Robert Reich of Me.dium, who does a fantastic job of running the Boulder New Tech Meetup, just tagged me in this video on Facebook in which I present earFeeder at one of the first New Tech Meetups in Boulder (there were about 25 people there, now there are usually 300+).
I just watched it, and towards the end he asked me “What happens if you get on TechCrunch? Are you scalable?” I of course replied, “Uh… no.”
Then TechCrunch covered it about 5 days later. Amazingly, it didn’t fall over (much) and was interesting enough that SonicSwap.com acquired my little side project just 39 days later.
Looking back, this project magically allowed me to meet the original goals I stated in this original New Tech Meetup presentation. I learned a ton about RSS which has helped me with a bunch of my other investments, learned and wrote about The TechCrunch effect, and solved my own problem. In the end I even got a little something out of it. SonicSwap has since been venture funded and continues to look promising. In case you’re wondering about earFeeder itself, it was highly integrated into SonicSwap itself and now no longer exists as a stand alone product. If you dig music and want to share your playlists, give SonicSwap a try.
At Techstars, I spend alot of time telling people to focus and not do side projects. Before they all write me to complain, let me clarify: this was a side project for me when I had no “main project”. At that time I was only doing investing because my previous startup (iContact) had just vaporized. So Techstars founders: hush, and focus.
