Tag: automattic
The Magic Moment When You Shift To Executing As Fast As You Can
There is this magical moment that happens when a startup finally puts the key components together to build a successful business. After months or years of iterating and pivoting, they finally have the right product for the right market at the right price. At this point, the company has to shift gears and change their mindset a little. They need to stop looking for gold and start mining as fast as possible. My friend Chris Moody, President/COO at Gnip, refers to this as the execution phase of a business and there is no better example of execution in our current portfolio than the team at Gnip.
After 2.5 years of product development and varying business approaches, Gnip found their magic moment about a year and half ago. Since that time they have been heads down executing and the results have been incredible.
Today Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Tumblr. This monumental partnership will give Gnip’s customers full coverage of an amazing source of social data that has never been available. With 50 million new posts per day and 15 billion page views per month, Tumblr offers a huge new data stream for companies to analyze and use to drive business decisions. The fact that businesses will be able to receive this data via the same reliable and scalable Gnip infrastructure that currently delivers Twitter and other important data sources is a major win for the ever growing social data economy.
The Tumblr partnership is the kind of announcement that companies plan their entire year around. However, in Gnip’s case, it is just the latest activity in an impressive series of events that shows the Gnip team knows how to get shit done. It is only April and Gnip has already done the following in 2012:
- In January, Gnip announced an exclusive partnership with Automattic to provide firehose streams of WordPress.com and WordPress.org data to the enterprise. This partnership increased the amount of real-time blog data available for business analysis by 70% overnight.
- In February, Gnip announced a premium partnership with Disqus. Disqus is the largest third party commenting system in the world (I use it on my blog) and the data offers tons of valuable insights to drive lots of cool business use cases. The Gnip/Disqus partnership makes this comment data available in full firehose coverage form to businesses for the first time ever.
- Also in February, Gnip released the first ever commercial Twitter historical product. Gnip’s 30-day replay product allows their customers to go back and replay Twitter history. As the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/20, and Gnip’s replay product allows companies to replay the entire Twitter stream for a full 30 days to look for things they might have missed. This product was a monumental engineering feat and a huge portion of Gnip’s customers have already taken advantage of this product in just the first two months after its release.
- In March, Gnip announced Big Boulder, the first ever conference dedicated to social data. Take a look at the list of speakers – it will blow your mind.
- Just last week Gnip announced that they added the largest microblogging service in China to their Enterprise Data Collector offering. Sina Weibo has over 300 million members; brands across the world are very interested in the conversations happening on this enormous platform. Gnip continues to push to increase the number of international data sources in their offerings and Sina Weibo represents a huge addition to their portfolio.
Okay, so the Gnip team is getting stuff done, but at what price? They must be cracking the whip pretty hard and creating a real sweat shop, right? Wrong. In spite of growing their number of employees by 300% in 2011, Gnip was just named The Best Place To Work in Boulder. Not the best startup, the best company. And, the best news of all? They are hiring!