We have been running Wikidot for almost seven years now. It is pretty long time for a web-oriented company in a fast-paced world of invention, progress and game-changing deals. No doubt Wikidot is considered a successful project, especially in Poland, where we come from.

In March I was invited to Openreactor — a Warsaw meeting for startup-oriented folks — to give a short speech about Wikidot and share my thoughts about running global, world-wide web services. The video has been recently released and I think it is worth sharing.

For these who have no time to watch the whole talk, but are still interested (or want to go global with their projects), here is a short summary:

#0 Prerequisite: stop reading Techcrunch, it might be depressing
#1 Make an AWESOME (and useful) product (that you would use yourself)
#2 Have a scalable business model
#3 Start small and grow (vs. inflate and die)
#4 Become THE face of your product
#5 Build communities
#6 Get only the best people to work with you
#7 Automate everything
#8 Scale your costs — use the cloud

My conclusion is that in order to run a successful project you do not need to be located in Silicon Valley, London nor Berlin. Nor does your project need to be large — you can avoid a problem of over-inflation. Growing slowly is great too.

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It has been a while since the last blog post by the Wikidot Team. During the last two months we have been seriously involved in a few other urgent web projects. Unfortunately the amount of work we had affected our activity at Wikidot itself. But even though we have not been extremely active on the surface, lot of work has been done on infrastructure improvements and maintenance in order to make sure that Wikidot sites are hosted securely and served the best way we can.

There are good news coming too: to keep up with the work we are expanding our Wikidot team. The bugs/wishes pipeline should see a significant improvement in the near future. Our other projects are approaching the finish line — it means we are getting back on the track after several really exhausting weeks!

Thank you for all your support and your help!

Michal Frackowiak, CEO of Wikidot

PS. Regular blog posts will be back too!

Perhaps You know this scenario: there are hundreds or more of "log:"pages (or another category like the "delete:" filled with old pages), often autonumbered and created every day more and more and your wiki and the list of pages is growing and growing and you wished often that there should be a possibility to "delete a big bunch of pages in one go" - or even to "Delete a complete category" ( like "delete:").

Today it is 5 years since I first signed up for a Wikidot account. It is still one of the best things I have ever done.

Some recent events made us think seriously about relocating our headquarters. Six years ago, starting a business within the European Union in one of the economically rising and most promising countries seemed like a great idea. During the last few years however EU suffered from numerous issues and lost all its credibility in our eyes: economical instability, growing unemployment, critical economical situation in Greece, Spain, now Cyprus, probably with other countries next on the list.

The Great Recession that started in 2007 had both economical and social impact. Despite the promising 2013 US employment statistics, we might see the recession in some EU countries for a few more years. We are afraid that EU is entering a very difficult period and will suffer from another, much deeper recession dip.

We are seriously thinking about relocating to another country. We have studied numerous "Best Places to Live" lists and found them highly biased. After long debates we constructed a list of requirements:

#1 Economically stable

A few years back Cyprus was one of our favorites. Not any more. Given the economical downturn we would be looking outside of European Union.

#2 No winter

This is a picture I have taken this very morning. April. It is Spring and Eastern already, but it is still snowing damn it!

#3 Stable, but independent legal system

Do you know how much time we spend reading all DMCA takedown requests? In a perfect independent system we could just drop them to Trash like the PirateBay does ;-)

No, just kidding. But seriously, have you heard about EU cookie regulations, ACTA or software patents issues? It is not only ridiculous, but frightening as well.

#4 Low and fair taxes

This is obvious. But at the same time "tax heaven" countries like Bahama, Cyprus, Monaco do not satisfy condition #1.

#5 Geographical location

New headquarters should be conveniently located and allow us to reach "rest of the world" in reasonable time. Right now we need 18 hours to reach east coast of USA, which is far too much.

#6 Politically stable

There is no way we would look into China or Middle East countries. Obviously the risk of being involved in a military conflict should be literally zero.

#7 Broadband internet

This is a must. We are spoiled with our multi-GB uplink and anything lower than that would be a serious drawback. This rules out lonely islands on Pacific Ocean with a satellite uplink only :-(

We are always happy whenever Wikidot inspires you to do great things. Just recently tsangk, a 16-year old Wikidot "Superguru" has published (an unofficial) mobile Wikidot application for Android phones. Wow. We are really impressed by the amount of work that was put into this project!

ed-johnson does not match any existing user name has already reviewed the application:

Wikidot for Android provides a very good way for Android users to stay current with and participate in forum discussions, easily send and receive PMs through Wikidot's messaging system and access sites that you are a member of. This is a great first release with a clean, simple and professional looking interface.

If you own an Android device — take a look at this amazing application and leave a comment! It is available in the Google Play:

Me and Łukasz just came back from San Francisco, California. Wikidot entered AWS Global Start-up Challenge 2012 last November and we were happy to be selected a finalist with an opportunity to compete for the Grand Prize on 23-24 January 2013.

Logos of all finalists displayed on barrels of wine during the finale. Nice.

The challenge itself was awesome. The final round consisted of a presentation in front of the judges — top AWS executives. During the finale in Dogpatch Wineworks we had a chance to present Wikidot to over 500 attendants. The other contestants were so great we felt no huge regret not winning the Grand Prize. Wikidot was among the twelve very top competitors chosen from 2,500 entries from 85 countries and this is what mattered for us.