Founders at Work.pdf

Mark Fletcher 235
Livingston: Tell me about some of the biggest turning points for Bloglines once
you decided, “We’re a real company.” I assume you incorporated and did all the
legal stuff.
Fletcher: I just used the same company that I had set up for the anti-spam
company. That’s why the official company name was Trustic. I thought, “I’ve
already done the work to set up this company, so it’s just another product from
it.” I was using the same lawyer that I had used with ONElist, who was a family
friend.
Livingston: So you just did a quick shift into a different product.
Fletcher: Yeah.
Livingston: Does that mean that you were the only shareholder?
Fletcher: No, the people that I brought in who weren’t working full-time were
working for stock. I’m very fortunate that I can bring in people who don’t need
money right away to do this; they can just work for essentially deferred compensation.
So you give them some chunk of stock as a contractor. You say, “You
have a 6-month contract, you get this amount of stock over that time.”
Livingston: Tell me about some of the big turning points.
Fletcher: We went online in late June of 2003. I guess the first thing is that we
started getting press coverage almost immediately—and this is even before I
brought in my marketing friends. There’s a newsletter called NTK, or Need to
Know, and we got a big old blurb in that within 2 weeks or so. Then it kind of
went from there.
The amazing thing about this company is that . . . I can show you the press
binder and it’s literally this thick, for something that really a tiny percentage of
people actually use.
Livingston: Why?
Fletcher: I think we got really lucky because blogs in general started to become
really big and the downturn was ending, so you had all of these people looking
for the next big thing. Also a lot of reporters used Bloglines. They like to talk
about things they use, so we got really fortunate in that regard. But there was
no planning with that; it was just serendipity.
Livingston: I’m surprised, because I feel like reporters are often the last people
to write about what’s new.
Fletcher: In general, yeah, but it became comical. I’d talk to these reporters,
and they’d all tell me they were Bloglines users. Maybe I was talking only to
people who were using Bloglines, but I don’t know. If you compare the press
that we got with Bloglines versus the press that we got with ONElist and
eGroups, it doesn’t even compare. Whereas with the first company, we had
20 million users at the acquisition, with Bloglines, we only had a tiny fraction of
that. It was this huge, disproportionate amount of press for this little company.
We were all amazed.