174 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
174 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
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layout: post
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title: Looking back on Selling Gravatar to Automattic
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---
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{{ page.title }}
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================
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<p class="meta">23 Oct 2008 - San Francisco</p>
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For an entrepreneur, the line between horrible mistake and runaway success can
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be so thin that even Kate Moss would be envious. I lived with
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[Gravatar](http://gravatar.com/) for nearly four years before that line even
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became thick enough to measure.
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As it's become one of my favorite parables, I'll save the details of how I came
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up with the idea for Gravatar for a future post. What's important to know is
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that the idea was spawned not from a business perspective, but from a desperate
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desire to create something new in the world of blogging.
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Spin the clock back four years and you'll find me sitting at my Windows desktop
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machine in my underwear with a box of Life cereal to my left and a day old Coke
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to my right. Since I'd been laid off from my job as a Java developer some months
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earlier, I'd decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge doing what I knew best:
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web design. Working in a cone of isolation, I'd become accustomed to waking up
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late, swinging my legs over the right side of the bed, and in one fluid movement
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sliding over to the ratty chair I stole from my old college dorm room. I'd spend
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most of the day working on client projects in ColdFusion or PHP. It was hard
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work and could become a bit tiresome. I needed an outlet, something that didn't
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have a suit on the other end of a telephone telling me how blue was the wrong
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color and things would be so much better if only the photo had a slightly bigger
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border. Gravatar would become that outlet for me.
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I was really big into web standards at the time, having recently read Zeldman's
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seminal work, and became a true believer. Eric Meyers, Dan Cederholm, and Jon
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Hicks became like gods to me. I worked very hard at making relevant and witty
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comments around the right kinds of blogs. Being a part of that movement became a
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significant goal for me. My Movable Type weblog rarely went more than two days
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days without a post on design or standards.
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Two weeks after I had the idea for Gravatar the first version was written and
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deployed. Every request hit the database and dynamically generated a properly
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sized gravatar via PHP's gd2 api. Premature optimization and all that, right?
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The first thing I did after getting the system to a workable state was email all
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the bloggers I looked up to (and that had no idea who I was). Blog comments at
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the time were a pretty dreary affair and I guess Cederholm was intrigued enough
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by my idea that he linked to it in a sidebar micro-post on simplebits.com.
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That single mention kicked off a slow but steady trickle of interest in the
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system. A few blogs here and there installed the plugin and the world started
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seeing avatars that mysteriously followed them around. At the same time, just as
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people must have thought Cheez Whiz was a stupid idea when it first came out,
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some bloggers started railing against Gravatar, calling it frivolous,
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inefficient, and "an abomination." This was my first nibble at the smorgasbord
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of what was to become the "horrible mistake" aspect of Gravatar.
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Due to the inherently self-advertising nature of gravatars (the "what the hell
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is that and how do I get one?" brand of advertising), Gravatar adoption
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increased at a rapid rate. Having crafted the idea for Gravatar without any
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semblance of business model or growth projection or build-out strategy, things
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took a rather dramatic dive away from "runaway success" as my server (yes,
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singular) buckled under the pressure of tens of requests per second! As it turns
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out, regenerating a gravatar on every request is not very CPU efficient.
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Gravatars worldwide suddenly turned into little red Xs. Then, in what has become
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known as the Twitter Effect, a barrage of emails hit me complaining about how
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the free service on which they had come to depend was down, and how this would
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adversely impact my well-being.
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I fixed the code. Gravatar came back online with caching. All the while I'd had
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the bright idea that gravatars would be rated for content, MPAA-style. Because
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users clearly were not fit to rate their own images, I was manually rating 400
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or more avatars each day. If I missed a day, I'd have damn near a thousand
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waiting for me the next day. In addition to the angry mob, I was very fortunate
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to have an amazingly supportive group of users that volunteered to help me rate
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images. I owe them my sanity, and it freed up enough time for me to work on the
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next iteration of the site.
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G2, as I called it, would be written in Rails and use lighttpd plus a convoluted
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directory structure of symlinks to enable me to pre-render every gravatar (1x1
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up to 80x80) and serve only static images. I did this to avoid having to rent or
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buy the kind of hardware necessary to hook up a properly scaled system. Up until
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the end I ran Gravatar on a maximum of two rented commodity servers that set me
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back a mere $300/month, a pittance for the kind of traffic I was serving. I say
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it was a pittance, but that's not really true. Donations didn't even come close
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to covering that cost.
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At some point early in the development of G2, Toni Schneider, the CEO of
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Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet) contacted me after
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hearing my [interview about the future of
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Gravatar](http://blog.gravatar.com/2007/10/18/automattic-gravatar/) on the
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WordPress podcast. This was exciting news! How perfect a fit would it be for
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Gravatar to be bought by Automattic? I was already planning a trip up to San
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Francisco to meet with the Powerset guys, so the timing worked out perfectly for
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me to meet in person with Toni. I ended up having lunch with Toni and Matt
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Mullenweg at 21st Ammendment on 2nd Street. It was a bit intimidating to come to
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the mecca of tech startups to meet with such huge players in the blogging
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community. Turned out that both Matt and Toni are great guys and so we had
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drinks for about two hours, talking about my ideas for Gravatar and how we might
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be able to work together. Everything seemed great—I was jazzed and they
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seemed excited—but a few weeks later Toni let me know that the timing was
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wrong and they couldn't make a play at that time. He suggested I proceed with G2
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and they'd proceed with their own avatar system. I was pretty bummed about the
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outcome, but I took their advice and kept going.
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A few weeks before G2 was finished, the site imploded in a big way. One machine.
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Hundreds of requests per second. That poor CPU must have thought it was the End
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Times. Instead of wasting time on getting the existing system back up, I put on
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my headphones, turned it up to eleven, and got back to work on G2.
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I'm not sure if you've ever had to work on a project while your users are
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publicly skewering you on your blog for allowing the service to go down, but
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it's as close to depression as I've ever come. If I'd had less pride, I would
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have popped everyone a huge middle finger and let the service die, but instead I
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waded through the hundreds of comments and deleted the ones with threats,
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hatred, or my favorite, the words "fuck you" repeated 600 times. It wasn't fair,
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I told myself, that I should be sitting here with high blood pressure trying to
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raise Gravatar from the dead while the unappreciative masses do what they do
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best on the internet. The only thing that kept me going was never being able to
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tell which side of the mistake/success boundary I was sitting on. It was hard to
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think of the situation as anything but a huge failure, but the shitstorm the
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downtime was causing indicated that people found the service valuable. I want to
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say that Twitter went through the same thing, but they suffered their downtime
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with millions of dollars in the bank. The only thing I had was a full time job
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unrelated to Gravatar and a credit card that reminded me every month of my bad
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judgment.
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Finally G2 was done, deployed, and fully operational. I have no idea how many
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users I lost due to the several weeks of downtime, but I don't think it was very
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many. There seems to be a corollary to the Twitter Effect that I'd call the
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Forgiveness Effect. It dictates that if a user enjoys a free service and that
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service is currently up, all past atrocities will be easily and quickly
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forgiven. With the site running again, things looked to be shifting back towards
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a success.
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Things were not all rainbows and unicorns though. My Rube Goldbergian
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architecture had a few quirks that needed to be dealt with. The site still had
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some elusive bugs from the overly-rapid development cycle. And just like new
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lanes on freeways always fill up immediately, the two new servers I was running
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started causing expensive bandwidth overages. I had taken a job at Powerset at
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this point and the combined pressures of these two commitments started to weigh
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me down. Once again I started feeling like all the effort I put into Gravatar
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was for nothing. Like I would never benefit from any of it.
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In a last ditch effort to save Gravatar from final doom, I emailed Toni and
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pitched him again on Gravatar. I figured it was a long shot, but what the hell,
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couldn't hurt. Things must have changed in the prior 6 months because Toni was
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very receptive to the idea. We met again, at 21st Ammendment, and hashed out a
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tentative deal over drinks. I'd never sold anything like this before, so my
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technique was probably very amateurish. I'm almost certain I could have gotten a
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better deal out of it, but I had the smell of desperation about me and I really
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did want to see Gravatar end up in Automattic's hands.
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Four days later, Automattic made their official offer. On September 21st, 2007
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we inked the deal and Gravatar became both the first company that I ever sold
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and the first company that Automattic ever acquired.
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I am quite satisfied with the sale to Automattic. Some will say that I should
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have pursued VC funding. Indeed, I was contacted by several firms but never
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travelled very far down that road. I always felt like Gravatar was a feature,
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and I wasn't comfortable building a company on such a tiny foundation.
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Reinforcing this decision, no viable business model ever coalesced during the
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time I was building the site. It was also made clear by Toni that Automattic
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would maintain Gravatar as a separate brand and continue its evolution (instead
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of just absorbing it into WordPress). This appealed to my ego. Most companies
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kill or maim everything they acquire, but here was a chance for Gravatar to
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carry forward with all of Automattic's resources behind it (instead of two
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measly servers). Part of me just wanted to see what Gravatar could become with
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time, money, and man-power moving it forward.
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Things always seem so clear in retrospect. But it was pride and persistence that
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kept me in the game long enough to have anything to look back on at all. While
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the line between horrible mistake and runaway success may be difficult to see,
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you can still find it if you look hard enough.
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