Founders at Work.pdf

240 Founders at Work
when we started looking at user behavior, the average user came back to the site
4 times a day for 12 page views each time, which is a huge number. Usually, the
average user doesn’t come back to a given website more than one-half a time a
day or something like that, so it was this incredibly high number of sessions and
incredibly high number of page views. Whenever I quoted that to Bloglines
users, they would say, “These numbers sound low to me. I go back ten times a
day.” People were saying that this was one thing that had changed their use of
the Internet, which is incredibly gratifying.
Livingston: Can you remember one of the most surprising things about the
startup experience?
Fletcher: I don’t think there was any one thing. Startups are just so amazingly
fun; they are so amazingly stressful. Whether you are an engineer or whether
you are a founder, at least for me, it takes every emotion you’ve got and multiplies
it 100-fold. Higher highs, lower lows than any other work experience. A
startup is all-encompassing, so do it when you are young and when you don’t
have a family because you’ll lose it all.
Livingston: Back to the money thing—you said startups can be cheap. I read
that you said that a lot of the Web 2.0 principles started even back in the ’90s.
Fletcher: With ONElist, we didn’t own machines until years into the company.
We did the virtual dedicated hosting thing. So we had 40 or 50 machines at
Digital Nation in Virginia, that we had never seen. Which is smarter. That was
the biggest mistake I made at Bloglines—not doing exactly what I had done in
the ’90s. Because when you do that, you don’t have to worry about buying
switches, racking the damn machines or moving them when you run out of rack
space. Or going down to the colo at 2 a.m. to reboot something because it
crashed—all that gets taken care of. And these types of startups are never
valued on the cap x, so you don’t get any more money in any sort of acquisition
based on the number of machines you own. Unless you’re Google. So we had
40 or 50 machines at Bloglines when we were acquired, and that didn’t play a
factor at all.
So just get something out there. If you find really early versions of ONElist
or Bloglines on archive.org, the websites are horrible. They are crap, they don’t
have any features, they just try to do one thing. And you just iterate because
users are going to tell you what they want, and they’re your best feedback. It’s
critical just to get something out quickly. Just to start shipping and then you can
iterate. Because shipping is just this huge hurdle. I’ve been a part of companies
that have had big problems shipping—they just can’t ship. It’s a psychological
thing.
Livingston: It’s hard to do though, no?
Fletcher: Well, you want things to be perfect, and the great thing about userbased
Internet services is that they don’t have to be perfect. You got a bug, you
can fix it in 5 minutes. You don’t have to worry about upgrading everybody’s
software installation.