Regator 2009 Recap + A Sneak Peek At 2010

Like this very intense owl, we here at Team Regator are facing forward but want to take a moment to glance back at where we’ve been. It won’t be as creepy as when owly here does it. Here’s a recap of some highlights from the last twelve months and a sneak peek at what you can expect from Regator in the year to come.

January ‘09 – At this point, Reg is just a baby gator and the site is all of five months old (not counting the nine months of development). We spent the previous year developing, then throwing a wicked launch party at Paste magazine’s offices, doing a minor redesign, and winning third place in the social news category of Mashable’s Open Web Awards but were really just finding our footing. Regator was, for those who might not know, founded by three folks in a house in Georgia with no outside funding (that remains true to this day) and the idea that it would be a very small site dedicated to real estate professionals…yes, really. We hadn’t launched a startup before but we had complementary skills plus a lot of enthusiasm and good ideas. None of us could’ve predicted that we’d have the kind of year we had in 2009. We continue to learn more about this crazy startup life every day and we want to thank every one of you for coming along for the ride.

February ‘09 – Behind-the-scenes work continues. There’s plenty of coffee, Red Bull, late-night strategy meetings, and early-morning updates before running off to day jobs. Cofounder Kimberly Turner works her last month as a journalist before devoting herself to Regator full-time.

March ‘09 – Team Regator attends SXSW for the first time–learning from panels, meeting fantastic new friends, and, of course, spreading the word. We have a Regator flash party for Scott’s birthday with the help of fellow Atlantan Download Squad’s Grant Robertson and his motley crew of troublemakers. Just a bit of the coverage from SXSW:
Regator crawls the blog trash to find blog treasure
SXSW Video: Regator – Curated Blog Aggregator

April ‘09 - Traffic continues to grow throughout the year as Regator gets great word-of-mouth and received press from top bloggers, newspapers such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Australian, and respected names such as AdAge and PC World.

May ‘09 – Regator cohosts Mashable’s first ever Atlanta event, the Mashable/Regator Mixer aka Mashlanta. More than 400 attendees from across the Southeast turn up to the Trolley Barn in Inman Park to network, enjoy the weather, meet the Mashable and Regator crews, talk social media, eat, and–of course–take advantage of the open bar. In a word? Epic.

June ‘09 - Kimberly and Scott represent Regator at Internet Week NYC, sponsoring Mashable’s NextUp NYC. Chris starts learning how to build iPhone apps.

July ‘09 - Work commences in earnest on the first Regator iPhone app. Traffic continues to grow.

August ‘09 – Team Regator celebrates its one year anniversary, along with local blogger Dave Kell of inDecatur, who had been writing an average of 6.8 posts per day every day for two years. On the 25th, we release the free version of Regator for iPhone. A bit of the press:
Regator comes to iPhone (Download Squad)
Regator Launch Their New iPhone Application (Crenk)
The Blogosphere in Your Pocket: Regator Comes to the iPhone (ReadWriteWeb)
Regator’s New iPhone App Puts The Best of Blogosphere In Your Pocket (Touch Reviews)
Regator for iPhone: The Web’s Trending Topics in Your Pocket (Mashable)
Regator provides news aggregation for the more blog-minded (TUAW)
Regator’s iPhone app is all sorts of win (The Inquisitr)
Regator Launches iPhone App – Makes Finding The Best Of The Blogosphere Easier Than Ever (TechNation Australia)
iPhone app hunts down Web’s best blog posts (Webware)

September ‘09 – Quietly work. Quietly work. Quietly work.

October ‘09 – Team Regator heads to Vegas for BlogWorld, where we set up our first conference exhibit space and proceeded to demo and pitch our hearts out. We are thrilled with the level of interest in what we are doing and with the response from users and bloggers alike.
Six @ Six – 6 Tools We Found at Blog World 2009 (BulletProof Blog)

November ‘09 - There are times when we think we might be decent enough at this whole startup thing…then we make a genius decision like the one we made in November, when we launched the premium version of our iPhone app just days before Thanksgiving. While everyone was traveling home to see family and stuffing their faces with mashed potatoes, we decide to release our first for-profit product. Oops. We break into the top twenty news apps and get rave reviews from users but because our media coverage happened whilst everyone was in a turkey coma, we don’t stay there for as long as we’d hoped. Let this be a lesson. Fortunately, our guardian angels at Apple help us remedy that later (see January ‘10). The new app adds lots of functionality and personalization options. Some of the press:
Regator Brings the Best Niche Blogs to Your Phone (ReadWriteWeb)
12 Days of iPhone Apps – Day 1: Regator Premium (MyTechOpinion)
Regator Premium – Web’s Best Blogs in Review – All the same great content, none of the calories (TouchMyApps)
Regator Tracks Blogosphere Social Mentions (Crenk)
Regator Pro iPhone App To Launch “Any Day” (TheNextWeb)

December ‘09 - With the redesign finalized after months of focus groups, changes, and countless arguments–errr, I mean “discussions,” Chris spends the month coding the new site. Kimberly and Scott are, um, in Australia. Two years of working endless hours sans pay deserves a little beach time, no? Sorry, Chris. Regator was recognized in a few year-end lists, notably:
20 Fantastic Free iPhone Apps for Parents
Top 100 Web Products of 2009
Top Tools for Tracking Topics on the Web
10 Web Tech Innovations That Have Improved Our Lives (mentioned within RSS feeds category)
Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 (honorable mention)
Top 20 Free iPhone Apps You Can’t Live Without
My 10 favorite iPhone apps of 2009 (iPhone Atlas on CNET)

January ‘10 – Apple selects Regator Premium for its What’s Hot list on the App Store’s front page then includes the app in its “App Store Spotlight” email, helping the app dig its way out of the mountain of news apps and back into the top ten. Sales increase about 3500% on the first day of the app’s What’s Hot residency.

The rest of 2010 – You’ll see a lot from Regator.com this year, starting with the aforementioned relaunch/redesign, which presents our tools in a much more intuitive way, encourages sign-ups, avoids hiding all our coolest features until after users sign up (told you we are still learning), and adds some pretty fun new ways to interact with our data. It’s built now. We’re playing with it, bug testing, and tweaking design. You should be able to give it a try in the near future. Shortly after the initial relaunch, we’ll be adding in some incredibly nifty social stuff (don’t worry, we’re not going to become a social network; Facebook has that covered) and a few other fun bits to increase engagement with the site.

We’ll be releasing an API so that developers, bloggers, and other companies can take advantage of the huge archive of hand-curated blog posts we have accumulated. Good things will come of this.

We’ll be updating the iPhone app very shortly to increase the font size. You guys have asked for it, we’re listening. Later, we’ll add some other improvements. We do hear and note your requests for apps on other platforms as well. I can’t tell you if/when that will happen, but we’re watching the market and making decisions on how best to use our limited resources to bring Regator to the world.

The most important thing for you, as a user, to know is that we really care about what you have to say. If you have a suggestion that will help us improve what we do, let us know. We want to make the best, most useful products we can and we need your feedback to do that. We’re very easy to find:

Follow us at http://twitter.com/regator
Become a Facebook fan at http://facebook.com/regator
Email us at info @ the name of our website. (Suck that, spambots!)
Call us at 404-939-7181 (yes, the founders actually answer).

Do keep in touch. Thanks for a great ‘09.

-Team Regator

* Owl photo – Creative Commons, Flickr, ~Saw-whet Owl – Facing Backwards~ by ~Sage~