Founders at Work.pdf

Mark Fletcher 237
initially. If you get users, then everything else follows. Basically any technology
can be copied, any concept can be copied. In my opinion, what makes one of
these companies valuable is the users. That can’t be copied.
Livingston: Did you think about the idea of “democratization” of the media
when you were doing this? Was there a social ambition?
Fletcher: No, I’m not nearly that smart. Just friends and news sites that I
wanted to follow on a regular basis. But I was latching onto trends, of course,
which are [that] the number of websites on the Internet is just growing
exponentially over time. So if I had this problem now and I knew that I was a
very early adopter, other people would probably have the problem eventually. It
was just a question of when. I thought I was just way too early. But I wasn’t.
Who knew?
Livingston: Why did you think you were way too early?
Fletcher: Because I talked to all my friends and nobody knew what a blog was.
Nobody knows what a blog is and certainly nobody knows what aggregation is.
Even these days, you say, “Do you know what syndication is?” and they think,
“Seinfeld reruns.” Which is one of the struggles we had with Bloglines—trying
to explain these concepts to normal people. Syndication, RSS, aggregation?
What are these goofy things? But we didn’t have to do the education as to what
a blog is because the press was doing that for us.
Livingston: Did you worry about competitors at all?
Fletcher: Always and never, I guess. I get very competitive, very paranoid. I
freak out about everybody. But, I also knew that nobody was doing a decent job
when we started, so we had a head start. As long as we didn’t screw that up,
then it would be difficult for somebody else to come along, unless they were to
grab a whole lot of money and go on an advertising blitz, for example. Yeah, I
was worried, but what are you going to do?
Livingston: Who was your biggest competitor?
Fletcher: When we started, there was only one service that was at even a close
corollary and that was News is Free. When I was talking to reporters initially,
they’d ask the same question, “What’s your competition?” It was basically the
desktop aggregators, the programs you could download. We had a fairly good
story around why we were better than that. Most people don’t want to install
software on their computers. A lot of people can’t install software on their computers
at work. A lot of people use multiple machines. We had several clear-cut
advantages that were fairly easy to describe. About 6 months after we launched,
I think NewsGator came out with their web-based aggregator, and were the
closest competitor.
Livingston: Were there any lessons that you learned through your experience
with ONElist that you said, “I’m not going to repeat that this time” or “I am
going to repeat this time”?