Husband-and-wife cofounders Mena and Ben Trott
started Six Apart (named for the number of days
between their birthdays) in their apartment in 2001.
Trott’s personal blog, Dollarshort, was growing in
popularity, and she was dissatisfied with the blogging
software available at the time. So she and Ben
decided to develop their own and share it with some
friends. Movable Type became popular almost immediately
on its launch in October 2001.
In April 2003, Six Apart received funding from
Joi Ito’s Neoteny. They launched their hosted service,
TypePad, later that fall. In January 2005, the company announced the acquisition
of Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal. Six Apart launched Vox
(formerly known as Comet), a hosted blogging platform with a social networking
component, in 2006.
Livingston: Take me back to how things got started.
Trott: I started with a blog called Dollarshort in about April of 2001. I did it
because I felt that I needed a creative outlet. I just started writing a blog, writing
stories. I was still at my job, but I didn’t feel incredibly fulfilled. My blog was
getting more and more popular, and we were getting more involved in seeing
what people were doing.
When the company closed and we got laid off, we said, “Let’s start working
on a blogging tool—just release it as donationware and see where that goes.”
We didn’t expect anything from it. We thought we’d get donations and maybe
some stuff off our Amazon Wish List, but we never imagined anything more
than that.
As we got more and more involved, we became more ambitious, but I don’t
think we ever would have woken up and said, “Let’s start a company.” It just
never occurred to us that it was even possible. When Ben and I were in college
(we’ve been together since we were in high school), we started to think about a
web design company, but it always seemed overwhelming. We had no idea
where to start. When I look back, it seemed like the hardest thing in the world.
Luckily, it was all kind of accidental. When we released Movable Type, it
became popular pretty quickly, and it became a full-time job. I think having
customers from day one was the thing that really forced us to be a company. If
we had been just talking about a product and we had to build up a customer
base and figure out how to market it, that would have been incredibly hard. So
what we did was just jump in with no desire to do anything more than create
something that we love.
Later on when we were talking to VCs, they would say, “What problem does

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