Running a startup is like running marathon at the speed of 100-meter dash. We recently finished our first big stretch. If you talk to purists, they will ask you to take it easy and do a warm up run first. Our team did not listen to that.

That quick stretch resulted in a successful rollout of private beta version of messagedance.com. So much quote unquote back end work has gone into the software that we decided to first target hard-to-please (Yes Abhi, I am talking about you!) users. Who obliged us with their necessary “ahas” and “sounds interesting” comments. Icing was that we did it on time and used all the blog-wisdom we had at our disposal. These early users eat and drink beta applications. Response is still pouring in and it’s all good overall.

I was surprised to see strong interest from some users towards our long term vision of email as a social media publishing tool. We have all that in plan but we thought we will first start with easy sell like super-poke/super-wall replacement. Kristen was smart to highlight this aspect for wider audience. Thanks Kristen!

Going forward our plan is to make incremental progress. Sort of like user-generated software. Pardon me for beating user-generated phrase to death, but the point is to drive engineering by keeping real-time dialog with users. Which would also mean in some occasions they will see us changing our clothes. Which is ok I guess.

Go ahead and send more messages by inviting more friends. And for folks who have signed up for the beta invitation, I appreciate your patience. We are ramping up our data center operations (Rackspace and MediaTemple guys are great) and very soon we will be ready for more users.

Till then happy dancing!