This post is reposted from my personal blog, but I thought for some future context it would be good to have here too:
About a year ago I made the decision to start my own company and to make some software on my own. This was partly a lifestyle decision, but also something that I think a lot of technical people feel they want to do at some point in their careers - their one 'great novel' they'd like to at least try to do once. I've been very fortunate in having the opportunity to do that.
Taglocity as it is today is something I am enormously proud of, and has exceeded my fairly lowly expectations of where I thought I would be at this point. A lot of the ideas and concepts in it are very 'big' and are still evolving, but it is something that a lot of people use each day and something that actually helps people. I like it very much.
About three months ago I found myself at a cross-roads of what to do next. On one hand I had a viable living, working on something I feel passionate about and with the mix of extreme hard work and day to day flexibility I was looking for (by the way, if you ever think that creating your own software company and designing, writing, testing, marketing and selling it yourself as a lifestyle decision is *less* work than a being salary-man then you're in for a big shock) but on the other hand I felt like I had reached an impasse: Taglocity had got as big as I alone could make it.
I had customers asking for more features, opportunities to follow up and conversely found I had less and less time to do everything I wanted to do. It seem fairly obvious that Taglocity had grown to be much larger than me. I needed to grow this thing properly and with some help.
Taglocity is now owned by Terazen Technology Inc. of Vancouver BC, Canada. Terazen is a new company which my new business partner Dave Towert and I have recently founded, and of which I will now work within as CTO. I have known Dave for many years and he has a very successful track record of building a software company. I am confident that we'll be able to build both the product and the company into something very special. I also am sure that I'll enjoy doing it too. There's some more info here too.
First off, let me say that for current Taglocity customers nothing really changes. You'll get better support, more upcoming features and planned and stable roadmap of releases. We have a major website and forums update in the works, and some other plans that I'll share later.
One thing I would like to point out now though is that we are hiring. We need people that care deeply about the software that they create to come work in our Yaletown office in Vancouver BC. Some more details of the jobs we are starting with are here. This is an opportunity to get in at the start of a major new project that we want to start as soon as possible, and something that is way beyond the original vision.
On a related note, we are also now looking for groups of people within companies (small or large) that would like to join a private beta program for something related to some new collaborative tagging features in email. If you work in a group of people that would like to collaborate via email better, or get far too much email to manage, then we would like to work with you to explain and evolve our ideas. if you are curious about what we are planning then please contact here for more information. It's really something way beyond what you see in Taglocity 1.0 today.
- David Ing - CTO, Terazen Technology