Percolating

For the last six months I feel like I’ve been keeping up a secret identity. In December I left my job at The Barbarian Group to start a company called Percolate with James Gross. We kept things pretty quiet as we were working on the product and today we finally lifted the curtain.

Percolate is a different take on publishing. Rather than starting with a blank box, like blogging, it starts with a piece of relevant content for you to comment on, which we bubble up by way of a filtering engine we built which pulls from Twitter and RSS. The basic idea is to take the pressure away from publishing, making it easy for you to curate content on the web. I wrote up a more full explanation over at our company blog. Put simply, Percolate is like a blogging platform that tells you what to blog about.

Obviously deciding to leave an awesome gig at TBG was a tough decision, but after building Brand Tags and a few other things I caught the product bug. I had been playing with some of the ideas around Percolate for a while and when I started chatting with James last fall and knew I had someone who I trusted that was willing to make the plunge with me I went for it. It’s been amazing so far, but also the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. We’re up to six people now (and hiring) and have funded the whole company by licensing our API to brands while in alpha (more on that in another post).

Needless to say, I’m excited about what we’re up to and would love for you guys to take a look. I’ve got 30 invites available here and if that runs out, you can probably talk me into sending you one. Hope you like it and thanks to all of you for all the support over the years. I genuinely believe I wouldn’t be here without this blog and this blog wouldn’t be here without all of you. So thanks.

July 7, 2011