We sent out our first round of blist beta invites yesterday. We’ll be inviting more and more people over the next few days. This means that if you have not yet received the beta key you need to start using blist, you won’t have long to wait.
Thanks!
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
You’ll all quickly learn that I’m no gifted orator, but watch our DEMO 08 launch video anyway. In 5 minutes you’ll get a sense for what blist is:
Webware - Webware - Jan 29, 2008
Blist launches a impressive Flash-based front end to its SQL database service. Read this blog post by Rafe Needleman on Webware … View Article
Presentations from all 77 presenting companies at DEMO 08 are being streamed live. You can see blist’s 6 minute presentation at about 2:38 today. Go to demo.com to watch. If you miss it, we’ll post the video online tomorrow.
Four of us have made the trek to Palm Desert for DEMO. The excitement is starting to build. I did my rehearsal (practice) run on the DEMO stage yesterday. It was a lot of fun. I’m really impressed with the set up. The audio and visual folks and all the other support people are really top notch. You certainly get the feeling that they’ve been here and done this before.
Thanks to all the well wishers pouring in with their emails of encouragement. I know I’ve been a little quiet lately. We’re just getting ready.
Before we go on stage, I just want to compliment Paul, Matt, Jeff, Justin, Amir, Aaron and Sam for doing an awesome job so far. Keep up the great work.
Back to work for me - I need to keep practicing. Talk to you soon.
blist will launch in beta at DEMO next week. We’ve been working hard on fixing bugs, stabilizing the application, getting our production system up and running, etc. What’s sometimes overwhelming is how many features we already have on the product backlog. The main inhibitor to adding these features is simply engineering bandwidth. We’ve been interviewing engineers lately, but none are stellar. It might seem like a reasonable idea to slightly lower our standards for now, just to crank through the backlog, but that would be a huge mistake. We have to keep the bar high.
As we come out of our stealth shell, launch at DEMO next week and host Lunch 2.0 next month, I think recruiting will become slightly easier. Even in the last month the quantity and quality of unsolicited, inbound inquiries has noticeably improved. I sent an outbound feeler to an engineer today and his response was “Yeah, I know who you are. I’d love to come talk with you.”
Little by little we’ll get there. It just may take us a little longer by keeping our standards high. If you’re an exceptional engineer, product manager or marketer, I encourage you to introduce yourself. I can be reached at kevin.merritt at blist.com.
I still remember September 16, 2003. It was the day MessageRite, my first company, archived its first email message on behalf of its first customer. I remember all 5 of us huddled around my monitor, watching the output of tail -f on our application’s log file. We watched and watched and finally a message came in. It archived successfully. We cheered; high fives all around. Then a few more came and we cheered some more. It was a great day. But I actually don’t even remember if that first email was archived in the morning or afternoon. I only remember the day, not the time of day.
My sense is that many years from now I’ll remember not only the day, but the exact moment when blist went live. January 29, 2008 at 2:38. That’s when we’ll be on the DEMO stage, unveiling blist for the first time. The excitement is building.
