Before Noah Everett started TwitPic, a photo sharing service for people who use Twitter, he had bigger plans in mind: he wanted to build tools that made the Web an easier place to work.
Two years and 12 million TwitPic users later, Mr Everett is finally getting to that project.
On Tuesday, Mr Everett announced via Twitter a new company called Heello, pronounced HE-low, that hopes to "make communication easier." If you're wondering what that means, I was too, so I called Mr Everett to find out more.
"We are tackling communications with groups, and we'll be building services that help bring teams together online," explained Mr Everett with some trepidation. "I don't really want to explain too much right now, but we plan to launch the products by the fall."
Mr Everett said he hoped to solve the kinds of problems companies face when building new products -- the same struggles he went through when building TwitPic and previous projects.
He also said Heello was being financed by the money TwitPic was generating through online advertising, and he did not plan to seek venture capital in the near future. "Twitpic is fantastic; it continues to grow. We're adding 35,000 new users a day, and we just hit 12 million total users," he said.
The team working on the new project will also cross paths with TwitPic. Mr Everett said that TwitPic had grown so quickly that he had hired his parents to help run the company. "Dad's the account and tax guy, and Mom does customer service," he said. "But we're still growing. We're trying to double if not triple our team size by early next year."
Mr Everett assured me that Heello wasn't going to compete with any other services on the Web today, including Twitter, but would offer a solution to problems that have not been solved yet.
"We love Twitter, we love all these other services, we're just really excited to start this new project," he said.