it’s the little thing that clicked in my mind: “This is that little tweak that makes
it kind of maybe a big deal.” Not that the future lit up in my head and I said,
“We are doing that.” It was just sort of a hint, more in retrospect than at the
time.
We took the script I wrote to publish my site, and we made an internal site
where we could do the same thing. So, even when it was only Meg and I, we
had this little internal blog we called “Stuff,” and we just put stuff in there.
Evan Williams 113
It was a blog, but it was just, “Here’s a thing from a competitor or a potentially
useful page or just information for each other.” It was a place where we collected
everything and, as we grew, it was the center of Pyra. It was where things
happened.
So this whole time we are building our real collaboration tool, with all kinds
of structure and big ideas trying to be implemented into it, but we were really
using Stuff a lot. And then Paul wrote a little addition to Stuff so that certain
things we posted to our internal blog we could put on our external company
blog.
We were one of the first companies to have a blog on their site—not that
many people were reading. But it was neat. We were publishing news, random
things we liked, whatever.
This must have been around March of ’99, so all of this happened fairly
quickly. That’s when I got the idea for Blogger—I know because I registered
the domain then. I totally pictured what it was because it was based on what I
was already doing and then the way we were publishing our own blog to an
external site. I said, “Let’s turn that into a product.” I have always been a product
guy and am just always thinking about products and thought this would be a
cool little idea.
While it did seem fairly easy to build, it was a dilemma, because one of the
big lessons from my first company was to focus. After my first company died, I
did an inventory of the projects I had worked on in the last year. There were
something like 30 projects that I had started on and not finished. My total
weakness was not focusing on things. So I had this idea and I loved it, but very
clearly we were only three people and we had to contract to pay the bills and we
couldn’t start another product. We had this big thing we were trying to do. So it
just kind of sat in the back of my head, but it wouldn’t go away. It kept bugging
me. Of course, what made me still think about it was that we were using it for
our own purposes and we were building this collaboration tool, but we were

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