All I can say is:  Wow.

As we headed up to the 05 January release, I expected it to be a huge month.  I knew that we'd have some late nights.  I knew we'd have some stressful coding sessions.  And I knew we'd get attention from people and places that we'd never heard of.  We made the release date.  Despite daily updates for the first week or so, we even got a major update out the door.  It was a stressful time, but we had lots of forward progress.  All in all, a good month with some stress but lots of successes.

And then February happened...

February started off slowly.  We released our Facebook Application.  Despite a couple bugs, it went successfully and is broadcasting your listings to all your friends.  After all, if you're interested in something, it's possible your friends might be.  Then we had a couple meetings with friends and allies including Justin Thorp from Clearspring to discuss our widget strategy.  Somewhere along the way, Ann made friends with Jeff Pulver and he wrote about us... and the dam broke.  In the last two weeks of February, we've gotten coverage from ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Pulver.tv and more than I can publicly thank.

Yet another round of successes to be celebrated... but despite everything else, Ann and I are still perfectionists working with minimal resources.  The team is excellent and the ideas are numerous and somewhere along the way, the release slipped.  As COO/CTO I take responsibility for it and boiled it down to a handful of points:

• We dream big, and we push hard... sometimes too hard.  Prior to this iteration, we've been strict about only applying peer-reviewed fixes to any release branch.  This time we had a mini-release in between iterations.  It was bad form and we should not have done it.  From here until funding, we're doing smaller iterations to make them more managable and easier to deploy.
• We're still shorthanded.  Despite the prowess of our UI Ninja, she's been tied up on other things.  Therefore, we've been shaking the bushes to find another set of skillful hands and eyes to help us.  I went ahead and went public with our request for a User Interface Ninja.  If you think you have the skills and want to work with a great team, check it out.
• We've outgrown our tools.  We've been using Basecamp to manage everything and really gotten past the point where it's useful.  I've said before that Basecamp isn't a real Project Management tool - nothing personal guys, I still love it - but we've passed the point where it breaks down.  We're moving some of our things to Trac to... track and organize them better.
• This is our biggest release since launch.  Our previous couple releases centered around one new piece of functionality and a number of fixes.  This time, we had a pair of new  features (Twitter and Timezones) and an infrastructure upgrade (Rails 2).  In order to do it right, or testing had to be even more extensive than usual.  And our deployment/upgrade was tested repeatedly... just in case.  ;)

So, we have had some minor issues but this time it's not because we're screwing things up.  It's because we're at a new level working with the same resources.  We're getting more and more attention, writeups, mentions, and just general discussion coming more often and faster than we've had.  We have people actively seeking us out, we have investors starting to lurk around, and a number of groups in serious discussion.  When you see the person's eyes light up during a pitch...  wow.

And yes, I know this is the first week of March...