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Our Internal Blog

11 pointspicnichouse11 comments

Hey guys,

I'm the founder of The Point (www.thepoint.com), a startup that launched a few months ago for organizing collective action and helping people make things happen.

We've got a staff of 10 or so, including 5 or 6 developers. For the last several months, we've been communicating in part using an internal, password-protected blog, mostly as a stand-in for what would normally go into group emails.

Looking at it recently, I noticed there's nothing in there that's really worthy of secrecy. And while most of it is uninteresting to the public, it's kind of a window into how our team works together. I would have liked to have that kind of perspective when I was getting started, so I thought I'd at least let you know it exists. Some of you voyeuristic types might find it interesting.

We won't be promoting it on our site or accommodating an external audience in anyway, but here it is for anyone that cares: http://internal.thepoint.com

Anyone else doing something like this?

- Andrew

Reading the day-to-day story of The Point is entrancing to me, an ambitious yet too passive person. Entrancing in a way similar to that of watching awesome Salsa dancers in a Latin club about a year ago. Entrancing enough to get me to start taking lessons and eventually step out onto the public dance floor. Maybe The Point's story will entrance more of us to get out there and start our start-ups. Thank you for recognizing some of us who really want to know what lies ahead and beneath the romanticism of a real start-up.

+1 for salsa/latin dancing. It's a lot of fun and a great way to meet women, and build up your confidence.

Curious how much you paid for that domain...

It's not just curiosity driving me; I'm trying to decide how much I'm willing to put down to save 1 letter and a syllable. :-P

twenty thousand-ish. Finding a domain was painful. First we wanted tipit.com, but we couldn't even get the squatter that owns it to respond. Then we wanted hotpotato.com (god I'm so glad that didn't work out) -- the dude wanted like $80,000.

Luckily, once we thought of thepoint, not only did it become our favorite, the guy that owned it was cool and reasonable and not in the business of making a buck off of domains.

Wow.

I think this is great. Not necessarily something every company would do, but it does let someone get to know you extremely well. I think this will be useful when it's time to hire more people. Anyone prospective employee can look and make sure your company is a place they want to work. I think this is an important difference from the typical "company blog" used for marketing and SEO.

Why don't you use the Point as your platform for discussions etc. It sounds like you guys are trying to do something you can't do alone by working on thepoint.

Chow your own dogfood.

I like the idea that you are showing the world whats happening inside your company. Its kinda like 37 Signals and their blog

We can't expose everything in our internal blog, but the blog tool we use (http://b2evolution.net/) lets us share some of it. Not much there yet but we hope to add regularly: https://dev.youdevise.com.

While I don't have a blog for my projects, I do appreciate the fact that you're letting us in to this area of your startup. I'm sure it will be of use to others who wish to observe the inner-workings of a startup, and hopefully inspire others to begin projects of their own.

You might note that the links to the wiki require a username/password. This appears to be a private area for ThePoint.

Hey Andrew. I really, really like the site design and overall presentation. Best of luck moving forward.

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