Now I don’t often believe start-up stories when people say the ‘site was nearly free’ or “all it was, was a brilliant idea”. No, my experience is that everything – and I mean everything – is hard work. Fun, but hard work. The stories about cheap projects usually don’t cover the work that people put into it them selves.
In one case, I was involved in a small success that was actually born in one day: Totally Erlang.
In 2010, I started Maximonster Interactive Things with Marc Worrel and we set out to create new and exciting applications using Erlang (MaxClass, Zotonic and more). We needed an Erlang developer and I was researching how to find them. Recruiters I had worked with at my previous company ICATT, couldn’t really help and I didn’t want to waste money on the mainstream job sites.
So one morning, Marc and I decided we should make our own Erlang job site. We were really busy, so we gave ourselves exactly one day. I came up with a name, a logo, registered the domain, came up with some ideas and Marc set the site up with Zotonic – the Erlang web framework and content management system. We actually did do some spellchecking and bug fixing the next day, but it was minor. I am still impressed that Marc could build something in one day that has had virtually no downtime in two years.
The site did what it had to: Atilla Erdodi, a talented Hungarian developer who had done an internship at Erlang Solutions, joined the company and has since then joined the Zotonic core group. But we wanted the site to keep going. So we tweeted about it and told a few friends and the “rest is history”.
The site has now hit the nr.1 position on Google for Erlang jobs and is really starting to grow and we have decided to spend more time on it – to start off with, we finally have a Twitter account (Follow us on www.twitter.com/totallyerlang and a new logo!
We have moved on to organize a Erlang Talent Community for a more personal network of developers but Totally Erlang will continue to grow and we hope to be adding more services to support the Erlang community.
Michiel Klønhammer 