready to ‘go live’ but we don’t have the time to dedicate to developing new features.” 

Maritz said they have several other ideas, outside of EskomSePush, of how they could help South African communities.

For more, go to Business Insider South Africa.

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