Interview: Mena Trott

I spent a few hours at Six Apart, an authoring tools publisher on nearly everyone’s short list of blogging companies most likely to succeed. Most of my time was in free ranging conversations with the articulate, passionate Mena Trott, who co-founded Six Apart with husband Ben in 2001.  Our book will not profile blog enabling companies, but Mena’s insights and anecdotes will be used in several chapters:

Do you have any anecdotes from Six Apart’s early days not previously published:

When we first released our software there was no blogging industry so expectations weren’t what they are today. We had to set our own. Ben and I decided that once we start, we’ll need to commit to go all the way. Other [software] companies had started then disappeared leaving users unsupported.  We knew that we would have possibly had our lives tethered to Movable Type and had to decide whether we were committed to do so.

We had no business plan, but we did have a vision to make a tool that everyone could use and it would give them power. 

Our code name for the product was “Serge,” but we wanted to find a name that implied “earth-changing.”  One day, I was laying on the couch and came up with Movable Type. For a long while, neither Ben nor I could remember the name. But we knew it would be good, once we could.

I started my first blog, www.dollarshort.org , during a pseudo mid-life crisis that hit me at age 23. I had graduated school, married, Ben and I had been laid off from our tech jobs and had moved back to our hometown of Petaluma,[CA]and were contemplating starting a family.  “One day, I realized, oh my God, I'm not going to be a celebrity.  Nobody will know who I am in the real world, so why don't I just try to get famous on the Web?  If I want to change my life, let me try something small, like online. My blog reached the so-called A-listers and when I talked about Movable Type being in development, they seemed interested.  I wanted to change my life and we ended changing a lot more.

What I’m proud of is we’ve given people a tool to communicate.  Typepad is a tool to let people write things and express themselves the way I needed to create and express myself. You don’t need to reach tens of thousand people like Robert Scoble does to have a weblog that matters. Ten people who are really interested in what you write is a lot. And,  for most people and having them appreciate you can be life-changing.

Typepad was released at a time when, there were these pundits, but also people writing about their everyday lives and they had been so dismissed for so long, and we gave them a tool to express themselves.

The small group space is the next part of the blogging revolution.  Most top-ranked bloggers focus on mass audiences, but most people are more private than the massively followed so-called A-Listers she observed.  There's a reason not everyone is a journalist.  Most people don't care. They use blogs for these small little projects.”

(In fact, the idea of niche media vs. mass media is a fast-emerging concept.  Radiant Marketing’s Paul Chaney commented on it in a post.

What will Six Apart be when it grow up?

I want Six Apart to be the communication company. We are the weblog company already, but its communications that’s important.

Toward that goal, you face some formidable competition in companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.  How do you plan to survive playing against gorillas?

You interviewed Blake Ross. He uses Mozilla and he knows what he wants in it.  We use our blogging tools and we know what we want in them. Blogging is our central culture.  We are part of the community. We know what people want in blogging tools because it’s what we want too. Blogging is not a central product for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. We are a company made up of bloggers.”

Will Six Apart remain independent?

We want to remain a strong independent company with a focus on our products and our customers/users. Honestly, I can’t predict what lies in the future but we’re certainly not interested in a quick flip. Ben and I want to be able to start a family relatively soon and being in a start-up would be hard. Therefore, we want to grow this company into something sustainable that can have a place amongst the giants in the industry.

We’ll have a chapter on blogging in a crisis. You had one of those a while ago, when you surprised customers by starting to charge for Movable Type.  Can you to talk to me about the role your blog had in calming down a hostile audience?

When we changed licensing, we knew there would be pushback but we didn't know the extent.  Pricing wasn't really the issue, it was limiting the number of blogs you could have.

The biggest problem came from us not communicating in advance. We should have communicated our reasons and what we were doing beforehand. A major issue was that commercial users were using personal licenses and had 2000 people on a $150 license. We should have focused more on solving this abuse on the commercial side rather than applying limits across the board (for personal use as well). So, the big uproar came from personal users, not businesses. Businesses were pleased we finally had coherent licensing.

We really didn't see this coming.  We knew people were going to complain, but we didn't know there would be a 1000 people who personally wanted my head on a platter. Even with the backlash, we had to continue. We couldn't just say, ‘Oh, never mind’ and change back to the old model. We had to figure out what wasn't going to work, and we needed to start charging for MT. We had said from the beginning that we were going to charge. Also, we needed to start enforcing licensing limits.

Trackback was key.  That’s how we got responses. The responses were really hard for us to take. It was like the first dent in your new car. Until then, everyone seemed to think we were perfect, and now we weren't. Trackback helped us learn that people really wanted unlimited blogs more than free use. Reading these responses let us take our emotion out of it. People said: don't give me commentary, just tell me how it’s really working.

We took about a month to get our licensing straightened out and more time to get people to understand what we were doing. We had to take our time.  We had to get it right. The experience was like owning a megaphone company, holding a shareholders meeting and handing out a new model of the (previously free) megaphone we produced. Then, as the megaphones were all in their hands, we said it would now cost money. And then we locked the doors.

Our last chapter is the “big picture” chapter.  Where is this all going?  Where will Six Apart be five and 10 years hence?

Blogging needs to be as ubiquitous as email.  You don't differentiate email between business and personal—you just do email. The thing about blogging is that it needs to be just blogging.  It doesn't matter whether its business or personal or family or friends or private or public.  I want a day when I have one weblog and I can just post whatever I want to post in that one weblog and I don't have to think of how to categorize it. I want it to be filtered on the reader's end. I don't want 30 blogs I want one that is an extension of all parts of me. I want one weblog that publishes to all sorts of groups

Personal websites died because they were too hard to update. RSS is hugely important. Being able to know that we have updated was not possible with websites. To be able to comment, to affect a communications loop, this is how weblogs have gone beyond the old personal and even corporate websites. Weblogs are evolved personal web pages even when they are commercial or anonymous. You have to know there's a personal voice even when it’s a business blog.  Robots can't write this stuff.  It’s what made blogging what it is. 

Ubiquity is important—using blogs to spread communication, to be able to have a tool to allow people to communicate—having the ability to write and publish to certain particular groups is going to be very important. 

Can you tell me something about yourself that most people don’t already know?

I post a picture of myself on a private weblog every day with my camera phone. I'm able to look back and see how I've changed over the year. People say it's the most egotistical thing, but it isn't, if only a few people read it.  My mom loves it. She calls me up and tells me how she loved my hair on Wednesday and she knows I’m okay on days when I can’t call her. It’s valuable to me because I can look at every picture and tell you something about that day.  I remember what I'm wearing, reflect on where I was at.  It's the best way to capture individual days just by looking at the pictures. I can see the months fill up.  I think web logging is almost a way to slow life down. At the end of the year, I'll probably post it publicly.

People did this. People kept journals all through history and it's important. As soon as you stop, keeping track of what you do, things go by too quickly. This is one of the things we like doing. I should write a post about it. Life slows down by posting everyday.

Comments

[Jozef Imrich]

Six Apart is the proof that Six Degrees of Separation is all about past ;-) Eye opening interview indeed!

PS: I never realis(z)ed there were so many - Types of weblogs

[Shelley]

"When we first released our software there was no blogging industry so expectations weren’t what they are today. We had to set our own. Ben and I decided that once we start, we’ll need to commit to go all the way. Other [software] companies had started then disappeared leaving users unsupported."

Uhm, no. Manila, Radio, Blogger, several open source tools...there was a thriving blogging industry before MT was released.

[Anil]

I think, from context, that she means there wasn't a blogging industry in the sense that there is today. As you know, Ben and Mena were familiar with all of those tools and have acknowledged their debt to those teams. Do you disagree that expectations were different than they are today?

[shel]

Anil,

That was most certainly my interpretation of my talk with Mena. She spent a good deal of time discussing respectfully the contributions that preceded Six Apart. She even went out of her way to speak kindly of Blogger and Evan Williams. The focus of my interview was how business uses tools for blogging. If in choosing the quotes I used, I somehow misrepresented Mena, I do apologize.

[Shelley]

Anil, it still comes off to me as Six Apart saying that it has defined the weblogging business, and there wasn't the industry before. Shel, you may want to put some context on this in your book.

It's the same as saying personal web sites have died -- there are probably still more personal web sites then there are weblogs. It's just we're very insulated from a 'non-weblog' world. But this one is Mena's opinion, so I guess it can be seen as that...opinion.

Finally, and this is a quiet note, but 'mid-life crises at 23'? Going to be hard to read when you're now on the shady side of 50, like I am. Just something to keep in mind.

So are you mad at me again, Anil? I didn't once mention small, cute, furry animals.

Hi, just popped in here through a random link. Cool site, keep this good work up :-)