There’s a famous graph that used to be on one of the dry erase boards in the Y Combinator office in Palo Alto, depicting the life of a startup.

Here’s a copy, courtesy of Inc magazine:

Preceden is somewhere in the Trough of Sorrow at the moment, though its not as bad as the name suggests. After receiving sporadic spikes of traffic over the first few weeks, the number of visitors has stabilized at about 400 per day. The challenge now is to keep pressing forward, to continue iterating, and to build something truly amazing.

On that note, I’m happy to announce that Shaun, a Salt Lake City-based software developer, has joined the effort.  He contacted me after reading about Preceden on HackerNews and after a bit of back and forth, we decided to give it a shot. I’m really excited to work with him–he’s smart, hard-working, digs timelines, and we get along really well.

Here’s to the future.

Update: The partnership between Shaun and I never went anywhere.