Founders at Work.pdf

234 Founders at Work
this, and that’s how I found out about RSS. At that time, there were a couple of
desktop-based aggregators—programs that you could download. But those
weren’t really applicable to me because I’m on several different computers
every day and the quality of the programs weren’t very good. With my background
of building server applications, it wasn’t a great leap to figure out that I
should just build something for myself.
So I did that while I was running this spam thing. Then it became very
apparent that the anti-spam business is not a fun one 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. This other thing,
Bloglines—which was working at the time, but I was just using it for myself—I
wasn’t even sure was going to be very popular. Nobody really knew about blogs;
aggregators were the next level up, kind of difficult to explain to people. So I
decided, I’d already written it, might as well just throw it out there and see how
it goes. So that was it. I put it out there in June of 2003, and it started getting
coverage pretty quickly after that. I realized that I should probably put some
effort into it, so I brought some friends in and started doing some marketing
and went from there.
Livingston: So Bloglines was something that you created for yourself to use and
then backed into doing a startup around it?
Fletcher: I had an inkling that it could be interesting, but I guess I thought it
was a little ahead of the curve. I started ONElist because I wanted to start a
mailing list for my parents, and at that time you had to download software and
you had to have a computer connected to the Internet. It was just really difficult
for an average person to put together a mailing list. So it was the same
thing. I guess my advice is: solve a problem that you have, first and foremost,
and chances are, other people may have the same problem.
Livingston: You brought on some people that you had worked with before?
Fletcher: Right. A core group of people that I had worked with at ONElist: a
great marketing person, a great PR person, a UI guy, and eventually a programmer.
But I was the only full-time person until around September of ’04.
Livingston: Were you doing this out of your home?
Fletcher: Yeah, the den over there.
Livingston: Was it self-funded?
Fletcher: Yeah.
Livingston: So you didn’t have to deal with any of the investor headaches?
Fletcher: Didn’t have to deal with any of that. That’s the other thing. Doing
startups like this is so cheap that it just doesn’t require a lot of money. I think I
put in a total of $200,000. And I didn’t do it nearly as smartly as I could have.
I ended up buying all the computers. My recommendation would be: don’t buy
any computers. Just use the virtual dedicated hosting services.