If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Marc Canter is a) being mean, b) being cranky or c) being cynical. Once in a while Marc’ singles me out - sometimes he’s nice, sometimes he’s not, sometimes its just for lunch when he happens to be in town.
Today he’s singled me out not once, but twice. In the first instance, he obviously has a problem with how I’ve managed Blogrolling.com –
Ross Rader is finally figuring out (3 years later) how blogrolling fits into Tucows strategy... Gee - that took long enough.
He’s sort of right on this one. Three years ago when we bought Blogrolling.com, I had some big ideas how we could use the platform as the basis for launching our (then) nascent private label blogging system and take some of the more interesting technology and integrate it into the blogging platform. It would have meant all sorts of identity systems integration, implementing new microformats – mainly, it meant implementing the vision that Marc lays out here. And it was a kick-ass idea.
But we quickly found out that there was a problem with this idea– It had nothing to do with the people that were using Blogrolling.com.
Our subscribers weren’t using it because they trusted Jason (I mean, they trusted Jason, but that’s not why they used the service, it wasn’t the “itch” they were scratching). They weren’t using it because they needed access to Outliners, microformats and identity systems that worked with their blog. They weren’t using it because of any of the kick-ass ideas that Marc Canter, me or anyone else had. They were using it because it was a damn simple way to add bookmarks to their website. And by simple, I mean AOL-user simple. (AOL is one of the biggest sources of new signups for Blogrolling.com, along with Google and a few other services).
This posed a huge problem for me. What the users wanted was completely contrary to where I wanted to go with the service. Go back to the paragraph where I outlined my plan and read it again. You will quickly note that not once did I mention any where in our plan anything to do with the existing Blogrolling customers. Had we executed on that plan, I firmly believe that we would have royally screwed those existing customers, they would have left and Blogrolling would have been dead on the floor.
So what did we do? Absolutely nothing. The feature set hasn’t changed in two years. We’ve continuously upgraded the hardware and infrastructure, we added customer service options, and we’ve continued to maintain the code along the way as we figure out better ways of doing the same things. But haven’t attempted to redefine or add to what Blogrolling.com is in any meaningful way. We did try to do some cross-selling and promotion, but our subscribers weren’t really interested. They just wanted their dead simple bookmark manager. So we ended up trying to do our best and just respect that. You’ll note that Blogrolling.com isn’t dead on the floor three years later. In fact, its grown dramatically. The number of people using it today is a bit more than three times what it was when we bought it.
Unfortunately, few of these people are actually paying for the service (a miniscule percentage which hasn’t grown appreciably since we bought it). This was the single biggest factor leading up to our decision to go free last week. If no one is paying, why keep up the charade. This doesn’t increase our expenses and it certainly doesn’t impact cash flow materially. Well, it would if Blogrolling.com was the only service I ran, but let’s put it this way – I will earn more from introducing multi-gigabyte mailboxes to our NetIdentity customers in a couple of weeks than we earned from Blogrolling.com in the past three years.
For us, its always been a question of priorities, an urge to do the right thing for our customers while at the same time, trying to turn an honest buck into a fair profit.
Which brings us square into the present day. Taking Blogrolling.com free is the first step in a much larger strategy. This new approach includes a few of the services I’m responsible for – NewsHub, NewsDirectory, Blogrolling.com and a couple of others. Resources have been assigned, priorities have been established, people have been hired and code is on its way. And I’m really excited about the plan.
So yeah, its taking a while, but you know what? My users are happy.
But wait! There’s more. Let’s not forget that Marc took another shot as well! On this point, I think he’s just confused;
If Ross is so into 37Signals - he needs to go to Foo Camp and sleep on the floor of Tim O’Reilly’s offices. That’s allot less that he’d find in a hotel room, which (in this case) would be considered feature rich.
There’s a big difference between sleeping on the floor of some office and checking into a hotel – I would argue they are completely different products, and not close substitutes in any meaningful way. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Marc is really suggesting that I check into an ultra-low-budget hotel instead of the local Ritz because I’m a believer in simple products. This metaphor confuses simplicity with quality. And yesterday, I wasn’t talking about quality, I was talking about building only those features that customers would use and not burden them down with stupid things that they will never use and never understand.
This is actually a bit of a sore point with me because a lot of the things that Marc evangelizes are so far ahead of the curve that they don’t translate well into real features in real products that customers will actually use. It took me a while to realize this. How many other blogging platforms include ENT support? Just mine. How many consumer apps include support for Microsoft’s 
LiveClips? Probably just mine. OCS? Yup, likely only me. I could go on at length describing the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve wasted over the years implementing features that no one ever used because some dude with a blog (not just Marc) got all hyperventilative one Tuesday and managed to convince me that it would be the next big thing for the web.
But no longer. When it comes to product design and development, I’ve stopped listening to most of the dudes with blogs and started trying to listen to my customers. Unless those dudes a) are my customers, or b) have “customers” that they are listening to.
