email management system....
email management system. Your customers email bugs, it spam filters it automatically,
it sorts them into areas, it assigns them to people, you can keep track
of them, you can set due dates, you can automatically reply to a customer with
a nice little message that gives them a link that they can click on to see the
status of their message. We use it for handling all our incoming company email
and make sure that it gets handled by the appropriate person.
Livingston: Would you consider when you released this product one of your
major turning points?
Spolsky: Yeah, although it didn’t feel like “Let’s have a celebration.” At the
time, we thought, “Hey, we have this product. We don’t know what else to do.
Let’s just ship it and see what happens.” We had no idea. At the time, you could
have told me that this thing was going to sell zero copies, and I would have
believed you. You could have also told me it was going to sell $50,000 a month’s
worth of copies—an equally unrealistic number—and I would have believed
that too.
Now I have enough experience to know that almost everything you launch
is going to sell $2,000 to 3,000 in the first month, and that’s the way the first
Joel Spolsky 349
month of any software product always is, if you do things perfectly. But at the
time, I just had no idea what to expect.
Livingston:Was there a time during that first year when you thought, “We’ve
lost our clients. Time to close up shop”?
Spolsky: We never thought we would close, because we had this theory that
Fog Creek would continue as long as Michael and I could eat and pay whatever
external obligations we had. There was no reason to completely and thoroughly
give up. And that’s pretty much what it got to. In the first year, I’d say revenues
off of FogBugz averaged like $10,000 or $15,000, and that was enough to live
on. It was growing at a reasonable rate—I remember literally every month it
would grow—at least 100 percent a year. And that gave us the confidence that
we could wait this out.
There was money coming in, and the amount of money coming in was going
up every month. So there was no reason to give up and go home. The theory
was that we would only give up when there wasn’t enough income even to pay
the minimum bills we had to pay. I think our monthly overhead was $5,000—
mostly rent, but also office supplies and T1 and that kind of stuff.
Livingston: It seems like you have a really unique corporate culture—one that
values hackers. Did you plan this from the start?
Spolsky: Absolutely. Remember, the original model was, “How can we become
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