Maria Lourdes C. Capilitan

SysAnal

July 1, 2008

Case Study

Joshua Schachter

Founder, del.icio.us

Joshua Schachter started book marking site in 2003. This start up is also for himself. He have a 20,000 collection of bookmarks. Then, he have the idea of tagging. Del.icio.us succeeded because it was not a venture start. Being over capitalized is path of failure. Lastly, I learned that they are the first company who did “Tagging”.

            In 1998 Joshua S. created website called Memepool. It was a blog. They put link at the bottom. After a while, he crated another text file ahich is called Muxway(2001). He also did GeoURL and Reversible. In 2003 he started del.icio.us. the users gain a lot and have 30,000 users by 2004.

            Morgan Stanley is also belong to this project. After feeling of being failed. The idea of book marking service is different to others. By that time, tagging was essential. This tagging was from the concept of inventing wonderful things.

            In crating del.icio.us Joshua S. was getting a lot of interest in acquisitions. Union square and Amazon are their VC. For them the most challenging part is getting payroll going. Union Square introduces Albert Wenger who have experience in operation. They created Firefox Toolbar.

            The biggest problems that they encounter are scaling and inevitably. Scaling was important but dealing to network will result to a lot of work. Tagging also one of their problems because they think of innovation.

            When the site’s down, site’s slow, Table crashes and SQL corrupted, it was being done by 24 hours. They rebuild the script. Joshua S. was inspire by Perl, My SQL, Apache and standard mechanism for everything. Joshua S. also added that if given a chance to change something, he will designed back-end and would have saved a lot of work from now.

            The user base evolve over the years by an adopter audience. Joshua S. says their life in the start up is like a roller coaster ride. It is also being seen in the other startup companies. Joshua S. learned that he released a lot of projects. Press is also part of the success of project because talking to them is essential part of marketing.

            Joshua leaned things from Albert W., Fred Wison and Morgan Stanley. They help to know how to understand problems. In starting and selling a company, a person will learn a lot.

            Lastly Joshua S. says that having a start up is a combination of sudden freedom and crashing responsibility. For me, I will agree to it because you have to do a certain things in a particular time. He have advices that do as little as possible to get what you want. Don’t add another thing because you can understand it better and can analyze the problems clearly.