We recently received some great news from Jay Meattle of Shareaholic and wanted to share it with the community:
“This week we closed an angel round of funding for Shareaholic to support and accelerate ongoing development from prominent east coast angels. We may also be a part of a NY Times story this Sunday!
The reason this may be interesting to add-on developers (& startups in general) is that Shareaholic got its start from Extend Firefox. I tell everyone this.
Shareaholic is now a company, my full time attention is now on it, and we just successfully raised an angel round in an iffy economic environment. When the first release of Shareaholic was pushed live on AMO, I most certainly did not start off thinking we’d be where we are today. I built Shareaholic to fulfill my own need, decided to release it to the world, and it just happens that a lot of other folks have the same need! It also comes back to my philosophy that if you build a good product, keep improving it based on community feedback, and always keep your users number one, good things will happen.
Other add-on authors should use Extend Firefox as a launching platform — as you never know – their add-on may just end up becoming a lot bigger than themselves and change their lives. Extend Firefox is a lot bigger than the great prizes on offer. Extend Firefox kickstarted my awesome Shareaholic journey. I adore our users and the resulting community that has formed around Shareaholic, it has been really fulfilling, and there isn’t a day that we wouldn’t go way above and beyond for our users.”
A couple of things to take away from this are that the Mozilla platform offers developers the tools to build successful web ventures as well as the support and distribution channels to get your product out to a large, focused audience. In addition, the Extend Firefox contest is an excellent way to get introduced into add-on development and also make your mark in the browser application world.
Jay, Mozilla congratulates you on your success and we hope to continue to provide the best platform, tools & support for developers to build world-class applications such as Shareaholic.
Kevin Dwinnell
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Fraser
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