After a months of beta testing, we’re proud to announce that Foomark.com is finally open to the public.
We’re launching with just under 200 users, 46,000 foomarks and 10,000 tags.
Hopefully you’ll join us!
Sign up for your account at foomark.com
After what felt like the longest 36 hours ever, foomark.com is alive and kicking on our new cloud server from Rackspace.
We’ve already seen a huge drop in response time (two thirds by some measurements) and page load times have also been reduced.
Apologizes to anyone who tried to access our system and couldn’t. Hopefully our jokes on our maintenance page were worth some laughs.
If you haven’t gotten an invite yet head over to foomark.com and sign up for our newsletter. Our plan is to get anyone who signs up in the system within the next 2-3 weeks.
Need an invite sooner? Ask around on twitter, every beta user is given 2 invites.
In the meantime, happy foomarking.
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we will have some expected downtime tonight (11PM CST) as we move to an upgraded server.
We’ll give an update as soon as the migration is complete.
Today we reach our first landmark of 10k foomarks and just under 1k tags.
A big thanks to some of our beta users for putting our system through it’s paces. We’ve gotten some great feedback and suggestions for features.
Thanks guys!
Being a lean startup is all the rage these days.
I think the real question here is, “When did boot strapping become antiquated?” People talk about lean startups like bootstrappers went on a diet. While I can appreciate the concept, lean is a term that’s already being over used.
Back in December, the news broke that Yahoo might possibly sunset [read: kill] Delicious. The internet had a meltdown, Pinboard’s server melted, and Robert, my business partner, built his own “Delicious” engine in a weekend. No, seriously, a weekend. While someone blogged about it, he actually did it.
We spent the next 3 months bringing Foomark to life. We didn’t want to build a copycat so we decided to make things more interesting. Why not turn bookmarking into a game?
Bookmarking sites + earning coins + building a guild sounded like fun.
There’s just two of us. One designer (me) and one developer (Robert). The system is built under CodeIgniter. Why didn’t we choose Rudy on Rails? To tell you the truth, we didn’t spend hours or days researching the right solution for Foomark. Robert just sat down one morning and started coding. He originally named it a “‘Delicious clone”.
This year at SXSW, we launched our app. With every party or new introduction the question was “What is your startup?”.
Foomark is our startup, even if we didn’t set out with that goal in mind.
Robert and I are both full time freelancers. Foomark was birthed between client work, evenings and weekend meet-ups. To help lighten the load we’ve employed several other apps:
First up, Postmark which allows us to track all the mail we send out. We’re tracking everything from invite emails to cron scripts.
Next, Uservoice which is a great system for providing feedback and support to users. We’ve already received some amazing feedback and suggestions for our roadmap.
Internally, we’re using our own custom built to-do list for bug tracking and feature development (another side project from Robert and I).
And of course if you’re reading this, we’re using Tumblr for our blog. We just need something lightweight to get our message out.
Support from our friends and beta testers have been overwhelmingly positive. We’re not sure what the future holds for us or Foomark but we’re pushing forward.
We’re open to the idea of funding but frankly, a lack of funding isn’t going to stop us. We will continue to support Foomark as long as there is a community of users.
Our hope is to eventually transform Foomark from a part time startup to a full time, bookmarking, guild fighting, social gaming awesomeness. Let the games begin!
This post is part of the lean startup challenge: http://appsumo.com/leanchallenge which is part of an amazing startup bundle from Appsumo.
As of today foomark.com is officially live. After some rigorous testing and some final design tweaks, we’ve made the migration from development to production.
Foomark.com has been outfitted with a new design, newsletter signup and sneak peak of the app. We’re still testing the database structure and site functionality so access to the app has been restricted to beta users only. We’ll be sending out invites in small waves over the next few weeks.
If you interested in leveling up your bookmarks don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter on foomark.com. We’ll get you an invite as soon as one is available!
(Source: foomark.com)
