TagJungle – Venture the Blogosphere

Starting a new company is probably one of the most insane, stressful and frustrating things a person could do. Then again, it’s also the most exhilarating, exciting, rewarding, fun thing you could do as well. Especially when you are doing it as a real entrepreneur – bootstrapping and taking every risk in the book, not knowing when or where income will come in, living on hopes and prayers, and brute forcing your dream to become a reality. It’s even rougher when you have trusted friends tell you you’re crazy, most people you know telling you that you should ‘get a real job’, and having your wife and family be supportive but constantly questioning whether you’ll have money for things.

All those things make you doubt. They force you to sit back and second guess yourself, make you question your own sanity, and make you wonder if you’re just being stubborn and stupid. Which is a good thing – being forced to check yourself helps you to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing – or helps you decide to abandon it and go find some real job. When you’re trudging along day after day making small progress each day but nothing significant enough to shout from the rooftops, you get tired. You get worn down, you quit blogging becuase you’re mentally exhausted, you quit returning phone calls, emails and IMs because you just can’t handle one more interuption, problem, questioning, or issue. You quit putting on social community events that you love because not only do you not have time for them, you don’t have the energy to do them – let alone the mental energy to think of something new to do.

But then.

But then you finally get things to where you can share them – you get to the point that you have a demonstrable product that, while not yet close to feature complete, has enough features to communicate your vision. But then you see your dream coming to life in front of your eyes, you are able to actually see the product do the things it is supposed to do – see it provide the solution you’ve been wishing for. But then you are finally able to start talking about it with the confidence that comes from a product that is no longer vaporware. But then you can finally start showing people, especially the doubters, exactly why you were willing to trudge through the pits of despair in order to create something new, thrilling and most importantly – useful.

Feedback.

Feedback is what begins to happen after the But Then. Feedback is a wonderful, reassuring thing that helps you validate to yourself that you made the right decision, that it was worth it. Feedback lights up your day and makes everything seem ok. Especially when that feedback is positive – an endorsement even.

And that brings us to now.

We started out on July 21st not knowing what we were going to do. We spent several weeks kind of floundering, working on a few different ideas – each of which we thought had some great potential. After a short panic, we settled on building TagJungle – and now, after almost 3 months, it is demonstratable. It’s real. It exists. I can show it to people. It’s not complete, in fact the most important features on it are not yet finished. BUT, there is enough there that people are able to catch the vision when they see it.

For the last week I’ve been able to demonstrate TagJungle to several people and the feedback has been amazing. Nearly everyone I’ve shown it to has expressed excitement about it. Many have said it will be an extremely useful tool for them. Several have sent very positive endorsements to people recommending us. And some have said that TagJungle may be the best Web 2.0 technology that has come out of Utah. Every positive feedback has been a boost for us, has been discussed and celebrated and has boosted our spirits.

So, what is TagJungle? It is a Relevancy Categorization engine for the blogosphere. Imagine being able to subscribe to feeds that you build that are based on the keywords or topics that you are interested in reading – and the only things that would come through those feeds are blog posts that were actually talking ABOUT the thing that you were interested in. Imagine not having to subscribe to hundreds of blogs or constantly search keyword based engines to occasionaly find blog posts that are informitive on the things you want to read about. Imagine not having to know a blogger exists in order to get their great posts about the topics that are important to you.

That’s just part of the usefullness of TagJungle – and yes – all that works RIGHT NOW. We will be launching a private beta in 2 weeks. If you are interested in participating, add your email on TagJungle’s homepage.
We’ll be going to a live beta in 6 weeks. Right now, we are working on completing several features and finding investment capital. If you are interested in a private demo, let me know – I’ll be happy to set one up with you.