FAW #8: Evan Williams of Blogger.com
The internal tool became the product
I’ve been following Evan Williams’ blog for about a year now and knew him as the founder of the podcasting portal Odeo and now the popular Twitter service. I had never put it together until reading Founders that he was also the original founder of Blogger.com. What’s interesting about Evan’s story is that like the Hotmail story, the internal tool that they built to help with development of their main product became the product they sold.
Evan founded Pyra Labs (the company that created Blogger) to create a project management tool. He was a web geek at heart and had his own personal web site which he kept updated frequently. He and the other two employees at Pyra wrote scripts that made publishing to their personal sites easier. Although plenty of services existed to simplify the task of maintaining a site, none were geared towards the idea of ongoing publishing that you see in blogland. The feature set of the tool they created differed only slightly from the traditional content management systems that were out there but the slight changes dramatically transformed the experience of how they interacted with their sites and encouraged daily “journaling” behavior. It reduced the friction associated with publishing just enough to where it was trivial to write content and publishing frequency exploded.
They used an internal instance of Blogger called “Stuff” as a repository of relevant info for the development of their project management software. They released their project management product and shortly thereafter put Blogger out for the public. Ev said: “We thought Bloggger was this free little thing that would get people to pay for the real thing. So we very clearly had a dilemma on our hands: we could focus on the stupid little blogger app that people were using, or we could work on our real product. We tried to split our time amongst those two things and contracted to pay the bills. We were three people, so that was a little bit difficult.” They were able to get into the right alphageek circles to get attention but they still weren’t making money on Blogger. They raised $.5MM from O’Reilly and and handful of other investors around both the Blogger and Pyra stories. Based on the forward-looking hypothesis that blogging was going to reshape the web, they finally made the decision to staff up to seven and tackle the Blogger opportunity.
In late 2000 they began running out of money square in the middle of the dotcom bubble. Unable to raise money and generate revenue from consumers, they debated the idea of making Blogger an Enterprise product. Ev said: “I thought it was pointless. At this time I was very much excited about the idea of democratizing media and that’s what mattered. It mattered more than the company, really. When you are in that mode, it’s hard to say that the company doesn’t matter, since every one’s heart and soul is in it, not to mention their livelihood.” Two different potential acquisitions for paltry sums came and went and the grim day arrived where Blogger was completely out of money. They laid off everyone in the company including Ev but they still had tons of users. Having taken money from friends and still having a popular service running with many users, Ev decided to stick around and keep it running for free.
Sustained by the goodwill with their user base
The performance Blogger service was grinding down under load and Ev held the “Server Fund Drive” on the site taking donations to scale the hardware. To his surprise it worked well and he raised $17k to buy more servers. It was clear that the users liked the product evidenced by the fact they were willing to make donations to keep it alive. The challenge was to figure out how to charge for the service. With the entire company laid off their monthly burn went from $50k+ down to a few thousand for rent and hosting. Ev used the blog itself to transparently tell the story of how it was just him at that point working solo for free barely keeping the service alive. This transparency strengthened the loyalty of his user base and he was sustained through a very dark time by the lifeline of encouraging correspondence from his users. He was able to do one-off deals here and there to keep the lights on but unfortunately also had to deal with a lawsuit from his disgruntled former colleagues.
By 2001 he had cleared up the legal troubles and was building out features and had small revenue from charging users $12/yr to remove the ads on their sites. In 2002 Google approached him and he was faced with a potential acquisition from a company that could give him huge resources to grow Blogger. He made the decision to accept and within four months was a Google employee.
We’re absolutely sold on the value of having a company blog and being as transparent as possible with your users. We use ours to communicate what’s actually going on inside the company on a more personal level than what you would read in a press release. We have a growing bulletin board of user-submitted photos of the people that are using our stuff so it’s not just a one-way street of trying to expose ourselves, but also trying to get closer to the folks that are out there using JumpBox.
On Ev’s personality style
“I had this personality that never liked school and rejected the normal way of doing things. Even when I was in school, I’d try to make up alternative solutions to math problems. When I was at Google, they had this huge focus on academia. Grades were super-important. Getting good grades at a good school is one filter of brains, but it might also suggest you like following rules.”
Thank you Evan. This ADHD rebel gene seems to be a fairly consistent trait amongst founders. And I know personally I’m no exception to this rule.
The light during the dark times
When asked how he was able to persist in the face of such grim times when the company was on life support, Ev responded: “I was always hallucinogenically optimistic. That’s the only reason I kept going. Not because I thought I could take this suckiness for a long time, but that it’s going to be better tomorrow. I had all these big ideas, and I could never stop thinking about the product and the thing I was going to build next.”
Of the FAW stories, Blogger was the one that came closest to shutting the doors only to be resurrected by its founder. On February 17th, 2003 Blogger became Google’s first acquisition for an undisclosed sum. The service continues to be one of the more popular blogging platforms today.
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
[…] 37s followed the path of Blogger, Hotmail and Bloglines in that BaseCamp emerged as a product after having evolved as an internal tool for solving their own problem of project management. They carved out one third of their time from client work and devoted it to refining and abstracting the application they used themselves in-house to collaborate on projects and then sold it as a subscription-based service to other developers. “It was just a flow of the application coming together and the feedback we started to get from people we respected saying, ‘I want this too!’ We thought, ‘This is something that it would be selfish to keep to ourselves.” […]
June 1st, 2007 at 9:00 am
[…] Mark Fletcher had created the service ONElist which later became eGroups and then was acquired by Yahoo. After a sabbatical of travel to clear his head, he was looking for what to do next. He started a company called Trustic which was focused on developing an anti-spam product. Like so many others, the tool he had created for himself to solve another problem during development became more important than the product he was developing. Fletcher came to the realization that making anti-spam measures is not a fun business to be in- “because everybody hates you. You’re never perfect. You either don’t block enough spam or you block somebody’s favorite emails. I quickly got out of that.” He took the tool he had developed for himself and shifted that to be the main product development focus of Trustic and Bloglines was born. […]