Founders at Work.pdf

406 Founders at Work
(we’ve been together since we were in high school), we started to think about a
web design company, but it always seemed overwhelming. We had no idea
where to start. When I look back, it seemed like the hardest thing in the world.
Luckily, it was all kind of accidental. When we released Movable Type, it
became popular pretty quickly, and it became a full-time job. I think having
customers from day one was the thing that really forced us to be a company. If
we had been just talking about a product and we had to build up a customer
base and figure out how to market it, that would have been incredibly hard. So
what we did was just jump in with no desire to do anything more than create
something that we love.
Later on when we were talking to VCs, they would say, “What problem does
this solve?” We weren’t giving pitches, it was just conversational, but that’s the
thing that never occurred to us. We were never trying to solve anyone’s problem
other than mine or a few bloggers’.
But there was a big demand for what we were creating, and Movable Type
became really popular. Around July 2002, we were at a fork in the road and we
asked ourselves, “Do we want to become consultants and focus on building out
customizations of Movable Type and doing implementations?” We went that
way for a little bit and then said, “This is not fun.” (I still have an invoice that we
were never paid and we ended up paying out of pocket.) So we said, “Let’s do
something even harder. Let’s go straight to the consumer.” And we started
working on TypePad.
We formed the LLC in July of 2002, right before we decided to start doing
TypePad. We still didn’t have funding—it was Ben and I still in the apartment
in Richmond. We used the spare bedroom and our desks were literally back to
back. We spent a lot of time there, 18 months in total. It’s funny when I tell
these stories. It seemed like a different world. It’s kind of like when people have
babies and they say they can’t remember how painful it was and they say, “Let’s
have another baby.” I think there’s a chemical in my brain that forces me to forget
how painful the time was.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the painful times, when it was just the two of
you sitting in a room.
Trott: I think that was painful enough!
One of the reasons that I started my blog was that I felt like I didn’t really
have any friends. When Ben and I were together at college, we never forced
ourselves to make friends with other people because we had each other. It was
a new thing for us because we had started going out when we were seniors in
high school, and then we spent the rest of the time joined at the hip. We always
had each other. Plus we got so involved with the Web and doing work that it
never occurred to us to make friends.
So I wanted my blog to have a connection with people online, all these
people that I wanted to be friends with. My blog helped facilitate that. One of
the things that was really painful about those times in the apartment was that
Ben and I really didn’t have any friends, and we really didn’t do anything
extracurricular. We went to parties occasionally, but it was never fun. So one of