Founders at Work.pdf

412 Founders at Work
that we didn’t want people to make a living off of Movable Type; it’s just that, if
we weren’t making a living, we didn’t think that other people should be making
money.
Some people say that’s not a good attitude, but it was the attitude that kept
us functioning as a business. That’s some advice for people: don’t apologize for
wanting to be a company. You see so many people who say, “Oh, we won’t
charge; things should be free.” It’s like you don’t think you’re worth being paid
for your time. I feel even more strongly about this when it’s an entire company
rather than just me and Ben. We can be kind of the fools that will work for free,
but I’m not going to make other people suffer for that.
With Movable Type, we said, “Why should businesses get this for free? Why
should we get taken advantage of?” There were so many people that were setting
up hosted services using Movable Type, and they would charge users
money. So we set up these limitations with the licensing saying that you can
only have x number of blogs and x number of authors. We just wanted to target
the people who were making money off the software that way. But we applied it
to personal users too much; we said personal users couldn’t have this and
people freaked out. They went crazy. Our biggest mistake was that it shouldn’t
have been across the board.
When we changed the licensing, people flipped out. They were like, “These
are the people that screwed you. We supported you for all these years.” It was
really hard for us because we had always been the darlings in the industry.
We never tried to be that, but people just thought we did no wrong. And we
didn’t do any wrong. I don’t think we did wrong with that, but, as soon as you
charge for something, it changes people’s impression. So we suddenly became
evil because we wanted to make some money from our product. It’s unfortunate
because it’s kind of the mindset that people have on the Internet—that
things shouldn’t cost money. But you have to pay people and pay the rent.
It’s really complicated, and I think that most people who aren’t in our situation
can’t really pass accurate judgment. I remember when Ev [Williams] sold
Blogger to Google, and people were like, “Ev sold out!” We thought, “OK, he
started a business and he sold his business.” You shouldn’t be ashamed of wanting
to be a successful business. Of course, you shouldn’t do things that are
unethical, and we have never done anything unethical.
Livingston: What competitors did you worry about most?
Trott: We never really obsessed about it. We were always worried about
Blogger. I think we always knew that Yahoo or Microsoft would enter the space,
and they did. When AOL Journals came out, I thought, “There were these big
companies that have entered the market and still haven’t done anything really
to innovate.”
At Six Apart, we’re a little bit behind what our vision is because we’ve been
talking about this stuff that we’re finally getting to start to trickle out and shipping
just now, even though we’ve been working on it for a year or two—like the
Comet stuff we’ve been working on since day one of the founding of the company.
Other than that, there’s the open source software, the free software that
competes with us.