What I mean by that is that I think we were able to create something that is useful in an obvious way, right away. The idea behind Scout is in some ways very boring and unoriginal: a search engine, and email alerts. Everyone understands these ideas. But they're very powerful, and we don't know of anything that does this well across a broad set of government information, for free.

I feel confident enough saying this in part because shortly before launch of the product, we actually used the tool to catch a dangerous proposed exemption to the Freedom of Information Act that we would never have caught otherwise:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/25/scout-is-already-delivering-results/

Because of Scout's tipoff, we were able to bring this change to the attention of public interest groups working on the legislation and eventually have it amended. We expect that detecting this kind of direct cause and effect between email alerts and actual policy change will generally be much more difficult. But it was certainly a promising beginning.