Twitter Gobbles Up B.C.'s Smallthought

Most businesses are built on business plans that try to measure the market acceptance of their product ahead of time. But sometimes, passion and self knowledge are all that's needed.

It's not exactly news in the software industry, but it should be noted for the general business community that one of B.C.'s pioneer SaaS companies was quietly acquired by Twitter last month for an undisclosed amount (both companies are private so don't have to disclose financial details).

Smallthought Systems, founded by Avi Bryant, Andrew Catton, Ben Matasar, and Luke Andrews, offered the Software as a Service (SaaS or cloud computing) application DabbleDB.

An online database building and management tool, it was started some five years ago when most people were still in the thrall of disc-based software that was often bloated beyond recognition and was therefor useless and far too expensive for most small business people.

Dabble launched quietly but soon was being hailed by online gurus such as GigaOm and Mashable as "a paradigm-busting innovation that renders past thinking obsolete," because it put database software online and simplified it so that you didn't have to be an accountant or software coder to use it.

Soon after, this new-fangled thing called cloud-computing, in which software is put online instead of on discs, took off. Today it would be quite difficult to find any general-use software that isn't on the cloud.

But it wasn't Smallthought's database system that attracted Twitter. The online social networking site was more interested in Trendly, a tool that helps web sites distinguish signal from noise in their Google Analytics data. Because Twitter and Smallthought were both using the Ruby on Rails web service, the rapidly growing social network site began using Trendly about a year ago, soon after Smallthought launched it in beta.

Trendly grew as much useful software dose--out of personal need. The Smallthought team developed it because it needed some way to make deeper sense of Google Analystics web traffic monitoring software. So they dreamed up a crude version of a visualization software that would allow them to see the results of various events on their website traffic.

Many iterations later it had software that would prove useful for online businesses that wanted to track more meticulously their Google measurements. As the Trendly website explains, it keeps track of Google Analytics.
 
The Twitter aquisition of Smallthought hasn't killed DabbleDB, but it isn't taking any more clients while it sorts out what to do with it.

But it does mean big changes for the four-person Dabble team, who are all moving to San Francisco to be part of the Twitter team. This is especially true for Bryant, who, despite his technical chops, lived a quiet rural life (sans phone, etc.) with his wife, newborn son and a couple of goats on Hornby Island.

So once again we have a BC success story that wasn't dreamed up as some kind of investment play, or as a copycat for whatever trend was going on at the time.

Instead, a company that developed an innovation out of its own needs and passions caught the eye of a much bigger player which recognized its worth.

This seems to prove that if you build it, they may indeed come.  

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