It's been seven weeks now since the start of Y-Combinator and our East and West Coast demo days are closing in fast.

We finally broke our way through the last strands of red tape lying between us and a bank account, we have an Employers ID number, we issued our founders shares and have filed the infamous 83B which saves us from paying horrendous amounts of tax on paper wealth we may never liquidate.

We decided on a name, developed a brand and designed an awesome logo. Three weeks before launch we discovered our logo was already taken and then that the expensive domain we'd bought was blocked by most corporate and private content filters due to a former life as a porn portal. Roll up, roll up and experience the fun of a startup!

Finally though we approach the last few weeks before product release. I'm incredibly pleased with what we have produced but all of us can't wait to get out - pre-launch is a nerve racking time.

Stripping down

Every day arriving in the office you are alertly aware that you only have so many features that you can develop, document and market successfully. Every additional feature takes time and resources away from the tiny fraction of features features your customers will actually use and dilutes your sales pitch and focus.

Developing product with limited time and resources is like crewing a leaking boat that's run out of coal. The only way to get to shore is to tear the boat apart and feed it to its own boiler. Burn too little and you'll sink before you reach the shore, burn too much and you'll get taken down by a wave before you arrive

In a startup features are your decking and it's time and money that leak. You start with grand ideas of the QE2 you'll launch with but as time goes on, more and more features get fed to the boiler and you strip down to what hopefully is little more than a racing dingy.

Build too much and you run out of cash, build too little and you'll have only a limp proposition when you reach your customers. The process keeps you lean and nimble but it's damn scary.

Keeping on course

Being a part of YC has been invaluable. The credibility that making the programme gives us is unreal and a totally different experience from having been out on my own. The feedback from Paul, Jessica and all of the other startup founders mean that all of us are constantly nudged back towards the path of what other people want rather than simply what we want.

You'll often people say that the best apps come from someone scratching an itch. It's undoubtedly true but for every flickr.yahoo.com there are ten thousand more apps that never make it past 127.0.0.1. Scratching your own itch is satisfying but it's scratching everyone elses that makes you successful.

OSCON and San Francisco

So it's off to Portland for the OpenID sessions of OSCON next week and then Immad and I go to San Francisco for the Techcrunch party and a host of meetings - both of us fully bolstered for serious internet celeb-overload.

One last thing - Sitepass (name and logo still tbc). We're taking the incredibly successful OpenID protocol and making it consumer useable. No more logging in, no more passwords, and no more OpenID URL's just one easy way to get to everything you do online. We hope you'll like it. We do and I'm extremely proud of our little team for having built it.