Agathon Group - "The Good Stuff"

Start Conference: The Blogging Trifecta

by Alan Ritari on August 7, 2008 1:16 PM.

Peter and I are at The Start Conference right now, hanging out with other entrepreneurs and listening to an impressive list of speakers. The venue at Fort Mason is perfect, just the right size for the 450 people here all sitting in a theatre overlooking the San Francisco Bay. I love this city.

Starting off the day we heard back-to-back from three giants in blogging software, Evan Williams (Blogger.com, Odeo and now Twitter), Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress) and Mena Trott (Movabletype), sharing their stories about how they stumbled into success by making great tools to address a personal need. Rather than trying to satisfy the needs of some nebulous market out there, they made software that they themselves wanted to use. Matt put it best when he said, “my ideas come from frustration 90% of the time.” It was a timely reminder of the advice that you can almost never go wrong by scratching your own itches.

The other striking commonality between the three blogging entrepreneurs was how hard it was on them personally. Building great products took sacrifice and long hours, often motivated by little more than pride and fear and… something more. The successful startups all share a persistent belief that they can do it better (whatever “it” is) and that somehow everything is going to work out.

It’s that obstinate optimism that pulled them through hard times and brought them to where they are today.

This post is the first in a short series on The Start Conference. Other posts include Start Conference: Your People and Start Conference: Marketing, Success & Wrap-up.