Kyle Bragger

Tinyproj has been acquired.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:31:19 -0500

It’s official: Tinyproj is now part of GroupTalent. I couldn’t be more pleased with how things have played out, and I’d like to give some brief thoughts on how and why this all took place.

About a month ago, I wrote an email update to Tinyproj members outlining what’s been going on with the service, the struggle with consistently getting high quality projects, as well as my thoughts on improving the product and bringing in projects more regularly. Around the same time, I started chatting with the guys at GroupTalent; the more we talked, the more I realized that all of the things I’d wanted to do with Tinyproj, they were already doing — and doing extremely well.

Ultimately, my goal in starting Tinyproj was to create a service that connects you with well-paid, quality projects. GroupTalent exists for this very same reason, and that’s why I believe it’s a perfect match for Tinyproj. They’ve got the talent, momentum, and most importantly, the same ideals about respectful, quality work that I do.

One important point to note is that members’ data is not being automatically transferred over or otherwise accessed by GroupTalent, unless the member opts in to the transition; instead, the email contained a signup link that allows Tinyproj users to skip the line over at GroupTalent. It was important to me to do this deal in a way that remained respectful to our users, and it speaks volumes about the GroupTalent team that they are on board with this.

I’m very much looking forward to following their progress, and I encourage you to give GroupTalent a shot if you’re a developer or designer looking for high quality projects to dive in to.

Photo

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:13:23 -0500

caterpillarcowboy: annagrimm: It has begun (Taken with...

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:28:49 -0500

caterpillarcowboy:

annagrimm:

It has begun (Taken with instagram)

That dog is ridiculously cute.

Reblogging for B.

On transparency.

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:21:00 -0500

One of the strongest parts of our company culture at Forrst is our transparency and honesty around our thoughts on community, product, and most importantly, our foul-ups. I have always tried to maintain the same level of openness with all of my projects, as I believe it is vital to a product’s success. I wanted to share this email I sent Tinyproj subscribers this morning about the current state of the service. Keep in mind, transparency doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be divulging trade secrets, detailed roadmaps, etc., but it’s paramount to at least be open about messing up, if nothing else. In regards to the email, it went out to about 9,000 people. To my delight, dozens have responded quite positively with great, great feedback about the service and words of encouragement. Now, without further ado, the email:

An important Tinyproj update

Hey {Name} — I’m Kyle, the creator of Tinyproj. I wanted to let you know about a few important things related to the service, and to thank you for giving Tinyproj a shot.

Lack of Saturday emails recently

You may have noticed that the past few Saturdays have either had no project email, or had a project email which only had a few projects in it. First, I’m sorry for the radio silence about that! Since launching in September the amount of quality inbound projects has dipped substantially. Each project is hand-approved based on interestingness and a fair and realistic timeline and budget, so only a small percentage of projects submitted actually make it into the weekly email. Lately, many of the projects submitted have not passed this quality threshold, and because of that, there have been a few weeks where no projects actually made the cut. I have some thoughts around churning up new and interesting inbound projects, and have been working hard on a solution. It thrills me that many of you have not only connected with great projects, but in some cases have even ended up with longer-term engagements through Tinyproj. That’s awesome, and I hope to see that trend continue.

Lack of response from project owners

Another issue I’m keenly aware of is that project owners are overwhelmed with the response to their projects, and therefore are frequently unable to respond to all interested folks in a timely fashion, if at all. I am a huge fan of transparency; having spent many years freelancing myself, I know how frustrating it is to never hear back from a lead. I’m sorry for that, and am working on solving that problem for you.

Confusion about intros

The other major hiccup with the service is that the intro flow is confusing to some. By intro flow, I mean the way we have you get in touch with project owners when you’re interested in working with them. Right now, it involves following a link in the email and then hitting another button which triggers an anonymous email intro. You then (very confusingly) have to reply to that email before you’re actually in touch about the project. It’s not an ideal user experience, and I’m going to make it much easier to get in touch about neat projects.

What’s ahead

I’m devoting some serious time to rethinking the product, including tackling the above-mentioned issues as best I can. I very much believe in the overall model, and I’m confident Tinyproj still has a chance to be a solid player in the talent space. My hope is that thousands of talented designers and developers can find interesting and lucrative projects to work on in their spare time through Tinyproj. I pledge to be more in touch about how things are progressing, and I look forward to your continued support.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns at all, please feel free to reply directly to this email.

Cheers,
Kyle

A few quick thoughts on email, office, and intro etiquette

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:11:35 -0500

These are just a few observations about email, office, and intro etiquette/culture that I have been meaning to get down for a bit. These are my own views on the matter, and I’m sure they come off as somewhat staunch, but it’s necessary for me to adhere to them as much as possible, if for no other reason than Forrst keeps me plenty busy and I’d like to make the best use of my time each day.

Sending emails like “Did you get my email?” — Yes, I probably did. Or maybe not. But, it’s probably not worth sending additional emails about it, since that will only add to the backlog. Pud has some good thoughts on this.
If I’m wearing headphones, I’m usually heads-down working through a problem in code, or otherwise in the zone on email, company financials, etc. and it’s not okay to interrupt me (unless we have something scheduled, since I probably just lost track of time.) Send me an email or catch me when I’m not in the zone.
Intro emails — I love talking to people about what they’re working on and I want to make the best use of everyone’s time. Email intros that lack any kind of context or other “intros for the sake of it” I’ll probably put on the back burner. If there’s not a clear ask, it’s really hard for me to make it a priority. I’m all for meeting folks, but I’m personally not into meeting people with no context or purpose behind it.
“Let’s jump on a quick call” — I like to work as asynchronously as possible. I have found that surprisingly few things that are pitched as a “quick call” actually end up needing to have that call at all, and can be handled just as effectively via email. This holds especially true for cold emails from vendors. I have tried to get into the habit of asking for a list of questions I can answer and send back; so far, so good.

It’s not my intention to paint a picture of myself as some downer that doesn’t want to talk to you or have any human interaction; quite the opposite: I’d like to have more meaningful interactions with those I meet/work around/am introduced to, make the best possible use of my time and theirs, and ensure maximum focus during the workday.

caterpillarcowboy: Woah. Screenshots of the app coming...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:16:05 -0500

caterpillarcowboy:

Woah.
Screenshots of the app coming next.

On the hiring space + reputation.

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 02:35:00 -0500

(Warning! Late night/random thoughts so apologies for any incoherence.)

The developer/designer hiring space is getting more crowded by the second. (Or maybe it always was?) Tons of job boards — GitHub Jobs, StackOverflow Careers, Authentic Jobs, 37signals — (and Forrst’s, too), plus services taking a more hands-on approach (Whitetruffle, Hackruiter), not to mention the hybrid/curated stuff like Tinyproj (disclaimer: I made it), Grouptalent, etc., plus professional networks like Path.to, Zerply, or LinkedIn. I think this is a great thing — IMO it’s never been a better time to be a “ninja rockstar guru best-of-breed”* developer or designer. Tons of smart people are trying to solve the holy grail of finding and hiring great developer and designer talent and this is taking a variety of forms. For instance, it will be interesting to watch the progress of the high-touch services (and I have no doubt they’ll do very well).

I think one of the more tricky/fascinating problems to think about is the idea of “one reputation to rule them all”. (Like Klout, but for you as a programmer/engineer/designer/whatever but actually meaningful). Posting “fatigue” is coming (if it hasn’t already). So, what will make your service one of the few any given job is listed on? In order of importance: results, results, results, painless for the company to use (e.g. deliver talent to them, but, don’t try to replace their vetting process fully), quality talent eager to work on meaningful problems, makes sense pricing-wise (save that $20k for a rainy day).

On the talent side, I think status needs to get more attention; applicants should be able to get instant feedback: application unread/read/replied to/ignored for [reason]. Make it effortless to get inbound jobs/gigs. Avoid the traditional recruiter problem and share jobs that are truly relevant to people, not just a spray-and-pray, buzzword bingo fiasco.

Ultimately, though, the concept of aggregating reputation across services is quite interesting to me. In a way, Forrst is just a reputation layer. Purely in the context of hiring, so are Stack, Dribbble, GitHub, and any other place we devs and designers are sharing/interacting. What if the reputation layer were interchangeable? Every interaction, positive or otherwise, affected this reputation score. The score could be used as one of many signals to surface great talent (and in fact, I don’t think reputation could/should be the most important factor — rather, looking at interests, cultural desires, etc. of a candidate should far outrank some arbitrary scoring system). However, in terms of the hiring space, the services that win out will be the ones which figure out how to curate a network of great people looking for work in a way that doesn’t rely on any one provider of reputation (this is one of the things I’m thinking about in relation to Forrst).

The other interesting thing to think about is a service where actual work is factored in to a candidate’s rank (much more relevant for freelance gigs since they’re back in the pool in a few weeks/months) — work outcome (e.g. would you work with this company/service provider again?) serves as another meaningful signal around your reputation.

One could even take this a step further and factor in other things like great projects I’ve created myself (and do they create real value?), peer ratings/endorsements, and so forth:

Rep = (sum of all my interactions on relevant sites [github, forrst, dribbble, etc.]) + (net outcome of all projects I've done/positions I've held) + (verified peer ratings) + (what value have I created?) + (scores/results from sites like Codecademy + Treehouse)

Any platform trying to surface talent could feasibly factor in any or all of the above. Ultimately the more context we can provide companies around who’s applying, and conversely, the more targeted we can be about what jobs we’re sending out to talent, the better for everyone.

To sum up, it’s going to be an interesting next few years. More and more companies are looking for great talent, and the hiring space is going to be heating up even more. Whether it’s a straight job board play or a more targeted system, we’ve all got our work cut out for us.

* Okay, just kidding. Those words should be illegal to even think about.

Beefing up user profiles on Forrst

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:03:00 -0500

I have been meaning to write a bit about something we rolled out on Forrst a two weeks back — this tiny question bar that lives right under our navigation bar. While seemingly simple on the surface, it was a blast to dream up and build (with some inspiration from Hiten Shah). It helps us solve a very important problem: how do we help users complete their profiles on Forrst without being pushy (e.g. tons of “hey, we have a new setting for you to tweak” emails or similar). To date, around 7,000 users have answered at least one question. The questions right now mostly revolve around whether they’re looking for work, what kind, etc. but thanks to this system, we can easily deploy more questions in just a few minutes.

On the tech side, I wrote a simple system that lets us define questions, complete with conditionals, and map responses to specific database fields (including typecasting and tracking progress — e.g. how far along is User 123?).

The question “definition” for the above image looks like this:

array(
    'text'   => 'Are you looking for work? Let us know!',
    // `users` col this maps to
    'field'  => 'available_for_work',
    'ftype'  => 'bool',
    'type'   => 'buttons',
    'inputs' => array('Yes I am' => true, 'Nope' => false),
)

For boolean questions, the first button listed is automatically given a primary color (in this case, “Yes I am”). We could optionally specify conditions that would need to be satisfied before the question was displayed by passing an array of fields and values to check.

On each request, the user is asked the next question in the series. We handle responses with ajax, so they’ll just remain on the page they’re looking at if they answer. This has helped keep our users’ profiles up to date in an unobtrusive way (so we can give them more targeted jobs, for instance) — that’s what we set out to accomplish, and it’s been great to see such positive results thus far.

On what's next.

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:55:00 -0400

forrst:

I’m really, really excited to be writing this post today. Big things are afoot at Forrst, and I’d like to share a few of them with you.

I am pleased to announce that Forrst is part of the latest 500startups Accelerator batch. Dave participated in our seed round in March, and when he asked us to come out to Mountain View this October, it was quite simply an offer we couldn’t refuse. I’ll post more thoughts later on how great 500 has been for us thus far, suffice to say we had a pretty decent month* this month, the partners & founder/mentor network are amazing, and things are only going to get better from here. It’s also great to be around a bunch of companies doing some pretty neat things in the industry. There is something invigorating about sharing an office (and what an office, indeed) with tons of smart folks.

Our goals while we’re out here are simple: kicking ass on product, growing the Forrst community in a meaningful way, and ramping up revenue. On the revenue side, we’re focusing on moving our primary revenue source from an internal one (the community paying for X) to an external one (people paying for access/exposure to the community). The most direct path to that thus far has been the launch of our new jobs platform, which I cover a bit below. All in all, it’s been a fantastic start, and I’m immensely looking forward to the next few months.

We also officially launched our jobs platform around a week ago. (PS - We can help you hire.) While it’s just the tip of the iceberg, I’m eager to continue iterating on what we’ve got planned, and the response so far has been simply fantastic. There are already a ton of rad companies like Meetup, Tumblr, LaunchRock, Storenvy, AppFog, blip.tv, A9.com, Visual.ly, Assistly, and more participating, and many are already having success connecting with great developers and designers from Forrst.

While it may look like “just another job board” on the surface, a Forrst account is needed to apply, and because of that we’re able to provide much more context around who’s applying, including a sampling of their public content, Forrst reputation, photo, and so forth. To date, most of the listings have been for fulltime positions, but we’re also playing around with an experiment called Tinyproj that aims to connect our users with great freelance work. I expect big things to happen on both of these fronts. Everything we do has to answer a basic question: “is this great for the community?”. We can answer a resounding “yes” here (who doesn’t love getting paid to work on awesome stuff?), and it feels good to be able to focus on helping our community in even more ways.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the overall vision for Forrst. It’s become increasingly clear that we’re in a really great spot to become the place where up and coming (and presently un/under-known) talent is discovered and hired. We’ve made a big push over the last six months to focus on high quality, thoughtful feedback around development and design projects, and there are some more fundamental product changes in store (all good things, I promise!) that should help to further focus the community around this vision.

There’s something incredibly powerful about being able to learn about how someone works, not just what they can produce. It’s also amazing to watch talented folks paying it forward and helping nurture budding talent; we were all starting out once, and I believe this is one of the best parts about the Forrst community.

So, over the next couple months we’ll be rolling out product updates that aim to make Forrst much simpler, faster, and focused — all keeping in mind the vision we’ve got for what the community can become (and quite frankly, already is in many ways!).

Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the people — our team, friends, colleagues, investors, mentors, and advisors — who’ve believed in and helped grow and build Forrst over the two years that we’ve been around (they know who they are), and I’m honored to have so many people rooting for us.

By the way, that “decent month” I mentioned earlier? We are profitable.

Onward!

Kyle Bragger, Founder

@kylebragger

Pretty darn excited about this.

superamit: About two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:13:43 -0400

superamit:

About two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.

He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that If it hadn’t been caught, it would have died within weeks.

—

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.

If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.

If you know any South Asians, please point ‘em to the links above. Thank you.

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

tony b:

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.

You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.

Please help us get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.

Week One Recap.

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:11:07 -0400

tinyproj:

Tinyproj launched in the late hours of Sept. 13. A week or so later, here’s where things are after sending two emails (there was a mid-week send on Wednesday due to project demand — not a bad problem to have.)

6,430 have registered for the weekly emails

Now that some of the buzz has died down, we’re adding roughly 200 users/day

64 projects have been submitted in total

31 of those have been approved and paid (with a few more in the queue)

Just as many have been rejected or asked for clarification for not meeting our guidelines

The average user requests an intro to 2 projects

Projects receive, on average, 74 intros each

The average project has a budget of $1,900 and has a timeline of about 1 week

I couldn’t be happier with the response thus far, and on both sides of the equation. Folks are loving the projects and seem to be enjoying the curation I’ve been trying to do. Those who have paid to list projects are thrilled with the amount of quality intros they’ve been getting.

It’s also been exciting to watch the product transforming before my eyes. For instance, based on overwhelming feedback from project owners, earlier today I pushed a brand new dashboard for projects where one can manage and respond to interested talent. This should also cut down on the email overload Tinyproj was causing up to this point. There’s also some stuff in the pipeline that deals with feedback mechanisms for both projects and talent. The future seems bright for this experiment turned revenue-generating product. Also newly launched are the Tinyproj Guidelines, which set forth what we expect of our users and projects.

You should follow @Tinyproj on Twitter for more quick-fire updates, and by all means, if you’re a developer or designer, or have a small project and need talent, please give Tinyproj a shot.

-Kyle

caterpillarcowboy: Postling in Businessweek! Read the full...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:43:14 -0400

caterpillarcowboy:

Postling in Businessweek!
Read the full article here.

Bloomberg / Businessweek just published an article about mentorship and decided to feature us for the story.

For Lifson, the mentoring relationship evolved: Thompson invested $50,000 in Postling in November 2009, the first of several outside backers who have bet about $1 million on the startup. She started using the service for 700 clients of her apartment rental service 4 Walls in Narberth, Pa., immediately after Postling launched in August 2009.

[….]

He says Thompson’s perspective was as important as her business. “She gets to see a side of the market that is a little different from what we see,” he says. “She was good at all the things that we were bad at.”

This photo!

A recap of Day One.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:09:00 -0400

tinyproj:

Today Tinyproj officially turns three … days (old), and what a ride it’s been so far. I thought it would be fun to do a quick breakdown of the first email we sent today (and if you didn’t get it, sign up for next time).

It’s great to see a chord has been struck with folks — over 4,500 developers and designers, copywriters, and illustrators have signed up in the past few days, and the growth isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. On the project side, there were close to 30 submissions, which was culled down to 16 (based on fairness of budget, quality, etc.). Today’s email featured those 16 projects; they covered a range of disciplines — anything from iOS dev, to HTML/CSS, UX design, copywriting, and more.

Across those 16 projects (which went out to an average of 3,800 people), the average number of people who asked for an intro to the project owner was 41, with the highest coming in at 99, and the lowest coming in at 8. The average project duration was 7 days, and the average budget was $1937.

The feedback has been incredible, and I’ve got a solid list of things to improve for next Saturday’s email. I’ll talk more about what went right — and what didn’t — in my next post.

Until then, if you’re a dev or designer and looking for interesting, paid, respectable work on the side, sign up today. You don’t have to do anything — the projects get sent to your inbox every Saturday morning (probably slightly less exciting than Saturday morning cartoons, but that’s up for debate.)

If you’re someone with short-term work and don’t want to use crowdsourcing services that have people working on spec, why not give Tinyproj a shot? It’s just 25 bucks.

Until next time,
Kyle

I just launched Tinyproj, the latest in my line of web service...

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:18:00 -0400

I just launched Tinyproj, the latest in my line of web service experiments. Tinyproj is simple: it helps connect developers, designers, copywriters, and illustrators with respectful, interesting, and paid short-term projects. These projects go out every Saturday to ~~almost 1,000~~ over 4,000 rad folks. It’s just $25 to get started if you’ve got a project to offer, and free to sign up if you’re looking for work. I think this fills a real need and will hopefully be of great use to people on both sides of the equation, especially given that it’s a more ethical alternative than asking people to work on spec. Nonetheless, check it out, sign up if it sounds interesting to you, and stay tuned — I think great things will come of this.

PS. Discussion on HN

Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply "make it work"?

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:55:00 -0400

I’ve been pondering this question for a while, and I thought it could spark some interesting discussion. 10 pin bowling is a huge part of my life: I’ve been a ball driller, coach, and at my peak was throwing 50-100 games a week, and was gearing up to start bowling professionally (those were the days!) What’s interesting about bowling is that a lot of folks I drilled equipment for didn’t really care about the physics behind it — the how and why; indeed, there are a ton of aspects to a proper drilling, but most of my clients just didn’t care about that — they wanted to see the ball hook, and they wanted to score well. Beyond that, it was of little concern what layout I used or why, so long as the ball was getting the desired reaction. Bowling is a combination of mental and physical routines greatly impacted by a number of variables that one can tune — it’s like a giant equation. As a ball driller, there are numerous tweaks I can make to how I drill a ball that will subtlety (or grossly) affect how the ball works on the lane (there are also a number of physical things you can do, like tweaking ball speed, hand position, etc.) In striving to improve my own game, I learned everything I could about the variables involved, and how I could tune them to maximize my scoring potential.

Now, if you’re actually still reading this, you’re probably asking yourself how this could possibly relate to development or design. Well, my friends, it does more than you think: When was the last time you stopped to truly understand what was going on behind the scenes in your code, gems, plugins, libraries, your CSS frameworks, and your design tools? Have you ever spent a significant amount of time pulling apart your tools in an effort to understand not just what the do on the surface, but how and why they do it? This is something that I’ve been making a concerted effort to do the past few years, and it’s helped me grow immensely in my craft, not to mention it’s so much easier to understand what’s going wrong if you understand what’s going on in the first place.

So, my question to you is this: do you strive to deeply understand your tools, or is getting it working good enough?

(Cross posted from Forrst.)

psql: mindsnacks: We’re adding a shipload of new fun things to...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:03:28 -0400

psql:

mindsnacks:

We’re adding a shipload of new fun things to MindSnacks, so we need the help of some fresh, creative brains. We’ve got some early openings in our Art-Design department.

Check out our careers page for more information, and spread the word! It’s a truly exciting opportunity.

It’s actually blood!

But anyway — check out our openings. It’s going to be exciting to work with some additional whacky brains.

Any questions can also be telegrammed to pasquale(at)mindsnacks.com.

Pud's Blog: Why Must You Laugh At My Back End

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:56:09 -0400

Pud's Blog: Why Must You Laugh At My Back End:

pudjam666:

Disclaimer:

I’m not a trained engineer or sys admin. Never even finished a book on it. But I’ve launched (and sold) a few things that have become popular, so sometimes people ask me about my back end. Which ends up in blank stares, or worse.

OS:

Windows Server 2008. As for why not linux, I…

Nailed it. Using the right tool(s) for the job will usually win over using what’s hot this very second.

Fun fact: I used to write ColdFusion, too.

Stats!

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:00:00 -0400

forrst:

Everybody likes stats, so here are some neat/awesome/boring stats about Forrst.

Since launching about 14 months ago:

31,000 registered users, 40% of whom are active each month (and that’s more than just logging in)

nearly 90,000 posts across four types (code, screenshots, links, and questions)

350,000 comments

17,000 folks waiting for an account (something we’re working on reducing, e.g. with GitHub-powered signup)

almost 1 million pieces of content liked

between 50 and 100 people request an invite every day

640 paid accounts

we grew by 1,200 users in January 2011; we grew by 2,700 users in June 2011

It’s been awesome to see Forrst grow from literally nothing into the awesome community it is today, and we’re all seriously excited about what’s next for us.

And we didn’t need to raise enormous amounts of money to do it, either.

Ted Roden: Meet the new boss

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:58:54 -0400

Ted Roden: Meet the new boss:

tedroden:

About five months ago I left my job at The New York Times. When I left, the plan was simple, I was going to work part time at betaworks/bit.ly to help get news.me out the door and part time on Fancy Hands. News.me is out the door and Fancy Hands is still “up and to the right” as Tony Haile…

Congrats, Ted!

Andrew Pile: Oops

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:55:30 -0400

Andrew Pile: Oops:

From: XXXXX
Date: Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 2:07 PM
Subject: Hello From YouTube Engineering: checking in
To: XXXXX@gmail.com

Hi XXXX,

It’s a new year — already halfway over! and I thought I’d check in to see if you may be interested in exploring engineering opportunities with YouTube? I hope…

Gotta love recruiters.