History of Famous Startups. Fog Creek Software

awful for all

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

awful for all kinds of reasons. Let’s make good backup software.” That’s a big
project. I want to have the organization that I don’t have yet where, when we
Joel Spolsky 359
get those ideas, we can produce the products. Because the capital is sort of endless.
Capital is not a problem for us. Even if it was a problem for us, there’s VC.
The real problem is how to deploy that capital to create software, and that’s
something that we want to make the machine that is able to do.
Livingston: What advice would you give to a programmer…

database and the

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

database and the name in the application. Ruby on Rails finally said, “It’s no big
deal if you’re just forced to use the same name in both places. You know, it
doesn’t really matter.” And suddenly it becomes much simpler and much
cleaner. To me, that is an elegant hack—saying, “This particular distinction that
we used to fret over, just throw it away.”
I don’t know if that’s what makes a good hacker. I guess that would be
answering a slightly different question to what’s a brilliant hack. I guess a brilliant
hacker is someone who comes up with a…

software companies did

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

software companies did not do bug tracking. Or 80 percent of commercial software
companies did not write specifications. Or 99 percent of commercial
software companies did not do usability testing.
If you were an alien and you came here in 1991 and you wanted to learn
how to develop software, you would learn ten times as much at Microsoft as
anywhere else, I think, because I watched these companies kind of flail making
mistakes. There were things—really basic things, that companies did not know.
Microsoft knew that loading a segment register on the 386 was a very timeconsuming
operation, and…

when we released

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

when we released a new version of our software (we’re on 5.0 with FogBugz
already), there would be a big jump in the number of sales. We would say, “OK,
all the upgraders are upgrading right now, so that’s what accounts for the
boost.” And the surprise is that after that initial boost, the number never went
down. We expected there would be a hump after a new version was released
and that would make us want to keep releasing new versions. But instead there
was a step. A big step up. We kept thinking it was a hump that…

The interesting thing

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

The interesting thing is what they copied. They didn’t really copy the code;
they copied the implementation of how FogBugz works. But they missed what
made us successful. They didn’t really copy Joel on Software. And I think what’s
happening to those seven people right now is they are getting an object lesson
that merely copying the product that another company makes does not make
you successful. We’re not afraid of those people by any stretch of the imagination.
Sometimes they can be aggravating, but we don’t really care.
More than that though, we’ve long had a philosophy of pretty…

Joel Spolsky 355

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

Joel Spolsky 355
companies buy more, and people leave those companies and go to other companies
and buy it. They’ve never heard of Joel on Software, but they’re still buying
our stuff. We’ve actually seen that in the curve. Whereas, in the early days,
we would ask people on our website, “How’d you hear about Fog Creek?” when
they purchased things, and 100 percent of the people that filled out that field
would write, “Joel on Software.”
Now it’s down to about 30 percent. It’s dramatically reduced, but it’s still
there, so to some extent I don’t believe this is…

but to say

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

but to say yes. And you’d keep getting distracted to do their pet projects that
they dreamed up in the shower one night and they think might be a good idea,
and you just don’t think it’s a good idea.” You don’t really have the ability to say
no when you take those outside investments. It’s hard to tell your investors,
“Let me just go in my own direction.”
There are things that we do, boy, that I’m so thankful that I don’t have to
answer to anybody. I don’t think it’s possible to have private offices for developers
when…

your potential customers

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

your potential customers and see what it is that caused them not to buy your
product or would cause them to buy more copies of it. And do that, and then
ship it. That was something we really, really should have focused on, but, you
know, we didn’t know any better.
Livingston: Do you consciously not take any investments?
Spolsky: Yeah, absolutely. We took no investments because there were so many
horror stories about what VCs would do to you. ArsDigita was the most public
one, obviously, of kicking out the founders and then mismanaging the company
and bringing in…

We said, “Make

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

We said, “Make hyperlinks to Fog Creek properties (or whatever) and if
people follow the hyperlinks and buy our software, we’ll give you a percentage—
15 to 25 percent.” It was an affiliate program, just like Amazon affiliates. That
actually did get us some sales, but we put a lot of work into developing that, and
the amount of sales it got us was negligible. The administration and development
overhead were just not worth doing, and we eventually shut it down
because I was sick of writing $19 checks every month. It was a complete waste
of time; it absorbed…

MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:25:23 -0700

MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) or something like that. That particular
relationship, before Lotus completely acquired Iris, lasted long enough
that I thought that maybe this model would work.
I later talked to people that were involved, and they said, “Oh my God, the
tensions were unbelievable. It was a nightmare.” Lotus had to acquire them.
So the next thing we looked at was selling Fog Creek to some other company
that we thought could take us to market. We went through the whole song
and dance and negotiations with the company that we thought would acquire us
and had…