Birth of a Startup

In 2006, while dealing with a relationship breakup, I started a company in my living room. To keep myself sane during that lonely, stressful, exciting time, I started a blog. I called it Birth of a Startup, and I meticulously documented all the highs, lows, and (very many) mundane moments, over the first few years of building my first company.

The blog went dormant for a while, but I managed to rescue the posts and resurrect them in this new blog. I plan to continue adding to this section of my blog as I continue to birth new startups, and make all sorts of new mistakes along the way. Enjoy (and scroll down to 2006-2008 posts to have a solid giggle at how naive I was!).

26 Aug, 2008

Server downtime today

Alicia Navarro2019-02-01T21:06:49+00:00August 26th, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

Apologies to anyone trying to access Skimbit today. We have been beset by problems with our hosting company (intermittent slowness, frequent unexplained downtimes etc) for some time now. I perhaps stupidly have stayed with them because 1. they are a British startup and I want to support them, 2. they have fantastic account management, and

21 Aug, 2008

Drink Tank shenanigans

Alicia Navarro2019-02-12T09:28:06+00:00August 21st, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

We have been very busy here at Skimbit headquarters. Busily putting together our exciting new version of the site, filled with lots of little improvements that will make you all smile (we really think it will!). So, due to this crazy busy bee-ness, I’ve missed the last couple of Drink Tank events, the fabulous networking

14 Aug, 2008

“Its a small world afterall…”

Alicia Navarro2019-02-01T21:14:45+00:00August 14th, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

We are growing bit by bit - welcome the newest member to the Skimbit team, Tamas from Hungary. We are continuing our trend towards being a hugely multicultural company: we have an Aussie (me), English (Joe - well, he is kinda Aussie though), Ciaran (Irish), and Matthieu (French). What will our next recruit be? We

4 Jul, 2008

A day in the park

Alicia Navarro2018-10-03T19:53:45+01:00July 4th, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

Skimbit has changed a lot since I past posted. We are now a team of four, working in new offices in Shoreditch, London. We are working hard on our new visual design, on speed optimisation, on usability enhancements, and great new features. We have launched a really snazzy monetisation platform that is - we think

16 May, 2008

Web Mission 08 – the aftermath

Alicia Navarro2019-02-24T19:07:08+00:00May 16th, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

And finally, my final post on Startups.co.uk reflecting on Web Mission 08 and what it has meant to Skimbit: I have been back a few days from my Web Mission expedition to San Francisco. It’s taken me this long to recuperate and take stock of everything that went on. I’m still in a state of

16 May, 2008

Web Mission 08 – the middle

Alicia Navarro2019-02-24T19:07:59+00:00May 16th, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

And here is my mid-trip post from Web Mission 08: It’s Day 2 of Web Mission 08, and I have not stopped yet. From the minute we landed in sunny San Francisco, we’ve been schmoozing, networking, visiting, exploring, learning, and, inevitably, drinking. The only thing I haven’t done enough of is sleeping… But what with

16 May, 2008

Web Mission 08 – the start

Alicia Navarro2019-02-24T19:09:59+00:00May 16th, 2008|Birth of a Startup|

It’s been a while since I posted, but before you thrust out the bayonets and skewer me, await and see how much we have been up to here at Skimbit, and they you may forgive me for my lack of editorial diligence. As you may have read, Skimbit was selected for Web Mission 08, a

16 May, 2008

Anyone want to be Skimbit’s CTO

Alicia Navarro2019-02-24T19:08:52+00:00May 16th, 2008|Birth of a Startup|

Skimbit now has a good size team (Joe the amazing Marketing Director and Matthieu the incredible Operations Manager), but what we really need now is a CTO. We have a team of developers offshore, but we would like someone to really champion Skimbit from a technical perspective, with experience in scaling web applications, and in

23 Apr, 2008

Kicking things off again

Alicia Navarro2019-02-24T18:32:26+00:00April 23rd, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

Its been a very very long time since I have written in this blog. The last post was such a fitting place to stop, that it felt almost criminal to sully such a poetic ending with a banal next post. However, much has happened in the last 14 months. My company has gone from a

7 Apr, 2008

The glory of helpful users

Alicia Navarro2019-02-01T21:19:42+00:00April 7th, 2008|Birth of a Startup, Ruminations|

Admittedly, Skimbit is still in beta phase. So it shouldn’t really be totally humiliating to have a bug. But, in the last month, Skimbit’s traffic has tripled, so suddenly, bugs are a bigger deal, as they can potentially affect more of our users. And I LOVE my users, truly! I can’t describe it… but to