The Team

Tres Henry wrote all the code for mamaswap. He's a rock star and a dear friend. William Van Hecke made usability testing so fun we laughed until we cried. Megan Wright is a co-founder and amazing person who's helped every step of the way. Jake Zukowski spouts good ideas every time he opens his mouth. Paul Tashima created an amazing hermit crab logo for us.

Tech

Mamaswap is written in Ruby on Rails. It would have taken twice the time without it. All design was done in Adobe Fireworks, Jon's favorite program for designing on the web. John Resig created jQuery, which helps us with a lot of the fanciness on the site. Panic is a big inspiration, design-wise, and their Coda IDE is all Jon uses for writing his code. OmniFocus from Omnigroup helps Jon track tasks. Without it, he'd be lost.

Inspiration

We spent a lot of time figuring out why Etsy is so awesome. The only site we like to use more than Etsy is Ravelry. Northwest Enterprising Moms rocks. Community Birth and Family Center is a fantastic resource. Khoi Vinh, helped us with layout by stressing the importance of the grid. Getting Real, by 37 Signals, is a really inspiring book if you're starting a business. He's not always right, but Edward Tufte is never far from mind while displaying information on the screen.

Testing Superstars

All our amazingly supportive friends who also put on their beta tester hats: Meghan Nash, Kristen Church, Melanie Quist, Denise Jungbluth, Amanda Van Dyck, Rebecca Kindig, Lindsey Steel, Nora Dalasta, and Christy Leissig.

Support

The generousity of John Gruehl, Norma Bowman-Bell, David Elliott Bell, and Kate Arndt helped us pay for all the fancy code we wrote.

Just Generally Wonderful

Sarah got her MBA at Seattle University and had a great time. Posie Gets Cozy is a well-designed blog we love. The Secretary of State in Washington made setting up an LLC very easy indeed. Mosaic Coffee House is where Sarah and Megan came up with the original idea during a playdate. Turtle Papers inspired our design in the early stages and we kept looking back to it. Costco helped us scrimp and save while we invested in this crazy idea. They also have great paper towels. Village Yarn and Tea is a great place to buy yarn, drink tea, and discuss how to launch a new business.

We Are

Sarah, Jon, and little Elliott of Seattle, Washington. Sarah had the idea for the site and did all the business legwork while Jon did his best to design something worthy of Sarah's ideas.