Wow! Today is Jay Laney’s one year anniversary at CrowdVine. I was rereading the blog post I wrote, Introducing Jay, and noticed that it wasn’t written until November. We had such a backlog of work that it took three months before Jay could get even set up an official blog.

It’s been an amazing year, and a lot of it is because of the work Jay’s been doing. He’s been behind the customizations for a number of our best customers. He did our Facebook integration. We’ve seen a massive improvement in performance, many of our pages moved from an F to a B+ in the YSlow grading system. He did our private messaging system, our new microformats spider for calendar integrations, our improved feed spider (much faster and reliable) and much more. Basically he does the hard work while I talk on the phone.

Some stats, since Jay started we’ve gotten 91% of our users, 83% of our networks, 94% of our revenue, and 100% of our New York Times mentions. So clearly, he panned out!

The result is that CrowdVine has been able to go through two major milestones. First we figured out an important new business model, social networks for conferences and were able to build a product that can reliably serve them. Then we were able to build a business that wasn’t just break even, it was profitable enough to expand.

The day before hiring Jay, TechCrunch had described us as a one-man Ning. His hire meant changing the company description. Well, I just saw Jay describe himself to a customer as the other half of CrowdVine.

Unfortunately (but very much thanks to him), Jay is going to need to change his description. We’re expanding. We have a team of designers on contract that let us customize our networks so that they match your existing design and branding. We’ve brought in help for a site redesign. And we have a good friend helping us with the services side of our business.

I want to give our friend a proper introduction when he’s ready, but the summary is that we’re definitely much more than a two-man Ning. We’re a three-plus-friends-amazing-social-networks business.

Thank you Jay!