Founders at Work.pdf

Mena Trott 411
thing for 6 years. So I think it works, but we had a different scale than
LiveJournal, which took a long time to get a large base.
Livingston: Why did you build new software for TypePad instead of reusing the
code you had for Movable Type?
Trott: Movable Type is download software that you install on your own server.
It was meant for people who knew their way around installing server software.
We realized that more and more people were coming to blogging with less and
less experience. That’s relative to the people who are coming in now, who probably
have only installed one web application.
So we wanted to have a service that anybody could use. That’s why we
started developing TypePad. It’s a lot more like WYSIWYG, and you can drag
and drop items into your templates, and you don’t have to know any coding. It’s
a very different product than Movable Type.
Livingston: You have distinct audiences?
Trott: Movable Type and TypePad are kind of the same audience, and then
there’s LiveJournal. Movable Type and TypePad are both about 50/50 gender
split and it skews toward people in their 30s. With LiveJournal, 70 percent are
under-21 females.
Livingston: I heard that you planned to transfer the code behind TypePad to
Movable Type. Is that true?
Trott: No. We always thought that the features of TypePad would go into
Movable Type. But as time went by, more people who want to use TypePad
have just gone to TypePad, and Movable Type tends to be more of a professional
business tool. Even though there are still “prosumers” that are using
Movable Type, it’s easier to deploy the features that people want on TypePad.
It’s funny, because Movable Type is a tricky install, but it would be almost
impossible for someone to install TypePad because there are so many things
that are required with the server setup. It’s kind of trying to decide what the
best of all the worlds are. That’s what we’re doing with the Comet stuff that we
announced at DEMO. It’s kind of the next-generation platform. It’s all the features
of LiveJournal that are really good—privacy per post, friends aggregation,
to be able to read people’s posts—with the publishing options of Movable Type
and TypePad. So the reason why TypePad didn’t become Movable Type is
because the audience is differentiated and it didn’t make sense to have that on
an installable.
Livingston: What did people misunderstand about what you were doing?
Trott: There was licensing. From October 2001 to May 2004, Movable Type
was always free and you had paid options. Commercial was the one level that
was never completely free. So if you were using it in a commercial way, you’d
have to pay $150. The thing was that we had these huge companies using
Movable Type, paying $150 and putting 150 to 200 people on it. We never felt
that was right. That’s why we had a strict license that basically said that you
don’t make money off the stuff that we’re not making money off of. It wasn’t