Blog @ Percolate

Last night we held our first happy hour specifically for community managers, SPEAKEASY. We had an incredible turnout at Percolate HQ, especially for a night packed with holiday parties across the city.

Our celebrity photographer Dom Goodrum was on hand to document the night’s festivities:

Thanks to everyone who came out including our co-hosts Kristine Michelsen-Correa, bitly; Lauren Cucinotta, TEDx; and Allie MacPherson, TEXT100. We hope you enjoyed meeting team Percolate and other like-minded folk.

We’re busy planning the next SPEAKEASY so look for invites just after the New Year.

In December of last year we wrote a blog post about our seed funding. In it we outlined year one at Percolate and how we got to where we were (at the time 9 employees and the official launch of our “non-alpha product”). Here’s what we said about why we raised and what we were going to do with the money:

Up to this point we’ve been funding the company with money from clients (we’re up to eight) and the decision to take funding wasn’t one we took lightly. Ultimately we believed that the time is right for a product like ours and with the help of our partners we can really ramp up operations and bring Percolate to market in a real way. Needless to say, we’re stoked.

As for what we’re going to do with the money, the first order of business is to hire some more folks to spread the Percolate gospel. So, if you’re an engineer or sales person and want to work with an amazing team you should check our jobs page and apply.

It’s almost 11 months to the day of that post and I am excited to report that we are well on our way to executing what we set out to do with that seed round of funding.

Marketers are coming to us with their biggest challenges that intersect at real-time communication and the data their growing social audiences are giving off.

The team is up to 28 people and we have more than 30 Fortune 500 clients. This year has been a wild ride of growth on all fronts (product, business, company) and we’ve hit many milestones (profitability, version 3.0 of the product, an amazing list of blue chip brands).

At the time of our seed round, we made the decision that we would look to raise again when we felt like the only thing holding us back was that we needed even more people to help spread the word about what we’re doing at Percolate on a daily basis. Well, we reached that point more quickly than we could have imagined and decided to jump on the opportunity by raising our second round of financing with the objective of really scaling out our business and building the best software in the world to help brands create content at social scale.

To that end I’m incredibly excited to announce that we’ve raised a $9 million Series A financing led by GGV Capital with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and many others.

We are super excited to have such a great group of investors and even more excited for what lies ahead. We feel the opportunity has never been better to build the next great enterprise software company headquartered in NYC and to get there we’ll need to continue to hire the most talented people in the world.

If you are an engineer or sales person (or account manager or designer) looking for an amazing place to work, check out our open jobs. I’m sure you’ll fit right in.

After almost two years in business, Percolate has undergone lots of change: new employees, new spaces, new products. With that, we wanted our company pages to better reflect who we are as a organization. Today you’ll see new pages outlining our business, how we work, our culture, new job opportunities and a place to showcase our clients.

Here’s how we got there.

Our first round of company pages were a collection of facts and job descriptions, which worked well for a time. But as the company culture has taken root and become an inextricable part of how we do business, the new pages aim to give visitors a real sense of what we’re all about. The pages are designed to be that initial conversation on the Percolate story: from the story of our founders and mission to our clients and the immense change in brand marketing we help tackle.

Here are the questions our new online headquarters will answer:

Is the company solving an interesting problem?

1. Our Business: Here’s the company mission and an interview capturing the founders’ vision and passion. As we continue to build Percolate, we’ve included a timeline of the company milestones to date.

What are the team’s values and how do they work together?

2. How we work: Percolate is built around two teams: product and business. Our professional values, our thoughtful technology and content set the tenor for the entire company.

What are the people really like and how happy will I be at Percolate?

3. Our Culture: We love the culture we’re building and demonstrate that with a tour of the office and day-to-day life. Our people are crucial to maintaining a healthy and happy place to work, so here’s where you’ll meet the team, too.

What opportunities are available?

4. Jobs: The company is growing and fast, so we’ve included here the many opportunities to join the team and define the future of brand marketing. A career at Percolate means helping build a lasting culture and developing professionally.

So, have a look around. Stay awhile, get to know us and maybe we’ll see you (or your resume) some time soon.

On January 1st of this year James and I started Percolate. It was a bit scary to make the leap, but we were excited about the Percolate product and the space of helping brands create content. That month we started working on the publishing layer: Building a simple interface on top of the algorithm that would make it easy for brands to curate content for their social channels and .coms.

In March Reuters came on as our first client, licensing the API to power Counterparties. They were the perfect first client as we knew that Felix and Ryan would push the product hard (and they did, pushing 40+ stories on some days).

As they experimented with the early alpha version we prepared a public alpha for release. In July we pushed that out the door and began to show the world what we had been working on. By that point GE had joined the client list and the team was five strong.

Since then things have kept moving (faster than I ever imagined), culminating with the release of our full-featured product last week (and exit from “alpha” … whatever that means these days). Thanks to an amazing effort by the team (nine strong now) we pushed out a product we’re all incredibly proud of. The new Percolate.com brand dashboard makes it even easier for social editors to create content to push across the brand’s social presences. In addition, the analytics layer helps brands see how their posts are performing and even build out their interest graph by adding additional sources to their Percolate library.

With the official release of the new Percolate we’re also excited to announce that we’ve raised our first round of funding from an incredible group of investors. Leading the round are the excellent folks from First Round Capital. Joining FRC are Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Transmedia Capital and Advancit as well as angels Dave Morin, Rick Webb, Paul Woolmington, Nick Gross, Josh Spear and Jerry Neumann.

Up to this point we’ve been funding the company with money from clients (we’re up to eight) and the decision to take funding wasn’t one we took lightly. Ultimately we believed that the time is right for a product like ours and with the help of our partners we can really ramp up operations and bring Percolate to market in a real way. Needless to say, we’re stoked.

As for what we’re going to do with the money, the first order of business is to hire some more folks to spread the Percolate gospel. So, if you’re an engineer or sales person and want to work with an amazing team you should check our jobs page and apply.

Finally, I’d be remiss to not give huge props to the team here at Percolate. As proud as I am of the product we’ve built, I’m more proud of the team of people. We’ve got an amazing group of folks who are talented, passionate and excited. It’s awesome to get to come to work every day and I honestly believe we can do anything with the team we’ve got.

Are you on Tumblr? Looking to add some inspiring sources to your Percolator?

Good news! We’ve integrated Tumblr into Percolate.

Link your Tumblr account on your connections screen and we’ll add the Tumblblogs you follow as sources to your Percolator.

We’re excited about this one. Pulling content from the people you follow on Tumblr adds a new dimension to your brew, and makes it even easier for you to access the web’s most interesting stuff.

You can also share your favorite Percolate posts on Tumblr. Simply select the toggle in the post draw to effortlessly top up your Tumblr. Look Ewoks…

To get started, head over to your connections screen and link your Tumblr account.

Creating a post on Percolate just got a whole lot better. From today you can add photos and videos to the stories you publish with the ‘Media Picker’, a new feature we’ve woven into the Percolate publishing flow.

A story’s photos and videos are revealed inline once you open the post draw. This makes it easy for you to browse the media before selecting a piece to represent your post, you’ll see we’ve included icons to denote videos from photos. From here you can add a comment if you like and then you’re ready to post your reaction to the Percolating feed.

We’re excited about how you’ll use photos and video to capture the attention, and provoke reactions from your friends and the people following you. More media on Percolate is going to be awesome for the community experience.

The good news is there is more to come. Soon you’ll be able to spotlight a quote from a story, plus share your posts to a few more of your social platforms. Keep a look out for these releases next week.

With this being the first release of the Media Picker we’ll be watching closely to make sure we’re pulling the best media from all sites. If you notice anything unexpected, or have any questions or suggestions please get in touch.

Enjoy posting photos and video on Percolate!

Yesterday, AdAge,  Neiman Journalism Lab, and Felix Salmon announced our first public partnership and we wanted to give you a little more detail on it and also tell you more about our licensed business API model.

Reuters, the largest journalistic organization in the world, along with two of their journalists, Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy, will be using Percolate and our API as the content curation engine for a new platform called Counterparties. What is Counterparties? From their site:

Counterparties combines our own judgment — what we find interesting, overlooked and important — with the recommendation engine created by our friends at Percolate. That engine regularly monitors all the blogs and Twitter feeds that Felix follows, and keeps an eye out for stories it thinks we’ll find most interesting. The stories we love go into The River, on the right of the page; we’ll move the best to the site’s main section, on the left.

Our goal here at Percolate is to simplify the content curation process, making it easier for everyone to find and share opinion around content they care about. The exciting part of the Reuters platform is Felix and Ryan are using Percolate in the exact same way as any other Percolate user: They sign into Percolate.com where they find interesting stories bubbling up which they comment on, and via the API, push out to Counterparties.com. Ryan McCarthy summed the value of Percolate up nicely in this AdAge quote:

“My background for the last few years was doing this kind of stuff and it was literally exhausting,” he said. “This is a more efficient aggregation and we’re getting stories that would otherwise be missed.”

From a business perspective we think this Reuters partnership is a perfect first example of the power of Percolate as a tool to help brands and media companies create content at social scale. We believe the curated content from Percolate is a great compliment to the more traditional longer-form content that companies are used to creating for their audiences. We call this model Stock and Flow (first coined by Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket). Here’s a quick explanation from a draft of a piece Noah is working on to help describe the model:

Traditionally, brands have been quite good at creating stock content in the form of ads and when they first got to the web they tried to simply fill it with more of the same (only in the form of microsites and their offline content). While that’s great for short bursts, whether you’re a media company or a brand, creating a sustained publishing platform requires a combination of both stock and flow: longer-form, higher-quality content coupled with the quick-hit links to other interesting and relevant content on the web.

Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about the launch and encourage you to check out Counterparties.  The site is full of interesting content with intelligent commentary and we’re proud to play a role.

Links:

AdAge: Reuters Taps Percolate to Create News Aggregation Site That Doesn’t Suck

Neiman Journalism Lab: Felix Salmon’s Brain, Drudged

Felix Salmon: Counterparties.com Arrives

Another week, another round of updates. Have some good ones in this round.

First off, again we’ve worked on speed. Most of the improvements happen behind the scenes this time, but as a user you should see your page update more often with more relevant content.

Next up are a few design changes. Let’s start with one of the most-requested features: Some kind of way to know when you’ve gone over the Twitter character limit. From now on you can go ahead and write something of any length for Percolate and if you want to Tweet out the link we’ll give you a little editing window to widdle your comment down to Tweet size.

Next up is another highly-requested feature: Better access to followers and following. Now you’ll see it right on your dashboard.

Finally, the other big piece of this revision is around tooltips and other feedback messages. When you post you’ll see one that lets you know what’s happened and on first signup you’ll get the following quick explanation of the service (for those of you who want to check it out yourself, here’s the link).

Also, though it’s screenshotless, you can now click the green checkbox and unfollow someone. Definitely heard from a few folks looking for that option.

Needless to say we’re excited to be pushing new stuff out to you and we have a lot more we’re working on. As always, please let us know what you think and would like to see. Thanks so much for using Percolate, it’s amazing to see so many people Percolating all day.

Since launching our alpha a few weeks ago we’ve been pretty quiet as we listened to feedback, added new users and got some things in order. This week we’ve pushed some major updates that I wanted to share.

First off, everything is much speedier. We’ve been pushing hard on that front and we’re now both loading and scraping faster than ever. We’ll continue pushing on these fronts, but you should feel a significant different.

From a design perspective, the dashboard got a refresh courtesy of Dom, our new designer:

Everything is a little bit lighter, cleaner and easier to read. The Brew side, which got the brunt of the work, has a much clearer delineation between links, making it easier to know which set of tags belong to which links.

On the Percolating side, the biggest change was to the edit/delete functionality:

In addition we’ve added pages to see all following and followers, which are available at username/followers and username/following respectively (you can also get to the following page by clicking the number next to the user icon on your Dashboard under the post count).

Hope you enjoy. We’re working on some newer and even more awesome stuff for the coming weeks, so stay tuned. As always, let us know if you have any questions or thoughts.

Last fall James and I were sitting at a coffee shop (Grey Dog to be exact) and throwing around a few ideas. One of them was the beginnings of Percolate, which we were both pretty excited about. A few months later we decided to make a go of it, leaving our jobs and getting into the business of building web products.

The vision was to create an engine that helped people, all people, create content more easily by bubbling up the most interesting stuff from their world for them to comment on. We tested the algorithmic filtering bit for a while this Winter, sending out emails daily to a few hundred alpha users who dutifully gave us their feedback (and dealt with some really ugly early designs). We were excited to hear from many that Percolate was quickly replacing other trusted sources as their go-to place for great content.

While we were testing that part we layered the publishing engine on top, allowing users to post from their dashboard with nothing more than the click of a “tag” and an optional comment. Now, a few months later, we’re finally ready to show off what we’ve made (it’s no longer just James and I now, as we’re joined by four other folks without whom we wouldn’t have a product).

The way we see it, blogging was supposed to change the world and never quite did. It was amazing and we still love it, but most of those people who started blogs eight years ago fell off, intimidated by the big blank box they faced in the morning. Twitter’s big innovation was to shrink the box, making it less scary to create content on the web. With Percolate we’re trying to take the box away (metaphorically of course), starting the publishing process with a piece of relevant content for a user to react to. We think it works and hope you do too.

Welcome to Percolate.