Who would have thought that a 21 year old Babson College senior and a former Microsoft engineer would team up on their next venture? The power of networking and founder dating worked it’s magic with two startup enthusiasts, Carl Hu and John Xie. Both interested in setting out on their next startup venture, met at a networking event and started “founder meetings,” to see if they were a good founder team match. Their meetings turned into what would become a business venture that took shape within a month’s time.

John Xie, who founded and grew Cirtex Hosting, as a 13 year old right before entering high school has always been interested and passionate about the Internet and coding. He started to code HTML websites when he was just 9 or 10 years old and found a business need that he couldn’t resist. With a 20 dollar investment from his father he decided to build a site that would enable web hosting that didn’t “suck.”  He grew Cirtex over the past seven or so years into a 10,000 client base ranging from web hosting services of $2.99 a month to upwards of $1,000 a month in services. Cirtex is now one of the leading web hosting companies that enables companies to share video online. He still runs the company but has delegated a lot of the work to remote staffing in India, Canada, and the US. Quite a remarkable thing to do in the course of a 7 year period leading up to his next venture while in college.

John Xie and Carl Hu, two passionate statupers at different points in their careers, both based here in Boston met at a networking event and started to rack their brains on what would be the next scalable venture that they would want to pursue together. In September, yes a little over a month ago the two started to meet to see if they would hit it off in terms of creating a new business. They did and decided that they both wanted to pursue something together that was very different, scalable and added a lot of value for consumers on a world wide level. After brainstorming different opportunities they decided to do something about the way sharing is currently done on the Internet.  A simple concept in theory but often very difficult to do through current platforms. min.us was born- the next generation of sharing online. min.us from the initial planning stages, research stages and now continuous building stages has been about transparency and simpleness. min.us would now allow online sharers to drag and drop files, free of charge (maybe one day a possible monetization structure) and build a platform around user feedback in the early stages of development.

Apparently the leader of Google Chrome made the code for drag and drop open source and available to the public. Carl and John decided to go with this and were ecstatic about the opportunity to commercialize on this idea. Next step was to figure out the best brand name allowing for a domain name that would enable easy online sharing, something similar to the way bit.ly allows sharing of URL’s today. After not talking about their project for over a month they released the beta of min.us last Wednesday to the public. To most a beta launch takes months or even a year sometimes in the making, these two launched in less than a month. 24 hours after launch and the traffic started flowing in. There was no advertising done, it was all word of mouth. “The Alexa rank was non existent and went to 18,000 in the past six days or so. It was all word of mouth, we did no advertising. People wrote about us and bookmarked us in Reddit, delicious, etc and started giving us feedback. We pumped out features and are still pumping them out as fast as possible. We rewrote the back end so that we could scale because our servers crashed and we weren’t able to cover the traffic. We now can, thanks to the feedback from the community.”

A company a little over 1 month old and only released into Beta a week ago has over 1,000 fans on Facebook. By allowing for feedback from the users from the beginning min.us is experiencing transparency that will continue to help grow the company. Xie said, “We will keep updating different versions of the platform and update the status of the coding on our blog. It is now about figuring out what the priorities are on our to-do list and getting those things done timely. We are looking to expand the team quickly. The model is simple. As people continue to share on Facebook, Twitter, through word of mouth and other bookmarking outlets they will click on the link and then try the service themselves.”

There are many different ways that people can share online. In the early stages it seems that min.us is in the infancy stage and doing everything that a budding company should do to create traction. Xie told BostInno about some of his long term and short-term goals with the drag and drop-sharing platform, “The short term goals are to support more file types, not just photos. We have been labeled a photo-sharing platform and that is not what it is. We will be able to share excel files, PDFs, etc. We also will have a login tracking system so that users can come back to share the min.us URL with friends or colleagues. We will also be speeding the overall process up to increase compatibility. Other simple features that we will incorporate are the URL shortener like bit.ly so sharers can share links that redirect easily.”

min.us is looking for early adopters, techies who want to try new things and who are sharing images online a lot. The platform will be opened up to everyone once the feedback is in. Anyone can use the platform today but it seems that word of mouth has spread in the startup and tech community so far. So how will min.us be different than all their file-sharing competitors that are flooding the Internet? They believe they have created a technology that can support the users. The HTML 5 code has enabled capability with all browsers. The min.us team wants users to go to them for sharing. Their goal is to be a sharing platform for everything not just photos. By expanding on their existing technology that they have created they will help to make sharing online easier, hassle free and FREE!

One essential lesson that a lot of startupers can learn from the quickness of the min.us launch is that it doesn’t take a fully built platform to start getting users or customers for your startup. By communicating your passion and your vision of transparency to your customers and users you will gain their trust and their use over time. John told BostInno, “We didn’t think too hard about all of this, we knew it was a good idea, we were passionate and went for it. The initial user feedback since the soft launch last Wednesday has been way more than we expected and that is an amazing thing. We are adding even more energy to this and the clock is ticking. We have more and more image downloads each day and we want to make sure that we do everything possible to keep that coming in. We didn’t sit around for too long on the idea. People need this, we believe in the idea. Sharing is too slow.”

Try out min.us by dragging and dropping to upload in Firefox 3.6+, Google Chrome and Safari. The main features of min.us compared with other sharing platforms is that you can share your gallery or images directly with short and simple min.us URLs, users can upload images anonymously, users can create & manage galleries (delete, add more, edit).

Currently minus is optimized for Chrome, Firefox and IE9. For Opera, Safari, IE8 or lower,  an alternative uploader will be available to upload multiple images. Let us know your thoughts but most importantly submit your ideas and thoughts to the min.us team as they continuously build and update the user experience.