So in the last ten days we shipped two plugins for Elgg (Sharedly, Updown), started work on a Drupal plugin and finished building out a content website that should be the first important step towards where we want to head to eventually as a company. 80% of the ongoing effort is still course correction – sorting out internal problems and refocussing energies and effort in the right direction. It will be another two months before we can actually devote majority of our effort into the core of what we want to do.
The code releases are not much, but it is something that is very important. In all the years that I have worked in the online domain, it has largely been a case of take and not much give. A significantly huge part of our industry has been built on open source and not many of us actually put back anything into the world that we took so much from. The Elgg modules are small steps to change that for us. Sharedly is an attempt at creating a social link sharing experience within Elgg, while Updown is a generic voting module that is used by Sharedly.
The first two years of running Frontiernxt were an experiment. It was more like an audacious experiment – to see if we can work the industry differently and work in it differently. From that perspective, things have been good. The company has paid its own way through doing work more or less on terms that it wanted to work at. But a lot of the internal systems and discipline has fallen by the wayside in the last 9-months and proving the basic hypothesis is only one half of the circle of success in an operation. We still don't have the other half – scale – in revenues or people as of yet. This is still largely a one-man operation and there are only a few exceptions in the world where that can be called a successful company.
So, the next six months I have to clean shop, scale up resources/revenue and move out of the experiment mode. Part of this is already in place. There is a lot of effort that is going into closing execution cycles than keep them clogging up the pipeline forever. But I have only started on it and the moment it is a major mountain that we have to scale. By the time the November update of this post comes up, it should give us a good idea of how much progress we have made on this front.
