Technically, the first line of CrowdVine code was written in late 2006, but I mark August 6, 2007 as the day CrowdVine became a company. It’s the day we were incorporated, the day I went full time, and the day when there was enough business to hire a second person (Jay). So that means today we’ve turned two years old!
There were some milestones:
January 17, 2007: Our very first network was for the Socon Social Media Conference in Atlanta. It was the best conference I’ve ever been to, mainly because it was so easy to meet people. That was the first hint that conferences were going to be a big part of our business. Huge thanks to the conference organizer, Sherry Heyl for taking a chance on us!
May 2, 2007: Announced that we were open for beta testers. Unlike the betas that Google puts out, this was a very rough piece of software.
June 22, 2007: We partnered with social schedule builder, Icalico, for the FooCamp conference. We were the first event social network provider to offer an integrated schedule builder. The Icalico product is now folded into CrowdVine. Huge thanks to my former coworkers Kellan and Rabble for building and releasing Icalico.
August 6, 2007: CrowdVine, the company, is born.
November 15, 2007: Officially launched a conference version of our software. People had released event software that they called a social network before, but we were the first company to have a social network that felt like a social network. There are now five other event social network companies copying our model.
December 19, 2007: We launched Twitter integration. We were the first social network provider of any kind to provide twitter integration as a native feature.
May 28, 2008: We break out of our niche serving web/tech events with a record growth month and new mainstream customers.
September 2, 2008: We launched self-service versions so events of any size could afford CrowdVine. We’re currently the only event social network offering this option.
September 9, 2008: We launched our mobile version.
February 12, 2009: We launched our session rating feature to the public.
March 9, 2009: We added custom domains for free. We’re the only white-label social network service that doesn’t charge for this.
May 23, 2009: I went on my first vacation (to Italy) since starting CrowdVine. Any business owner should recognize this as a major milestone.
I like our track record for innovation. But I’m much more proud that we’re building a company that can last. We’ve gotten this far without ever taking investment or going into debt. The people that work here are fantastic. And our customers are great people too. So much thanks to the folks here at CrowdVine who’ve made all this happen and even more thanks to the customers who had the vision and guts to give us a try before there was proof.
Tags: milestones
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on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 10:57 am by tony.
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August 7th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I was just bragging about you during my presentation at the IAEE event http://www.iaeese.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6&Itemid=1