We’re about to launch Auctomatic at eBay Live in Boston, and it just struck me how much our friends are helping us out/have helped us. So, I decided to outline here the specific help we’ve had, to give an example how powerful your network can be.

1. The Auctomatic journey started with the help of Srini Panguluri of YouOs. He helped us learn how to code, and then helped us build the Auctomatic prototype that we demo’ed at Investor Day. That was critical.

2. Back in January, Boso was having some real issues with page load times (our server was in the UK and latency was a nightmare, it was taking 6-8 seconds to load pages!). Anyway, I knew that one of the YC Winter Fundees were experts in this sort of stuff, so I emailed Joe Cooper of Virtualmin a friendly note asking if he’d take a look at what was so wrong with our set up. What’s cool is that Joe is a leading expert on this, he has a god-damn book about it too, so that was cool. We implemented the suggestions he gave us and sure enough load times shrunk significantly to 20% of what they were before.

3. When we came back from England in April, Crystal Towers were being assy about letting us get a room there, Robby Walker of Zenter was an absolute star and let us crash with him for a week until we sorted out somewhere else to stay. This was really important because we had a big VC pitch that week and staying with him let us work comfortably.

4. Following on with the accommodation theme, Adam and Josh of Tsumobi were extremely generous and donated us their desks, chairs, whiteboards and mattress to help us get started in our new flat. Apart from saving us a bit of money, what was really useful was the time saved in having to get all this stuff for ourself. That’s valuable. Also, Chris Smoak of Shoutfit was kind enough to lend me his jeep to pick the furniture up.

5. Srini (again) drove Patrick to our Colo in Fremont today to help us set up our servers, and he configured Apache for all of them. This close to launching, all the time saved is really valuable (and he’s pretty good at it).

6. In Boston, a bunch of the current Summer Founders of Y Combinator are going to be helping us at the conference. Since the amount of leads we get depends on how many people we have there, I’m really happy about this!

7. Adam of Tsumobi (again) will also be putting us up here in Boston, which again will save us a ton of money in this absurdly-expensive-hotel town.

8. Alexis of Reddit fame has been helping me brainstorm for the marketing we plan on doing. He’s brilliant (and experienced) at it, so this is greatly appreciated. He had the idea of doing a live webcast from eBay Live for the people who can’t watch it around the world, and so we decided to investigate and alas, we hopefully will be doing one thanks to…

9. …Justin, Kyle, Emmett and Michael from Justin.tv - for giving us a camera and the platform to launch our own channel on the network, starting from eBay Live. The turnaround/execution on this idea was superfast, and it’s not 100% that we’ll be able to do it, but if we can, it’ll be huge for us, and it gives us a lot more scope to gain visibility in the market.

10. Matt Brezina of Xobni has been great at sharing his experience of raising investment with us. He’s answering the questions I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking others.

I’m sure I’ve missed out some other examples, but these are the ones at the forefront of my mind at 4.45am in Boston right now. We’ve had a ton of other help, from Obvious and from Naval to name a few, but I wanted to just highlight the power of our peer group (and therefore of Y Combinator) for now.

Posted on June 13