A couple of days ago, the TasteKid.com domain just turned 3 years old. I am considering this to be our project’s birthday, so I decided to share some personal insight with this occasion. But before I go any further, I would like to show you something – the way TasteKid looked like 3 years ago. I’d say Emmy has come a long way since then.

There have been a lot of ups and downs during these past 3 years. Many times I felt like this is going nowhere and that I’m wasting some of the best years of my professional life on a “cute little project”, as someone used to call TasteKid. There’s been so much uncertainty during these past 3 years that I rarely felt like I could make any type of professional or personal plan for myself that would extend over a period of more than a few days. Receiving mixed signals and rapidly oscillating between very high hopes and a visceral sense of failure has taken its toll on me, and the constant financial and professional insecurity only added pressure to the situation.

Somehow though, every time I was about to let go, something came up that reignited my hopes. A couple of years ago, that “something” was the highly unlikely event of finding an experienced US investor willing to finance a Romanian startup run by a guy with a complete lack of business experience. And that lasted precisely as long as it was most needed, until we launched our latest big website update, which included the options of becoming a registered user, maintaning a taste profile, etc. But the things that kept me going the most have always been the positive feedback I’ve been receiving from all over the world together with the constant, steady growth of TasteKid’s community. The fact that millions of people used a service I designed and implemented to enrich their lives by discovering new music, movies, books is very humbling indeed, and many times gave me a sense of accomplishment that money can’t buy.

Right now I don’t want to be too concerned regarding TasteKid’s future. I prefer to keep my expectations as low as possible, while maintaining and improving the service, enjoying our continuous growth, all the positive feedback users keep sending us, and the fact that people are actually finding this helpful. After all, this was why I launched the project in the first place. The simple fact that we are still here, online, is in it’s own way a miracle. Over these past 3 years, so many startups or new web services had their moment of fame only to see their own death shortly after, many of them having much higher profiles than TasteKid (eg.: Cuil, Google Wave). So time will tell, and until then, keep exploring your taste :)