the ’90s. Because...
the ’90s. Because when you do that, you don’t have to worry about buying
switches, racking the damn machines or moving them when you run out of rack
space. Or going down to the colo at 2 a.m. to reboot something because it
crashed—all that gets taken care of. And these types of startups are never
valued on the cap x, so you don’t get any more money in any sort of acquisition
based on the number of machines you own. Unless you’re Google. So we had
40 or 50 machines at Bloglines when we were acquired, and that didn’t play a
factor at all.
So just get something out there. If you find really early versions of ONElist
or Bloglines on archive.org, the websites are horrible. They are crap, they don’t
have any features, they just try to do one thing. And you just iterate because
users are going to tell you what they want, and they’re your best feedback. It’s
critical just to get something out quickly. Just to start shipping and then you can
iterate. Because shipping is just this huge hurdle. I’ve been a part of companies
that have had big problems shipping—they just can’t ship. It’s a psychological
thing.
Livingston: It’s hard to do though, no?
Fletcher: Well, you want things to be perfect, and the great thing about userbased
Internet services is that they don’t have to be perfect. You got a bug, you
can fix it in 5 minutes. You don’t have to worry about upgrading everybody’s
software installation.
Livingston: What would you tell a founder who just could not release new features
and was overanalyzing everything?
Fletcher: That it’s very easy to do, very understandable; but, in my opinion, the
best thing for your company is just release early, release often. Because then
you start a dialog with your users, because they’re going to send you emails saying,
“This is what I want.” We were getting 50 to 100 emails a day at Bloglines,
and most of them were feature suggestions. Once you start acting on those feature
suggestions, the users see that you are actually listening to them and they
become more loyal to your site. Because they see they are able to participate in
this and it’s just kind of like a virtual cycle. So it is not a disadvantage—it may
even be an advantage—to ship without all your features initially, for that reason,
because you get all of this going and you get out there sooner.
Livingston: You called yourself a nerd. Do you have any thoughts on founders
who are technical people versus founders who are MBAs?
Fletcher: I guess it takes all types. When you say a technical guy, they can
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