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Thanks to a tip in the post below, I have confirmed that Blue Dot recently cut its staff nearly in half.
The Seattle social networking startup -- led by former Microsoft engineer Mohit Srivastava and backed with $1.5 million in angel financing -- laid off four people as it tries to do a better job of managing its burn rate.
"We wanted to give ourselves a longer runway," said Srivastava, adding that the 5-person company has enough cash to last until next summer. He said the plan is to start generating revenue in the next few months and possibly raise an additional round of capital next year. Profitability also is targeted in the next 12 months.
Blue Dot, which allows individuals to tag their favorite restaurants, bookstores or products, plans to unveil a new service next month that will create "niche publications" around certain topics. It plans to start with more than 100 categories, including books, movies, news, technology and shopping. But Srivastava said the system is flexible enough to allow users to create topics around more narrow subjects, say Seattle coffee or San Francisco real estate.
Blue Dot attracted about 500,000 page views last month, a far cry from Digg which reportedly gets more than nine million page views a day.
Trying to attract a bigger audience with less staff has challenges and benefits, said Srivastava.
"The irony of software development is that on one hand, yes, we lost the ability to do more things in parallel," he said. "But the counter-side is that by being smaller you can be laser focused."
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Posted by unregistered user at 12/20/06 12:02 p.m.
As if by magic, yet another start-up mis-managed by former Microsoft people appears. This is no trend- this is fact.