Bloglines—which was working...
Bloglines—which was working at the time, but I was just using it for myself—I
wasn’t even sure was going to be very popular. Nobody really knew about blogs;
aggregators were the next level up, kind of difficult to explain to people. So I
decided, I’d already written it, might as well just throw it out there and see how
it goes. So that was it. I put it out there in June of 2003, and it started getting
coverage pretty quickly after that. I realized that I should probably put some
effort into it, so I brought some friends in and started doing some marketing
and went from there.
Livingston: So Bloglines was something that you created for yourself to use and
then backed into doing a startup around it?
Fletcher: I had an inkling that it could be interesting, but I guess I thought it
was a little ahead of the curve. I started ONElist because I wanted to start a
mailing list for my parents, and at that time you had to download software and
you had to have a computer connected to the Internet. It was just really difficult
for an average person to put together a mailing list. So it was the same
thing. I guess my advice is: solve a problem that you have, first and foremost,
and chances are, other people may have the same problem.
Livingston: You brought on some people that you had worked with before?
Fletcher: Right. A core group of people that I had worked with at ONElist: a
great marketing person, a great PR person, a UI guy, and eventually a programmer.
But I was the only full-time person until around September of ’04.
Livingston: Were you doing this out of your home?
Fletcher: Yeah, the den over there.
Livingston: Was it self-funded?
Fletcher: Yeah.
Livingston: So you didn’t have to deal with any of the investor headaches?
Fletcher: Didn’t have to deal with any of that. That’s the other thing. Doing
startups like this is so cheap that it just doesn’t require a lot of money. I think I
put in a total of $200,000. And I didn’t do it nearly as smartly as I could have.
I ended up buying all the computers. My recommendation would be: don’t buy
any computers. Just use the virtual dedicated hosting services.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the biggest turning points for Bloglines once
you decided, “We’re a real company.” I assume you incorporated and did all the
legal stuff.
Fletcher: I just used the same company that I had set up for the anti-spam
company. That’s why the official company name was Trustic. I thought, “I’ve
already done the work to set up this company, so it’s just another product from
| ← Mark Fletcher was | it.” I was → |