This illustrates that a staff of three highly skilled innovative engineers can bring to market an innovative solution.
Jeeze, these guys developed their own database and language to accomplish their objectives. Others might take 10 million in funding, already be focused on the 2nd round, all the while not focused on delivering first.
I'm surprised they are still 3 engineers. They have been posting jobs for almost a year now and still haven't hired anyone, yet they keep saying in blogs and the job section they want to hire. I understanding waiting for the "best" yet at the same time you're growing a custom stack that requires specific skill sets and I imagine as time goes on it only gets harder. I mean, slow hiring is good too but at some point you need to give in and grow so that your employees can join in on your projects and grow with the company!
I think the problem is that if a startup hires a poor performing engineer, they get a negative output because other engineers will have to constantly fix/tune the offending code. So I definitely see backtype's cautious view of hiring only great engineers.
This reminds me of that post by the ex-Facebook manager, who said that tools are top priority. This article really brings it home for me.
However, despite their purported effectiveness as engineers, I'm not sure what Backtype is really doing. I generally see them just below an article, in place of comments, with a long list of useless tweets referring to the article (usually of the form "article title - bit.ly/shortened". That's probably not doing them too much good for marketing, unless you think any publicity is good publicity.
What you're seeing is Disqus' Reactions feature, which we help power. Part of our business is data services, which companies like Disqus, Bitly, The New York Times, SlideShare, etc use.
Our own product is a marketing intelligence platform; essentially, it provides analytics for social media marketing programs so brands understand what's working, what isn't and how to improve.
I remember when they first launched, Backtype seemed like something I had been looking for — a way to automatically aggregate and archive the comments I've posted on various blogs and such. I spent some time getting increasingly frustrated trying to use their webapp when I realized I had apparently misunderstood the purpose of their indexing — they were actually reinventing the trackback.
Jeeze, these guys developed their own database and language to accomplish their objectives. Others might take 10 million in funding, already be focused on the 2nd round, all the while not focused on delivering first.
You have to get there, before you can get there.
Congrats to the BackType team.