How did GoodTree start?
Getting here has been a long road. We came up with the idea for GoodTree in September 2004, and launched the first version of it in July 2005, when we were part of a bigger Internet company. At the time, it was primarily a search service where a portion of the advertising would be sent to charities of your choice. In November of that year, we had to take the site down because the parent company didn’t think it made sense in their portfolio of companies. In early 2006, we bought the website back from them and by July had put the site live. Then we realized the code base needed to be re-written from scratch, and we decided to do it using MySQL and Ruby on Rails. Then we realized that this was more about people connecting for good than it was about a search engine or a home page. Various beta version of GoodTree have been live since September 2006, and now, finally in 2008, we’re think we’re ready. We have many more features to come, but this is a good start.
