New Year, New Management
January 20th, 2010 by Dario Solera | Filed under Community.Sit down. Make yourself comfortable.
The Background
I started working on ScrewTurn Wiki in early 2006. It was supposed to be a simple content management system for my personal website and a way to learn ASP.NET 2.0, but it soon turned out to be of interest to others, thus I decided to release it to the public.
Four years has come past, and it’s been a great journey. I learned a lot of things and the project survived three major releases and a Visual Studio and .NET version upgrade. In the meantime, I graduated and I worked in a couple of great companies, one Italian and one French. I had the chance to work on though problems with the help of cool technologies.
I wanted to found a software company since when I started attending my university courses. You know, we’re all a bit excited by the story of our predecessors: Larry and Sergey come to mind. To me, the most important source of inspiration are guys like Joel Spolsky and, more recently, Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni, which is my new hero. Superstar startup founders are not the end of the story. You can learn a lot from less famous yet very competent entrepreneurs, and I had my chance to do so.
The Outcome
Well, the time has come. On January 7, 2010 I officially founded a new company, together with two other guys, Matteo and Michele: it is called Threeplicate Srl and of course it’s based in Italy.
What will we be doing? We’ve got something going on behind the scenes, but we’ll continue maintain, expand and improve ScrewTurn Wiki. Technically, Threeplicate has acquired ScrewTurn Wiki but don’t worry, your favorite wiki engine will continue to be free and open-source.
The Reasons
It’s been a hard decision, but STW is now too big to be developed by a single person and a fundamental change is needed, otherwise the project would collapse under its own weight. Mind you, Threeplicate will not be entirely focused on STW. Our goal is to make it an important part of our business, but we’ll diversify our activity quite a bit.
Besides that, we’re sure we’ll be able to build an even better ScrewTurn Wiki, with more frequent releases. We believe that STW will gain credibility especially for large, long-term projects. I’m sure that being a “real” company rather than a freelancer will attract some more sales of commercial licenses, helping to push the project forward.
Thank you for making this possible. After all without you, the users, ScrewTurn Wiki would be totally irrelevant.
New Posts
Dario, congratulations, and best of luck with the new company!
Thanks Jon!
STW is a great application and I hope your prediction of “more sales of commercial licenses” comes true–and soon. Please continue your clear, candid, and timely communications. All the best!
Congrats Dario! We’ve been using STW, and appreciate all your hard work. Look forward to even better things in the future.
Congtaulations. Really great application.
congrats ! STW is a great product. Best luck to you.
Congratulations! from Korea.
I have used ScrewTurn Wiki about 1/2 year, and it rocks.
Good luck to you and your company.
Thank you very much guys!
Thanks for a great piece of software – I’ve been using STW personally for a year now and it’s been a great balance between strong features and ease of use. Best of luck with Threeplicate!
Congratulations…
Well if you can Post on codeplex then i think more peopels like us come forward to make ScrewTurn To New hights.
Congratulations!
I have setup a knowledge base powered by STW inside my company. And now I’m scheduling to setup a sci&tech wiki for public.Hopefully it could run smoothly.
Congratulations!
All the best for you new journey.
Thank you guys!
Congratulations! Wishing only the best for the three of you on this amazing trip.
Congratulations and good luck!
I hope the Active Directory plug-in will become a free plug-in for the new version of STW as well.
Congrats! and best wishes! I’ve enjoyed following your progress, and look forward to seeing Threeplate become the Atlassian of the .NET world! .NET users need a 3rd-party/opensource alternative to Team Foundation Server and a serious compeditor against Confluence/Jira. Bring it on!
Thank you very much for the encouragement Eric!
I would really like to see a truly hosted solution for ScrewTurn Wiki. Do you have any plans for that? I’m thinking something
More like BaseCamp: http://basecamphq.com/
Less like DiscountASP: http://www.discountasp.net/sp_screwturnwikihosting.aspx
Thanks,
Michael
Mike, this topic appears every once in a while, the problem with a hosted solution is that it’s not economically viable if the number of users is small.
Good luck!