Products take time to build; protocol takes a lot of time. That we were able to productionize in about 4 months — having previously been a team of 4 working on the protocol for 10 months — and not collapse under the load is a pretty decent.
We got up to around 15 engineers since then. We decided it wouldn’t increase our throughput enough to hire aggressively (org building alone is a major distraction) and decided it wiser to preserve our burn rate, which we did.
Inevitably we get compared to Threads, and that’s just how the market works, but they had 60 people on the team when they launched, and they did so by running off of Instagram’s infra and T&S. Watching them handle 100 million signups in their first week? That’s the rubric that the market is grading on today. So, that’s what that moment looked like for us. And again, I think we captured it well. We managed to build a really strong initial userbase with it. So the challenge for us now is to create new moments, which is what the product work is about.
As a software engineering leader I can appreciate the huge amount of work it took you all to get here. It may not be super flashy because you had to start from scratch and get to feature parity with existing platforms, but IMHO Bluesky has the best app and I'm excited about all of the stuff you will add in the future. I'm rooting for you!
Nice to see you're still patting yourself on the back lol I think you took wayyy too long to release your product and it's overall not an impressive looking social media app, certainly doesn't look like the work of
We got up to around 15 engineers since then. We decided it wouldn’t increase our throughput enough to hire aggressively (org building alone is a major distraction) and decided it wiser to preserve our burn rate, which we did.
Inevitably we get compared to Threads, and that’s just how the market works, but they had 60 people on the team when they launched, and they did so by running off of Instagram’s infra and T&S. Watching them handle 100 million signups in their first week? That’s the rubric that the market is grading on today. So, that’s what that moment looked like for us. And again, I think we captured it well. We managed to build a really strong initial userbase with it. So the challenge for us now is to create new moments, which is what the product work is about.