I've been mining for about three weeks since I heard about it. Quite a few have been mining for longer than that, its been word of mouth via Reddit and 4chan/biz/.
Last week Kevin Rose interviewed RockSteady and the discord went from maybe 100 users to I think over three thousand in just a few hours.
Last weekend was spectacular with the amount of interest it gained LOL.
No premine, no ICO, no big announcement.
It just started off kind of casually and has grown from there by people telling others about it.
Its got a great future, easy to mine.
Tradeogre.com is the only exchange so far and I have bought some Turtle's with zero issues and the transfer to my wallet was amazingly fast. I bought 200,000 Turtle coins and they showed up as unconfirmed in my simplewallet in SEVEN seconds and was confirmed in less than two minutes later.
EDIT: And so far its the most fun coin I have mined, there is a "RainBot" on the discord that shows up sometimes and "rains" free Turtle coins. Its the first discord that I actually wanted to stay and get involved in because the atmosphere there is great .
I just found out that exchange