building steam with a grain of salt

at the beginning of 2006, i moved to mountain view and started a company with 2 partners. the whole thing was like an experiment: what happens when you quit your job to bootstrap a startup on the foundation of a modern web application that you have neither tested nor written a line of code for yet? the short and dirty answer is that you take a crash course in software development, business and finance. you also memorize the exact amount in your checking account and learn to calculate how long you can survive without additional funding based on your current "burn rate". so i installed SVN and made friends with the Terminal.

well 9.5 months later trackingshot is ready for some attention.

after a good conversation at a STIRR event and the feeling that we were ready for some traffic, over the weekend we gave CNET's Rafe Needleman permission to blog about the site. he gave us a fairly positive mini-review which was nice. i wonder what kind of response we'll get?

then, without warning, Lifehacker picked up the story and because the gawker empire likes to keep it in the family we got a post on Gizmodo too, which inevitably leads pneumatically to the Digg… boom.

and of course that promptly beheaded our server in the afternoon.

but at 3:30am, the migration code was finished and we came back up. phew. not that we were ever in "stealth mode", but now we have a very public face for a small yet highly critical web population.

so please try out trackingshot, check out my public movies and if you have the time, send me some feedback at kurt.zero [at] gmail. thanks.