Mixergy, Matt Mullenweg, Who Said Nice Guys Finish Last
Home of the ambitious upstart
What you will see in this episode:
- How a photo blogger changed blogging as we know it
- A thoughtful Matt Mullenweg
- Matt’s vision for WordPress
- How open-souce can make money
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community . WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.
Automattic Inc. is a startup from a handful of people passionate about making the web a better place. So far we’re best known for our work on WordPress and other projects but we have a lot of other interesting things in the pipeline as well. We are strong believers in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under licenses like the GPL. We work from places all around the world.
Matt started blogging in 2002, he was inspired by Washington DC while attending a Federal Reserve Challenge in High School. While in DC he took a lot of pictures and wanted to share them with his friends, hence his start in blogging.
What do you want WordPress to look like in 10, 20 years down the road? I often think about its logical conclusion, I want it to stay true to what make it wonderful: an open-source community, peer driven development and be agile.
Do you focus on specific goals, like a specific number of users or things used in a specific way? I try not to focus on metrics, if you focus on the wrong ones they can be harmful. A specific number of users isn’t his goal he could easily emulate a friend building site. He prefers focusing on impact, the idea that more people publishing and engaging in the internet. As terms of measurable goals he tries doing them like his new year’s resolutions, he open-sourced his resolutions “picked 25” it’s going ok. Taking photos is going well learning Spanish not so well.
Matt’s original blogging platform is b2 because he preferred PHP and MySQL but b2 went through some hardship and was abandoned, so he started to blog about his concerns and Mike Little contacted him. They wanted to continue b2’s work (Blogger was too simple, Textpattern wasn’t open-source, Moveable type was commercial and Perl took too long to rebuild between modifying) but they had some big improvements in mind primarily making set-up easier, a method to modify code and created the Blogroll. In the beginning they had no plans of creating a business just making their blogs better and easier for others to start.
At some point CNET invites you to work for them, how did they find you? He had actually blogged about heading to SFO and Mike Tatum reached out to him, they met up and when he got home he asked him if he wanted to work at CNET as a Senior Product Manager in the Network Group (for Help.com). They have a lot of great domain names and Matt wanted to start WordPress.com there, he really wanted online.com but CNET never got the vision of blogs for users. He had ideas of bring all your profiles together but figured it was too early at that time.
However, after 10 months he left to create Automaticc. He wanted to create an umbrella group to support open-source but for profit. He believes that you can have more impact as a for profit company with virtuess in the fact that it is supported by the community.
2 Ways to make money with open-source: Dual Licensing (GPL and Proprietary) and Services. GPL license (it has freedoms and restrictions; if something is derived from open-source you can’t make it close-source)
Akismet was the first service created (a freemium model) and then WordPress.com with a business model revolving around adding features (ie. own domain name, more bandwidth)
When did you become profitable? Almost day one, Yahoo! was licensing Akismet. Akismet was key, advertising wasn’t enough, spam was affecting search engine results and was the fundamental basis for akismet, that and the fact that his mom was starting to use the internet and he didn’t want her to see some of the industry.
Andrew comments that he (Matt) is pretty calm and laid back, what is your personality like? (Matt comments, it is early) he is like what you see but impatient and motivated. He opposes hype and prefers to let the work speak for himself. However, if something is better he will promote it, in the early days he had to evangelize his work, one by one convincing them to switch.
How did you reach those people? Blogs, I would target people he admired and had a relationship with, spam was a huge problem for blog platforms and akismet helped solve these issues winning people over.
Do you have an example of who you contacted? Robert Scoble, he had read his blog for a year or two, Robert mentioned he was going to switch and whoever was the first couple commenters, he would try out their platform. Robert settled with WordPress.
How did you bring in other developers? He was lucky, most of the b2 guys came over, even the original developer, they had a simple website and adhered to web standards and a tagline that said “code is poetry” that appealed to the folks that had the same passion as him. It also helps that every developer at wordpress is a blogger and were using the product.
What do you say to people that ask you about an exit strategy? Answering that implies I want to exit, which I’m not in a hurry to.
How much of that comes from the passion and how much come from the fact that you took some cash out of the business? He has had safety net his whole life, which gives him flexibility. Taking VC funding allowed him to keep talent and give them a safety net the responsibilities of his employees and their families weighed heavily.
Rumor was you wanted to sell but investors saw more upside, were those rumors true? Not entirely, I can’t comment, I have considered the possibility, but with Automaticc ultimately there is a longer road ahead. I think as an investor you ultimately defer to the founder, the opposite may be true with other investors but he is fortunate to be involved with good investors (True and Polaris). Passion drives a startup and it’s early. Luckily he had good people around him that helped steer Automaticc in the right direction and not at an artificial pace.
What was the break out success? Growth has been organic, one of the significant versions was 1.0 it introduced importers (from other platforms) 1.2 introduced plugins, 1.5 introduced themes.
BB press, why didn’t you stay focused on WordPress? I don’t focus well, a lot of things frustrate me and I want to make things better.
Where did the idea of Themes and plugins come from? I didn’t like copy and pasting code, I wanted to make things easy. All the ideas came from frustrations, he also participated in the support forums and it was obvious what changes were needed.
How do you stay motivated? It is everything, the beauty of everyday things, all things worth doing are hard, feedback from users and how it affects their lives for the better
What advice do you give to entrepreneurs starting today? I prefer not to give advice, but I do it. I prefer to speak to what I have done and if my experience applies. My universal advice is to follow the morale underpinnings, work on something that makes the world better and you are passionate about and open-source.
Explore Mixergy
Andrew is proud to announce the first sponsor of Mixergy: Freshbooks
