Founders at Work.pdf

Evan Williams 115
turned out to take a week, but we just launched it, while Meg was gone. She
was pissed, of course, rightfully. We launched a whole product, and she’s the
cofounder of the company. But we talked her into thinking that it made sense.
“It will be this little thing that won’t take any effort. We just push it out the door
and it will attract people to our real thing and we can go back to our real thing.”
Livingston: Did it catch on quickly?
Williams: It caught on a lot more than we expected. It was really designed to
appeal to web geeks. It wasn’t a mass consumer product. It was, “If you’re a
web geek like us, you might find this interesting.” It’s good to appeal to the
alpha geeks sometimes. I thought it would be pretty cool if 1,000 people used
Blogger. It didn’t explode at first because it was fairly technical. You had to have
a website and you had to know what FTP was. You had to know a bunch of stuff,
but things that you would know if you were a web geek. We put it out there and
people started using it and the existing weblogs started pointing to it. Like
Peter Merholz (he is credited with coining the term blog), who pointed to it. It
started getting traction and a lot of people who were like the “cool kids” were
using our product, and we were really excited.
We launched it in August and we had a dilemma on our hands right away, of
course, because we now had a product that people were using, but it wasn’t the
“real” product.
The problem was, we didn’t see a business in Blogger. This was during the
boom, but we weren’t one of these companies that was just, “Let’s get eyeballs.”
We talked a lot about the stupidity of a lot of the dot-coms and raising too much
money. We were very product driven. We wanted to create cool stuff, and we
wanted it to have a sustainable business. We wanted to probably sell the company
to somebody eventually, but we didn’t see any business model with
Blogger. Also, we hadn’t raised money, so making money was pretty important.
The other product served a business need and was something we thought
people would pay for. We thought Blogger 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. We had endless debates about what to do about that. I think
we ended up doing another rev on Blogger in November that made it much
better, and then people really started using it.
Livingston: Did you start to make money?
Williams: No, not until much later. But we did get wired in, so to speak.
Blogger was how people found out who we were, within a community that was
at first San Francisco–based web design geeks but bled into a lot of different
communities, like Silicon Valley and a lot of leading Internet thinkers. They
were attracted to publishing blogs, and this was a thing you used to do that.
So it got us known a little bit, which was very helpful. For example, we met
Jerry Michalski, who emailed out of the blue and then became an advisor. Jerry
knows everybody and was tremendously helpful.