We just launched Tradeshift Apps after months of hard work and development. This is a huge milestone, not just because the amount of effort, but also because of what it symbolizes for us, expanding Tradeshift beyond invoicing. Fittingly we are launching this exactly one year after we launched the first version of Tradeshift and that made me think about all the anxieties we go through before a big launch.
It feels like 10 years ago, that we sat in Morten Lunds basement, tirelessly hacking on something we had spent the 12 months building and the three years imagining, Tradeshift. We were not ready at all, the backlog of stuff we needed to fix before launch was endless, but yet we did it, we were not ready, but we had one quote from Reid Hoffmann on our Intranet, that we kept saying over and over.
“If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late”
That did not make it any easier to hit the launch button, there was so much more we wanted to do, so many features we wanted to add, but in the end we did it, because we knew – that to realize our vision we needed real users, who could give us valuable feedback and tell us where they wanted Tradeshift to go. 
Since hitting that launch button, 2010 and already 2011 has been one of the biggest roller coaster rides of our lives. When we launched, we were five people in a basement, today we are 48 people on three floors in the middle of Copenhagen. During our first week less than 100 companies joined Tradeshift, whilst last week 2,143 signed up. It’s been a rush and it’s been going very, very fast and we have been razor focused, working in our own bubble that we jokingly call it “Tradeshift time”. This is probably why we were stunned when the news about PayPal’s investment broke in October. In our heads we were still in that garage and suddenly the whole world wanted to talk to us.
We have taken very big steps since the product we launched in May 2010, adding a new UI, switching front-end, adding seven new languages (yes seven!) and extending the product in a number of ways. With all this, we are still trailing behind the bigger vision we had for Tradeshift, Tradeshift was still about invoicing to the outside world, this is not how we see ourselves, we saw something much different.
Tradeshift as a social network for business, one global network to connect the hundred of millions of small business around the globe, to make it easer to DO business, not just move digital replacements for paper around. This is a huge big project and every day we go to work, we are quite humbled by the size of the task we have put in front of ourselves. If you stop and think about, what purpose do must business software really serve?
The basic accounting system is a self-service paper input system. You get a bunch of paper you type into it and generate a report, but what if all you messages were electronic to begin with, what if you didn’t need to type anything, what if the reports were automatically generated together with the messages, what if focus was on business relations, not documents? This would change everything, would you really need CRM, if you could just connect with your potential customers? Would you really need that expensive scanning solution in the big enterprise if all your suppliers were connected with you in one network and in real-time?
Sitting here tonight writing this blog post I think about the team sitting in that garage a year ago, and I look around and see more than twenty people sitting in the office, hacking away on different parts of tomorrows release and there is still an endless backlog of things we need to do before release. But I’m not afraid like the last time, because with tomorrows release we are much closer to that vision and we can finally start showing the world the full strength of the idea that is Tradeshift.
With the launch of Tradeshift Apps you can now extend Tradeshift any way you like, we are offering 10 small apps with the first release of Apps but soon many more will follow, making invoicing one aspect of the many business processes you can handle in Tradeshift, but this is just the beginning, because one of the apps we have launched is the Tradeshift developer app, allowing anyone to create their own apps directly on Tradeshift which they can share directly with other users simply by copying them.
So today we launched Tradeshift again, but this time we can with confidence say that Tradeshift is the social network for business, not just invoicing.
