Founders at Work.pdf

Mena Trott 407
the hard things was that we shut ourselves in for so long working on this. It was
such a different experience because Ben and I became such a team, everything
we did was together. There was probably a 2-year period where we didn’t spend
more than 6 hours apart. The first time I went on a business trip for the company
was the first overnight trip where we were apart longer than 6 hours.
It’s really good that we now have other people, because you can get really
caught up in living with someone and being so part of it. But I think we didn’t
know any better. We could definitely form a company again, but we couldn’t do
it that way, because you get drained.
Even after we became more of a company and we had employees, it wasn’t
until about a year ago that we’ve been able to say, “No, I don’t want to talk about
work at home.” Having an office made a difference. Working out of the home is
the hardest thing to do, because you can never leave work.
Livingston: You were working on Movable Type. Were you just planning to
launch it and see what happened?
Trott: We had a lot of excitement before the launch because I announced it on
my blog. About 2000 people signed up to be notified when we launched. All
these people were like, “Movable Type’s coming this week, we’re really excited.”
And we thought, “Oh my God, there’s so much pressure.” We were looking at
each other saying, “Should we do this or not? It could be tethering us to this
product forever.”
We made the decision to do it. Of course, if I knew then all the stuff that
would happen to us, certainly I would do it. But the first couple months were
pretty hairy.
Ben and I sort of have this perfectionism about what we do. We can’t do it
halfway. So we said that we were going to figure out how to make this something
that could sustain itself. But at the same time we knew that we were going
to have to get jobs. At least that’s what we thought, because it was free—it was
just donations. You can’t make money off of shareware. But luckily people
started donating very quickly, and we were at break-even just about after the
second month. And it was break-even pretty much until we got funding.
Livingston: How did you get people to donate?
Trott: We never actively asked for money because we thought that was obnoxious.
We had one page up that said, “We take donations and this is why you
should donate.” There were two factors why people would donate. One was
that they liked the product. The other was that we’d give recently updated keys.
When you posted your blog, it would appear on our main site, and if you
paid around $20 you’d get a key to do that. So people would say in the email,
“Can I have my key? Here’s my money.” Well, you could kind of think that you
are paying for the software, but here’s your key. I actually sent those emails out
with their keys up until probably January of 2004. It was a really long time. I felt
that they were giving money, so I wanted to honor that and thank them.
Livingston: So you’re taking donations, it’s paying the rent and keeping things
moving. Did you then try to seek out VC money?