Via David Crow, a pair of University of Toronto grads have launched Backtype, a blog comment search engine and tracking service. Christopher Golda and Mike Montano pledged their summer to startup incubator Y Combinator and in three months fleshed out the app.
Almost immediately after our launch, we knew we needed to iterate, focus on distribution and differentiate. Basically, our first release wasn’t something people wanted. After three major iterations of our product—two of which were featured on TechCrunch—we ended up being more of a widget provider than a social-network for events. We learned how important it is to build something that people want and that building something that’s useful right away is a huge advantage. We were trying to solve a problem in a very complex and convoluted way that would have only really worked at scale. After the many changes we made after launch, it became more and more difficult to explain our product—that’s what happens when you release a complicated, feature heavy product to begin with. I think that’s why we’ve developed such a strong appreciation for products like Twitter. We’re still learning and we plan on applying all of the lessons from IPartee; I think we’ve been very fortunate to have some great mentors and peers help us along the way.
BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website,... [more]
