Listia Turns 1!

So today is the day that Listia has been officially launched for a full year.  For some reason we mark “launching” as the day you hit TechCrunch which is probably the right thing to do.  We’ve come a long long way over the past year and the first thing we’d like to do is thank our users for their continued support and enthusiasm for Listia.  We wouldn’t be here without our users!  If I could I would give each and every one of you a hug.

So to continue my story of our launch day a year ago …

Knowing your site will be featured on TechCrunch is probably better than not knowing.  We had a vague idea that it might hit the day of August 5th, 2009 but we had no idea if and what time it would happen.  Gee and I stayed up all night making sure we had enough server power to handle the load and also made sure everything on the site was intact.  By morning I think the article had been published and our servers seemed to be doing fine (I think we overdid it).  I went on a McDonald’s run as we continued to watch our site and read all the comments … good and bad.  By 11AM it was time for some Cicero’s Pizza and we were exhausted so we took turns napping.  Gee and I have a lot of experience with all nighters in college preparing for those exams, so we knew our limits.  We saw some pretty cool auctions listed and some good activity on the site.  We definitely learned a lot from user feedback and found things we had to change right away.  By early evening traffic died down a bit and we finally called it a day … and here we are one year later.  I can’t say that was our last all nighter over the past year, but that’s what makes startups fun right?

Over the past year we’ve been eating, sleeping and breathing Listia.  We’ve had a lot of touching comments from some of our users that say Listia has really changed their community during these hard economic times.  Some users were able to give their kids some nice presents for Christmas that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.  Isn’t that awesome?  When I read some of those things I really felt like we made a difference in a few people’s lives … and that felt really good, I hope we can continue to do so.

The future of Listia is going to be AWESOME.  It’s hard to express the excitement we have for the next year, but you’ll have to trust us and stay tuned.  All the feature requests you have submitted are written down on a long list … don’t worry we’re reviewing each one.  Our small office is just getting set up, but hopefully we’ll need to move some place bigger within the year.  Gee and I can’t wait to get rolling on a lot of this stuff.

Be sure to check out the site today for a bunch of Rewards Auctions.  Give us a little time to take care of those auction wins cause we have a bunch to sort through today.  =)  Once again, thank you to all of our users for making this year outstanding.  Let’s make the next one even better!