Unstructured Thoughts on Making Websites
I've spent a lot of my free time making websites that I thought were great ideas. Many had gimmicky names. "BlitzList" was an easy-to-use site for hosting mailing lists. "2000 Pounds" was a site for making lists of anything, groceries to DVD collections. "More Shelves" was a site for keeping inventory of model train collections. "Eph Town" was a site to help alumni of my alma mater to find one another. "Bowdacious" was a student site with a wiki, profiles, and games. Each project took several weeks of "hacking", mostly on nights and weekends. All of these sites had a cool feature or two that wasn't on any other websites that I was aware of.
I enjoyed making these sites for a number of reasons. I usually built each site with a programming language I hadn't used before, and I loved getting to know a new language by making something with it. I liked sitting in bed thinking up features for my new website, and then waking up the next morning to go code them before breakfast. Finally I liked to entertain the notion that I'd be able to parlay my efforts into some sort of profit. I wanted to participate in the American Dream, Silicon Valley-style: to create something out of nothing, and be rewarded for the effort. I didn't want a big IPO or to be on the cover of Business Week: I just wanted to make a site that could turn a small profit through advertisements. To be a 21st century sort of yeoman farmer, sustaining myself by mixing my labor with my property, and learning things along the way.
I failed. I don't have a little virtual cash cow like I hoped I would, despite immense study and effort. I'm not here to dwell on my own failures and failings, but I think I have something resembling useful advice to anyone hoping to make money building websites on their own.
I learned everything I could about building websites and building companies. I read marketing books, psychology books, business strategy books, public relations books, web programming books, network programming books, UNIX programming books, C/Ruby/Perl/PHP/Python/JavaScript programming books, database books, and anything that I thought I might need to know at some point. I worked for a big Internet company and a small Internet company, in technical capacities that let me "see how it's done."
I wanted to make a very small Internet company. I'd build everything, automate most of the work, and let the dollars roll in. To go about it, I thought I knew everything there was to know. In two years, I probably mastered the equivalent of a computer science major and business minor. My hero was Markus Frind, founder of Plenty Of Fish, a popular dating site. He built the site by himself and now runs a multi-million dollar site off of a couple of servers. He's a computer genius; most sites with his kind of traffic require hundreds of servers and a full-time operations staff, but he figured out how to make it run smoothly with just a couple hours of daily effort on his part. He was living my American Dream, although Markus is technically Canadian.
So I gave it a shot, several shots actually. I built a succession of websites and figured out all the logistics of making them handle enough traffic to support me financially. They had great features and the people who tried the sites out said they loved, in some cases "fucking loved", the simplicity and innovation in them.
But my particular problem was that I could not, for the life of me, attract a "critical mass" of users. I could barely get 50 users to any of my sites. For one site, I put up posters throughout my college campus. For another, I spammed all my friends. For another, I tried to get my siblings to shake down their acquaintances. For another, I bought out AdWords on Google. I just could not figure out how to find a few dozen people who would like my sites enough to tell their friends. Surely they're out there; where do they live? Each time, I became discouraged and simply moved onto another project, another dream, similarly fated.
Yet I knew that I could make people's lives better with my software. In college, I joined an organization called Williams Students Online, or WSO, that had a website for students. I had a lot of ideas for making the site better, and I got my start in web programming by implementing those ideas in my spare time. I spent a lot of time remaking the website, at equal expenses to my GPA and social life. But my (remaining) friends told me they loved my changes; word apparently got around, and people I had never met were complementing my designs and features. The features were so popular that I became something of a minor campus celebrity, culminating in a forum thread called "Homage to Evan Miller."
Deep down, I held a certain ambivalence toward WSO. It was a ten-year-old website that I had renovated, and I got plenty credit and accolades for the renovation, but what I really wanted to do was build something out of nothing. Ex nihilo. To create, not renovate. To succeed with only my ideas and my execution.
Hubris? Some of that, and perhaps something darker. The act of creation is something god-like, mythological, un-physical. And the Creator's Mythology is not reserved for the original Creator (Genesis 1:1 and the rest); almost every institution bears the mark of its founder—George Washington, "Father of His Country", appearing on every dollar spent and quarter changed for over two hundred years, the namesake of a state, the nation's capital, and countless avenues, broadways, and boulevards—Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and the rest of the Founding Fathers deified on the higher denominations, known as well to every American as Romulus and Remus to every Roman—the date July 4th, sanctified by Adams' and Jefferson's eery deaths on that our nation's birthday—the great and lesser corporations, bearing the names of their founders for what may eternity (Sears, Roebuck, Morgan, Carnegie, Ford, Du Pont—Ben & Jerry!)—the corporations with other names, too, which still percolate and pulsate with their founder's personalities, for the simple reason that men ape their superiors, and by extension, their superiors' superiors, all the way up either to the the founder or his successor, the latter of whom is compelled to ask (if only board meetings) what would the founder want? As the ancient poets knew, to create is to defy death.
The Creator's Mythology persists even in that sector one might think immune to ancestor worship. I speak of Silicon Valley, where the Creator is known the Founder, and he does everything. He made the first product with his technical genius (Bill Gates and his 4 kilobyte BASIC compiler; Larry Page and his patented PageRank; Steve Wozniak and the Apple I). He does the marketing and motivating; he delegates to people who will act as his eyes, ears, arms and legs; he raises his child, the company, from conception all the way to NASDAQ, whereupon he joins the pantheon of self-made men.
I made the mistake of wanting to be a Creator, without realizing why the Creator's Mythology exists. While the Founder is alive (and at the institution which may or may not bear his name), the mythology furthers the Creator's power within the institution and without. After the Founder is gone, those who remain may appeal to his name as a higher authority. Those who claim to have been close to the Creator may then exercise greater power. Call them the priest class.
The Creator's Mythology is useless, of course, to a one-man enterprise. If one's goal is merely to be creative and make money along the way, then one need not be the Creator, the Christener, the godly man who makes something out of nothing. It is enough to engage in the more quotidian act of making something out of something else. The act of creating "from scratch" is in fact very short, and quickly the Creator (so-called) finds himself renovating that which a former self created, often cursing at the decisions he made in a former circumstance. The Biblical God, remember, created the world not in one but seven days. Monday was the Creation, but Tuesday through Saturday were new features and bug fixes.
That is what I wish I realized. If I had accepted the role of Transformer, rather than Creator, I would not have expended so much effort and so many personal favors getting an initial user base. Instead I would have found a run-down website with an established user base, bought it, transformed it according to my own creative vision, sold it, and moved on.
There's no reason that someone who is a great parent for a two-year-old will be a great parent for a teenager. So it is for companies and websites. Of course, founders of companies tend to stick around longer than their expertise should allow because they have that special Founder Aura, and because investors and employees like to see that the Founder Has Faith In The Company. But if you're working for yourself, like I hoped to, then the parenting metaphor is the wrong one. You should not think in terms of bringing an idea from conception all the way to maturity. You should be willing to take a neglected six-year-old, make her a happy eight-year-old, and send her to the next foster home. And like a good school teacher, you should find the "age group" you're most comfortable working with.
Where do you find these orphans in need of love? And how do you sell them when you're finished? Honestly, I'm not sure. It is difficult to set a price on a company. Traditionally, the value of a company is determined when it goes public. But the valuation process is expensive enough that a company needs about $10 million in annual revenue to make Wall Street interested in figuring out its "fair value." If someone figured out a formula for pricing small websites and established a market for them, so that web properties could be bought and sold like commodities, then I think many people would be able to make good lives out of buying, improving, and selling the websites that bring utility and pleasure to everybody else.