People’s Software Company

It’s the thirty day mark for Peoples Software and TechStars. A month ago, we had the following:

• two co-founders
• a set of problems around connecting people locally and among their friends that we thought needed solving (and that were being under-addressed by people focused on local news, local *community*, and alot of what passes as citizen media)
• acceptance into TechStars and a chance to accelerate our ideas into products, a business, and solutions
• Tremendous will-we both closed up shop on other things and moved across the country to do this.

What we did not have:

• A clear, as in executable this summer and making good customer and business sense, product roadmap
• A technical lead/co-founder
• Design and coding support
• Experience as a company and as a team
• A blog, web site, public face

Okay, so fast forward 30 days later and here’s where we are and what we have:

• A full team–we added a strong technical co-founder, Catherine Taylor, 20 days into the program (!) and she is rocking out
• A strong sense of how to enter the market, what to build, and how to acquire customers
• An executable product roadmap for the summer and beyond–this means scalable solutions and a way in to the issues we want to solve.
• Prototypes of what we are building
• A development environment, specs, and–best of all–roadmap, milestones, and release dates for July(!!!)
• Additional team members–a wizard architect and a talented designer-to help accelerate what we’re doing right now
• Commitment, passion, determination-we’re on the big march down the long road and we’re making it happen.
• A real view of the future, of how we will make money, and how we’re going to acquire the users to help deliver the $$.
• And plans to deliver the above.

Do I need to say, for the 5,000th time, that TechStars has functioned very much as an accelerator for us, driving quicker ramp up that our usual lives might have?

And that we’re so focused on this company, on making it happen, and on delivering these light-weight community applications that can make people’s lives works a little better?

Tonight we’re going to demo and get comments and feedback from friends, mentors, peers. Being at this place, at this time, is exactly where we need to be, but I want to give props to TechStars–to David, Brad, Andrew, Todd, and everyone else–and to the PSCo team–Lisa and Catherine (and the family and friends that encourage us) for geting here, right on time, today.

**And if you are someone who’d like to beta our tools when we release, and/or have a special interest in locally-focused messaging and life management tools–send me a note or leave info in the comments here.