Today I launched the first beta release of a project I’ve been working on for a couple months now. It’s a simple tool to allow landlords to easily create beautiful rental listings on Craigslist. The update I sent to our backers this morning is different than the draft I originally wrote below. I do feel a great sense of responsibility having taken people’s money and fortunately was able to deliver on that promise (though much later than any of us predicted). Anyway, here’s the letter that didn’t get sent but should be said nonetheless. And thank you to everyone that backed and supported us and a job well done to my team: Ajay, Andy and Helen. We built something useful from nothing.)

The day is finally here. We’re finally able to release the beta version of our site for you to start using…today! For all our awesome Kickstarter donors, we’ve messaged you individually within Kickstarter with your login details to start using biddenly immediately.

But first, we want to start with an explanation and an apology. Like many creators on Kickstarter, we were ambitious, optimistic and excited about what possibilities we could achieve with a bit of help from donors like you. And like many others, we underestimated the time it takes to make something great.

We weren’t trying to boil the ocean. We just wanted to create a simple and easy to use tool for people to create beautiful rental listings and we’d give it away for free. How long could that possibly take? It’s been a humbling experience to say the least.

To be honest with you, a lot of this was us learning as we went. After many talks with more experienced programmers we learned that software development is precisely that. You try some things. They fail. You try something else and it works and you integrate it into your set of tools. You get better over time.

So for that, we are deeply sorry. We wished we could have shipped sooner, but as they say, *”better late than never”*. We truly hope you enjoy and find useful what we have created. 

Now that we’ve launched our beta, your feedback is absolutely critical to helping us make the very best tool for you to create beautiful rental listings. Please make sure you e-mail any bugs or feature suggestions to info@biddenly.com so we can fix it or add it to the next release.

A final note: We are proud of what we have created and learned along the way. We are not the type to give up easily and we are not stopping. We are just getting started! If we’ve learned anything from these past couple months building out biddenly it’s that even though it’s been hard, it’s been a rewarding experience. We are hooked and we want to continue developing it further. Who knows…after apartment rentals maybe we’ll tackle other industries?