It's hard to summarize over 16 years of growth and change in a number of words appropriate for a handbook. For the sake of brevity, "we" means either "Jason and Matt" or "all of the people involved in Expected Behavior at the time" depending on the context and how early it is in the timeline.
Jason and Matt meet at Rose-Hulman and become fast friends. Nate is also there and avoids any sort of friendship quite spectacularly.
A few months later, we've decided to start a business together after graduation.
As graduation approaches, we think that mayyyyyybe it would be a good idea to work full time in a professional setting for at least a little while before trying to run our own business.
We graduate. Jason works for Interactive Intelligence, a company big enough to warrant a Wikipedia article. Matt works for Wlasuk, Deleport, and Davis (a consulting company that works for big tech companies). We learn a lot.
We decide it's time to make the leap, choose Recommendy as our first product, and begin making plans. We make an incredibly detailed budget (e.g. how many oil changes will we need?) and save our money to bootstrap the business.
Expected Behavior is legally created on January 29, 2007 by Jason and Matt. We move from Indianapolis to Cincinnati, where we live in Jason's mom's house and work in the attic (Thanks, Vicky!). It got very hot up there in the summer, but at least it wasn't a basement :)
Filled with enthusiasm for Recommendy, we work 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week, until....
Our finances started looking bleak and we had to own the fact that we just didn't know enough to successfully start and run a product business. We had lots of interesting software created by over 6000 hours of development effort between the two of us, but we did not have much revenue.
What kind of business can you run if you're great at development and not so great at product management, sales, marketing, design, etc? We became a consulting company. A short time later, we had many open contracts with A Big Famous Technology Company We're Legally Obligated Not To Name.
Consulting was going really well, so we decided to try our hand at product again. This time, we made a new project management tool called Project Burndown. Our internal use of Burndown was a critical part of Expected Behavior staying small while competing with much larger consulting companies. As a revenue creating endeavor, it went ok. Not great, but ok. Eventually Burndown breaks even when we make a large license sale, but in general it's costing us more to support than it's earning. Hitting breakeven with a sale we had no idea how to repeat seemed like a good time to cease public support for Burndown and refocus on consulting.
Or was it?
Expected Behavior starts the year positively brimming with signed contracts. The future is bright!
A few months later, the subprime mortgage financial crisis finally catches up with our clients. Nearly all our contracts are canceled, leaving the year suddenly and terrifyingly wide open.
With our newfound free time, we make DocRaptor. Except it looked more like this when we launched because we didn't employ any designers back then. We liked it as a product idea because many of our consulting clients wanted PDF exports of their HTML reports, but the tools at the time were terrible or outlandishly expensive. Also, we thought we could continue to skirt our lack of design skill by choosing an API product.
It works! Customers love DocRaptor and it starts growing. We still have a lot to learn, but DocRaptor becomes our first official product success. It's not so successful that we're ready to stop consulting, though.
We're invited by Fastest Forward, another small and excellent consulting company, to join them in keeping Words With Friends from collapsing under the weight of it's own enormous and growing popularity. It was very, very fun.
We have several long term consulting contracts that consume essentially all of the consulting time we have for sale, so we stop doing consulting sales. DocRaptor continues to grow. We begin the process of changing from a consulting business to a product business.
Expected Behavior acquires Fastest Forward, another small-but-excellent software company with expertise in consulting and two software products we like: Instrumental (an application monitoring tool) and Gauges (beautiful, usable web analytics).
Expected Behavior says goodbye to our last consulting clients and finally becomes the full time product company we always wanted to be.
We sell Gauges so we can focus our development on DocRaptor and Instrumental.
At this point, DocRaptor is 12 years old and Instrumental is 10. We decide it's time to free up some development for new products and sunset Instrumental.