From startup to early stage

Xeequa is now 8 month old. In January, when we started, I posted about social media, chatted about the social enterprise and how this all will influence business. I promised to write about the steps growing this company and the development we go through. Now we are on the verge of launching Xeequa at DreamForce and signing up first customers. The team has grown and the challenges have a different name and face.

From next week on this blog will change it's content a bid. The company while still very young is moving from startup to the next level, becoming an early stage company. Rather than sharing what we needed to do to start the company, what products and services we choose and what structure we built, we will more talk about the customer, the market, the experience with business networking and may be give a little insight into the challenges to grow the company.

But today I'd like to do a review:
* We started as an "All SaaS Enterprise" - still today we do not have any internal IT. All our applications are online. All phone lines are VoIP. Communication is mostly IM, email and skype.
* We built a virtual team out of desperation because we couldn't find local talents. Today the engineering team has grown to 15 - scattered all over the planet.
* We started with a Beta phase where most people told me they wouldn't even consider it PRE-ALPHA. Well I don't regret it. We received several hundred feature requests, several hundred bug reports and the product wouldn't be what it is today if not for the users who helped develop it almost from day one.
* Some close friends warned me about being so open, showing the product before it is a product, explaining the vulnerable pieces and how fragile this new company was, and how crazy it is to share strategic thoughts on twitter. At the end it didn't harm at all, it rather helped building an early community around Xeequa. Actually it accelerated my intention to develop an Open Business initiative. And I'm committed to continue the open communication.

In any case, I'm very thankful for every bid of feedback we received.

Pewh - that's a long post.