Founders at Work.pdf

356 Founders at Work
companies buy more, and people leave those companies and go to other companies
and buy it. They’ve never heard of Joel on Software, but they’re still buying
our stuff. We’ve actually seen that in the curve. Whereas, in the early days,
we would ask people on our website, “How’d you hear about Fog Creek?” when
they purchased things, and 100 percent of the people that filled out that field
would write, “Joel on Software.”
Now it’s down to about 30 percent. It’s dramatically reduced, but it’s still
there, so to some extent I don’t believe this is a replicable model. Because I’ve
seen a lot of people—that maybe can’t write in as exciting a way, or maybe don’t
have things to say that other people happen to want to read—try to replicate
that model and maybe succeed and maybe not. Unfortunately, startups have to
find something that works for them.
In our case, our software didn’t really have a strong viral nature to it, and so
using Joel on Software got the word out there that we make software products.
It worked very well for us, but it’s not necessarily a model that anyone else
could be successful following.
I remember one of the stupidest things I ever wrote on Joel on Software. I
was giving advice on writing technical specifications, and I said, “Be funny.”
The reason that was stupid was that I later realized that most people, when they
try to be funny, aren’t that funny. They just look kind of sad. That’s like, “Be
born to rich parents.” It’s not that useful advice for most people.
Livingston: Did you have any competitors that you worried about?
Spolsky: Probably, but I never really worried about them. It’s sort of funny, but,
because Joel on Software has such a wide readership, a lot of people say, “Hey,
if Joel can do this, I can do this too.” And they’ll copy the model all the way
down to the actual product.
I believe there have now been seven clones of FogBugz. The most extreme
example was somebody that reimplemented the whole thing, but copied our
user interface word for word, so the help file was actually a copyright violation,
which we had to tell him to change. But it was an exact clone of FogBugz in
every single way. He later used all kinds of nasty search engine optimization
techniques, got banned from Google, and that was the end of his business. That
was the worst extreme.
On the other hand, there are people, who we generally respect a lot more,
who kind of said, “Oh yeah, bug tracking. We could do that,” or “We have one
of those.” So all told, I think there are probably seven competitors.
The interesting thing is what they copied. They didn’t really copy the code;
they copied the implementation of how FogBugz works. But they missed what
made us successful. They didn’t really copy Joel on Software. And I think what’s
happening to those seven people right now is they are getting an object lesson
that merely copying the product that another company makes does not make
you successful. We’re not afraid of those people by any stretch of the imagination.
Sometimes they can be aggravating, but we don’t really care.
More than that though, we’ve long had a philosophy of pretty much ignoring
our competitors. When I first went to work at Microsoft, there was a person