The Six Apart Mistake

Six Apart just announced that they've secured another $12 million of financing, bringing the total raised to $23 million. They also announced the acquisition of a mobile blogging company.

I finally had the chance to see Mena Trott, the co-founder of Six Apart, in person at SXSW. I've always thought highly of Mena and her company, but I was disappointed. She was the only one on a diverse panel on the future of web apps who had nothing to show, which was somewhat foreboding. Then, as she discussed the funding, acquisition and plans for the future, she said that Six Apart was focused on the millions and millions of people who don't blog. The last thing these people want to do when they wake up in the morning is blog. How can we build the tools that they would want to use? How can we convince them to blog?

I believe that Six Apart is making a serious mistake.

The company is no longer passionate about users and blogging, they are passionate about markets and reach. Even when Mena talked about convincing people to blog, it was clearly motivated by what they could do for Six Apart, not what blogging could do for them. The company has thousands upon thousands of people paying $100 per year or more to use TypePad. Instead of serving, rewarding, and empowering the enthusiastic and the committed, they are pursuing the people who are specifically uninterested in what they offer.

As Jason Fried mentioned in his keynote, the more funding you receive, the more you will waste. The same goes for employees and time. The funding Six Apart has received has allowed it to grow through acquisitions and new hires. Now, the company is forced to pursue additional funding and market initiatives to support its ever-growing infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the company's core products are stagnate, despite the additional money and employees. I have used TypePad for over two years and the tool has remained essentially unchanged. Of course, there have been a number of very public outages and consistent, sometimes painful, slowness in the meantime. What I find interesting is that each time someone, including myself, posts frustrations or suggestions for Six Apart, the company responds promptly with "we feel your pain" and "we hope to address that soon", but the changes never come.

A simple example: to this day, there is no way in TypePad to see when your subscription will expire and when you will be charged next. Again, this is a subscription-based service that costs over $100 per year and I cannot see when I was charged last and when I will be charged next. Not even a simple "Your current subscription expires on June 1, 2006." And it has been this way for over 2 years! Why is a company with over 120 employees unable to roll out a steady stream of improvements?

Many loyal TypePad users are switching to Wordpress or other options. Most pro-level users incorporate stat trackers on their sites because TypePad's stats are so poor (and often down). The same users turn to FeedBurner for detailed stats on their RSS subscribers. Don't they see their core audience slipping away?

Six Apart is chasing the business market with Movable Type (high dollars) and the millions of people who have heard about blogs for two years and still aren't interested (high volume), rather than serving existing users who are passionate about blogging, and were once passionate about Six Apart.

Tags: typepad, six apart

Comments

[Arlan Daniels]

Brian, great post. If you could be in Mena Trott's shoes for a quarter or maybe even a year, what 3 key things would you change or put in place immmediately to turn the company's image & performance around?

Would the example you gave on this be one of the 3 keys? Would that make people stay? What creative or business stratagy does Six Apart need? Not that they'd read this and implement it or anything but, I'm sure many business entrepreneurs read your blog and could use an example like this.

[Rick]

I would think they would have good success targeting guys like me who use Blogger but could be talked into trading up to a better service.

[Nathan Smith]

I got the same impression during the Future of Web Apps panel, that SixApart has lost its steam. I think it came at the point where Mena pretty much acknowledged that LiveJournal is neither a quality product, nor a priority for SixApart. That, coupled with their ever more restrictive licensing, tells me that they're just in it for the money now.

[Eliot]

Very good analysis. I think a lot of people have been confused on where Six Apart has been going. I'm sad that they aren't active in the community like they used to be just a few short years ago.

One praise, though. My church (Providence Community Church[1] over here in Plano, TX) recently purchased the non-profit version of Movable Type for managing our newly re-designed website. I had a few minor issues and decided to try out their online support, since we paid for it and all. I was very impressed! They respected me, and gave me very helpful answers to the technical issues.

[1] http://providencecommunity.com

[Brian]

Arlan: That's a great question, one I may need to save for another post. I will say this, though, I believe that once a company chooses to rapidly grow and expand, they are then forced to make these decisions to justify and support what they've created. It's very hard to step off this path without failing your investors and employees.

Rick: Exactly! In fact, it seems like more and more people can't see enough benefit in TypePad to justify the cost when Blogger is free.

Nathan: I'm glad to hear from someone else who was there. There was a startling lack of enthusiasm or momentum.

Eliot: I noticed that Mena hasn't updated her Six Apart blog for months. There's definitely a very different vibe there now.

Glad to hear Movable Type is working out for you. I really like the site!

[Gene]

This reminds me of why I do not "blog." I too would confabulate and reconstruct reality based on fragments of things I've imagined or heard into one annoying conspiracy of incompetance.

[Me]

Are you smoking something, Brian? How can we convince people to blog, who are not yet doing it? Are you serious? If I could find a product that everyone in my family could use, gosh would that be amazing to see everyone contributing to it. I wouldn't have to receive email from my dad, who pastes photos into a MS Word document and emails them with Word's email feature... Out of everyone in my family that I can think of, I am the only one who has a blog. Think about how many other people are out there who would do it if they had the right product. Get a clue, please. It's hard for me to understand how you could possibly think this way.

And how can you compare TypePad to Blogger? These two products are nothing like each other. You say TypePad has been stagnate... um, hello, McFly... what has happened to Blogger over the years? Oh yeah, you can now finally upload a photo into the system instead of having to post it on Flickr first. Anything else? No, I don't think so. Go try to do something real with Blogger. Just try.

Give us a break, man.

[Brian]

I so rarely have the privilege of negative comments, particularly anonymous ones, so you'll have to be patient with me. (FYI, I will delete anonymous comments in the future. If you're not willing to put your name on something, I'm not interested.)

First, as I've mentioned, I've used TypePad for over two years and have written multiple times about my love for both the tool and the company behind it. Those were valid opinions then, as are my criticisms now. I'm actually an endorsement on their Compare page and honestly, I'm fine with that. I just see them going further and further down a path that takes them away from their strengths.

Second, I would love to see more and more people and organizations blog - in fact, I'm writing a book on exactly that topic. That's an entirely different subject from what business decisions a company should make and how existing customers can best be served. The greatest evangelists they have are current paying users.

As to Blogger vs TypePad, I would greatly prefer TypePad. But I see more and more individuals, as well as organizations, failing to see enough of a reason to justify paying for TypePad.

[jorone]

I think it's great that Typepad has a quote from you on one of their front pages:

“If you are still searching for a great weblog tool, it is time to try TypePad.”

Very ironic from imo.

[Anil Dash]

So, I finally got a chance to listen to the panel myself. (http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000871.html)

As I suspected, there's no basis for any of the criticisms Nathan's levelled. He says, "I think it came at the point where Mena pretty much acknowledged that LiveJournal is neither a quality product, nor a priority for SixApart. That, coupled with their ever more restrictive licensing, tells me that they're just in it for the money now."

Mena actually never says that. She says, candidly, that LiveJournal isn't always as polished as maybe we'd all hope, and that's in exchange for having a rapid cycle of iterating and innovating. Seems fair to me.

And interestingly, our licenses have only ever gotten *more* open, with the one notable exception of our introduction of Movable Type 3.0. Since then, you can have unlimited blogs with all of your MT licenses (vs. some more "open" tools that don't let you export your data or don't let you have more than one blog) and of course LiveJournal is GPLed, which is pretty much as open as it gets.

But to the core point you're talking about: You say "The company is no longer passionate about users and blogging, they are passionate about markets and reach." and I think you're exactly wrong.

All of us who work at Six Apart have had ou lives changed by blogging. Just speaking for myself, I've made many of my best friends, found the best job I've ever had, met the people who introduced me to my now-wife, and have had countless experiences that I would never have had without my blog.

We want *everyone* to be able to connect in that way with the people they care about, whether it's friends and family, or coworkers, or some random stranger on the other side of the world who happens to love the same music or movie that you do.

And when all those people start blogging, who's going to help them do it? Microsoft? Yahoo? AOL? Because those are the options, if we at Six Apart don't do it. Frankly, I don't want them to try out some half-assed blogging tool sometime and say "eh, this isn't for me" and miss out on something great. I *sure* don't want them to think blogs are this thing that exists because Bill Gates or the board of directors decided they could add .003% to their bottom line if they rebranded Geocities as "blogging".

So there's a responsibility for those of us who love blogs, who did it (and still do) because we love the medium and did it back when there was no money, no funding, and certainly no glamour in it. If this medium is going to exist on a global level, which is starting to happen, let's have it be by a company that's of blogging, and for blogging.

So, yeah, you can split hairs about how well we've focused on our different audiences, and I will absolutely take the blame personally for us not communicating well enough in some ways. But I hope you understand why the ambition has to be bigger, if you really believe in what blogs can do and what they can be.