Become Efficient or Die: The Story of BackType’s Success

  • BackType processes more than 100 million messages a day with only three full time engineers and two interns. Our dataset contains 25 terabytes of data with over 100 billion individual records. We provide realtime analytics to help help businesses understand and make best use of social media. Our service is relied on by hundreds of companies including bit.ly, Hunch, and the New York Times.

    As a startup, BackType operates under severe constraints. There’s never enough people, money, time, or resources to do everything we want to do. Those constraints have been a hidden blessing though. They have forced us to become extremely efficient and creative. Otherwise, we would have died as a company long ago.

    Our success comes down to two things: our ability to constantly make ourselves more productive over time, and our ability to avoid wasted work. What we’ve learned about efficiency can be applied to any company, small or large, willing to rethink their organizational practices.

    Video

 

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    • March 27, 2012
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      Chris WanstrathCo-Founder, GitHub

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