Secrets of BackType's (YC S08) Data Engineers (opens in new tab)

This illustrates that a staff of three highly skilled innovative engineers can bring to market an innovative solution.

Jeeze, these guys developed their own database and language to accomplish their objectives. Others might take 10 million in funding, already be focused on the 2nd round, all the while not focused on delivering first.

You have to get there, before you can get there.

Congrats to the BackType team.

I would be more interested in hearing the results/reasoning of their recent introduction of a paywall.

Seems the business model pivoted slightly.

e.g. http://backtweets.com/search?q=yongfook.com%2Fall-about-litt...

anything beyond the last few weeks, you need to pay $100/month.

I'm surprised they are still 3 engineers. They have been posting jobs for almost a year now and still haven't hired anyone, yet they keep saying in blogs and the job section they want to hire. I understanding waiting for the "best" yet at the same time you're growing a custom stack that requires specific skill sets and I imagine as time goes on it only gets harder. I mean, slow hiring is good too but at some point you need to give in and grow so that your employees can join in on your projects and grow with the company!

This reminds me of that post by the ex-Facebook manager, who said that tools are top priority. This article really brings it home for me.

However, despite their purported effectiveness as engineers, I'm not sure what Backtype is really doing. I generally see them just below an article, in place of comments, with a long list of useless tweets referring to the article (usually of the form "article title - bit.ly/shortened". That's probably not doing them too much good for marketing, unless you think any publicity is good publicity.