On Monday we released the first public demo of
a product I've been working on for almost a year. It's great to be
able to show people that you're not just imagining the company you
started.
The release create a mini-twitter storm
because of it could lead to a dramatic improvements to the open source
platform Drupal. It's also the foundation of my business - a hosted
platform that makes it easy for ordinary people to create dynamic,
cutting edge websites. Good stuff.
Even more fun for me, though, was the unveiling of our name: Buzzr.
Since October, I've been the CEO of a company called Codename
Enterprises, Inc. At first, we called it Codename because we kept it
hush hush for several months and Codename seemed to be a pretty good
codename for the project. Easy to remember and say. Kind of a meta
joke.
The name quickly became second nature for those of us inside the
project - not a joke at all. "Did you see the new Codename form builder
Nate built!" or "Codename is driving me crazy" or "Will Codename make
us very rich or very poor?"
Many, many hours went into brainstorming a suitable "real" name. I am the wistful non-owner of the parked "SiteMama.com" (is every aspect of one's naming imagination already in existence on GoDaddy.com?) and proud owner
of the rejected gem "BuzzGod" (yours for a song!) If memory serves me
correctly, several very off-color names were concocted and snapped up
promptly by the creator after rejection by the team. I am afraid to
check if any came to fruition as websites.
Nothing we thought of seemed just right, though. And so, Codename remained Codename month after month.
After a while, the name stuck, to the point that it now feels odd to
call the company by its new name. Buzzr. Buzz - R. Buzzr.com. It's
going to take awhile for me to get used to it.
Here's an initial list of the characteristics we came up with for the ideal name:
Cool,
new, elegant, dynamic, open, robust, endless functionality,
understandable, inspiring, not intimidating, warm, inviting,
supportive, huggable, profitable, empowering, works seamlessly,
tweakable, customizable, fun, flexible, social
All that, in 5 or 6 characters. Plus we wanted a name that would
look good on T-shirts. And possibly spawn an adorable icon. And please,
not for more than $3,000 bucks.
The naming exercise was led by Evan Orensten of Bond Art + Science,
our usability and design partner. Liza Kindred, Jeff Robbins, Karen McGrane
and I were probably the most active name brainstormers, but a lot of
the Lullabots pitched in: Kent Bye and Jeff Eaton come to mind. We even
sent Kent on an undercover mission to suss out background on the owner
of a domain.
At first, an orderly process was followed: a formal name and
branding strategy workshop was convened. A seven-page brand
characteristics survey was completed in several multi-hour meetings. A
wall-sized whiteboard was organized around themes and the names
springing from these themes. Lots of springtime themes kept popping up.
Flowers, bugs, trees, birds, bees and fecund rabbits.
We actually settled on one, then another, only to discover their
owners were recalcitrant to part with non-earning domains that had been
parked for years. I'm not exactly sure why, although I can speculate:
either it's the fantasy that if they hold out a bit longer, that $2,000
offer is going to turn into $1 million. Or, perhaps they harbor a dream
of a building a website they just haven't got around to yet. (Buzzr.com will help with that.)
I ended up pre-occupied with possible names for months. I'd post
long lists on our team blog (always to tepid responses.) I became a
fanatical user of www.makewords.com
Throw in a few letters or word, enter a category (e.g. business,
medicine or music), a base language (Finnish is a good one), and
MakeWords spits out a long list of possible domain names, along with
whether the names are taken or available for registration. (The site
could use a makeover, but the technology works just fine.)
I think it was MakeWords that led me to BuzzGod. We were doing
various takes on "Buzz" and I was immediately drawn to BuzzGod. My
narcissism unveiled in the name of branding.
I wasn't the only one making lists. By the end, we had considered
several hundred names and were only been pleased with a handful.
Jeff Robbins came up with Buzzr. He and his wife are good namers. As
a musician/lyriscist and artist, respectively, they have the proper
credentials to create silly icons and names.
The bee, most lately shanghaid for mass-market commercial purposes
by Jerry Seinfeld's Bee movie, is our intended symbolic stand-in for
our website. Bees get around, they make a lot of love, they fertilize a
lot of flowers. And when they get together, there's an audible buzz.
Good subliminals, no? Plus anytime you put together two "z"s and roll
them off your tongue, it tingles a smidgen in your mouth. Jazz. Fuzz.
Buzz.
Ok, if you piss off a bee, it'll sting you and possibly send you
into shock. That's a negative. So the Buzzr bee has to be very
friendly. We're still playing around with a few different bees. Some
seem more fertile, some more frenetic, some more fuzzy. You can see the
current contender here.
All in all, I'm pretty pleased. At the very least, my tongue gets to tingle night and day.
Ed Sussman is the CEO of Buzzr.com. You can follow him on Twiiter @edsussman or at www.edsussman.com
Amid the gyrations of the stock market, and predictions of a severe
economic downturn, I have found myself in the interesting position of
launching a start up with my friends at Lullabot and Bond Art +
Science. Over the past six years, I've worked within the comfortable
fold of two well known brands in the media world: Inc. and Fast
Company, the last four years as president of a digital division with
six websites, 40 employees and more than $10 million in revenue. Now
I've left to be the CEO of a self-funded company formed by Lullabot and
Bond Art + Science that doesn't even have a name for its product yet
(even the name of the company is just Codename Enterprises.)
Some people think we're crazy to do this now. Jason Calcanis wrote a
couple of weeks ago that he expects 80% of the start ups already funded
would collapse because of the down, part of a "start up depression." And legendary VC Fred Wilson said companies without angel or VC funding in place would probably have to try to make it without VC funding.
There's an old axiom, "There's no bad time for a good company" but
that's a bit flip for the times. After all, some companies with good
products are going to fail this year because of the downturn – they
won't be able to cut their expenses deeply enough to make up for lost
revenue, and VCs will cut the cord before second or third round
financing becomes available. That's why there's some panic in the start
up world right now, tempered by lots of practical advice from VCs about
tucking in for the long winter of recession ahead. Sequoia Capital's long slideshow shared with their portfolio companies recently is the best I've seen on the subject.
With our fledgling company, we only need to move around headcount
numbers on a spreadsheet to make phantom staff we never hired go away.
We're working lean from day one. If this were a funded start up, about
three million dollars of other people's money would have been burned up
so far. Instead, we just burned a few more pounds off of Lullabot Jeff
Eaton. (That's an inside "skinny" joke.) By the way, Eaton talks about
the technical work done by Codename so far, and the excellent
contributions that will ensue for the Drupal project, in this blog post.
That's been the story for almost a year, now, actually. Day one for
Codename was about ten months ago, when Lullabot managing partner Liza
Kindred and I started talking about how damn hard the Drupal open
source social publishing platform was for the likes of her and me
(non-developers), and seemingly, even for the many developers who were
working on a large project for me. I was in the midst of launching two
of the most complex Drupal-powered sites to date – FastCompany.com and
IncBizNet.com – and the separation between the promise of Drupal and
the practical restraints were fairly maddening. I advised the Lullabots
(the world's leading Drupal consultants) to start working with Bond Art
+ Science, one of the best user experience firms in the nation. I also
read an amazing post called "How Drupal Will Save the World" by Lullabot CEO Jeff Robbins, that pretty much laid out all the guiding principals that came to be the Codename company.
Some 4,000 hours of development and design by Lullabot and Bond Art
+ Science ensued. The object was and is to build a hosted platform,
powered by Drupal, that gives ordinary people, businesses and
organizations simple tools (like drag and drop or point and click) to
custom-craft websites with features such as multi-user blogs, social
networks, wikis, member reviews and ratings, photo sharing, and custom
form fields. With these tools, even newcomers should be able to build
feature-rich multi-user websites that go well beyond the boundaries of
blog sites, or more rigid products such as WordPress.com and Ning.
"Working lean" is an understatement of what happened. Working for
nothing is what happened. Lullabot juggled consulting and Codename to
make it happen so far. The excellent user interface experts at Bond
similarly kicked in their valuable partner time. An amazing advisory
board has similarly been offering up valuable advice: Jeff Dachis,
former CEO of Razorfish and senior partner at Bond Art + Science; David
Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media; Jeff Veen, founding partner of
Adaptive Path and former design manager for Google; and Lane Becker,
co-founder of GetSatisfaction.com and a founding partner at Adaptive
Path.
The Product
But "Why Start Now" isn't answered just by saying, 'we know how to
do it if we want to, even if it means working lean and in a tight
economy.' "Why Now" requires a deeper examination of the importance of
this product, especially in tough economic times.
The short answer is that websites that are social and dynamic are
dramatically more useful than websites that are static, and that has a
powerful social implication. In his post,
Jeff Robbins tells the story of a village in Nigeria that allowed an
oil company to use its land in exchange for clean water and schools.
Because they had a website with some flexibility, they were able to
post the contract with the oil company and bring attention to the oil
company not living up to its obligations.
It's incredible how many organizations and businesses in the United
States, let alone the world, still have static websites where they
can't even change their business hours without going back to the
developer who built the site for them. The simplest CMS back-end
remains unavailable to them, unless perhaps they keep a blog (which in
all likelihood is hosted elsewhere.)
I switched FastCompany.com over to Drupal in February, making it a
dynamic site for the first time. Within three months, repeat visits had
increased 1000%. The site went from a straightforward publisher to a platform for conversation.
But it took us almost a year to build and the work of half a dozen full
time developers - not something ordinary people or businesses can do.
Yet, think of the practical implications if we could create a widely
accessible web publishing tool with great social tools and format
flexibility:
Small businesses in search of leads for scarce business online
could do a significantly better job attracting and creating a
conversation with clients. More efficiency means more business and more
jobs. Really.
Small organizations could tap into the knowledge and needs of their
members, and help them better engage with one another. Stronger
organizations mean more powerful grass roots social movements. (Or at
least better organized bowling leagues.)
Bloggers could expand their work into real websites, with highly
flexible formatting of pages and forms, rich tools to interact with
their readers, and a back-end CMS akin for group blogging to what a
major publisher pays thousands of dollars for. Better blogging
platforms mean better information to readers at a time when newspapers
are disappearing.
Earlier this year I was a judge at a startup competition put together by Jeff Jarvis, one of the great voices of "citizen journalism."
We were charged with judging the business plans of a group of grad
students who thought running their own websites might be a better
alternative to getting a job. A couple of the plans were, in effect,
community newspapers, and a big chunk of the money they were after
would have gone to pay for development of their sites. A few others
involved more sophisticated dynamic tools: bookmarking, ranking and
rating, user profiles, and the links.
When our platform reaches its potential, the startup costs for
making these business plans real will drop dramatically. Companies will
launch that would otherwise have never had a shot. And more start ups
equals a better economy -- it's large enterprises that shed jobs during
a recession. Job growth comes from small business.
Drupal is a magnificent modular platform that lets you build most
any website you can imagine. If only you have the special know-how.
It's hard even for developers to master, though. And that's not good
enough to reach the mass audience that needs a social platform to build
their websites.
That's why we're building a layer between Drupal and the end-user --
a layer that simplifies choices, but leaves Drupal core intact. And
it's free.
Can we make money with a free product?
Yes.
Some websites will want help with advertising. That something I'm
good at, having grown ad revenue almost 600% during my time at Inc.com
and FastCompany.com. Some will want premium services, like extra
storage space, beyond what we'll provide for free. And some websites
will want to tap into our expertise in how to maximize a social website
with great copywriting, custom branding, SEO, SEM, and community
building.
The business model for freemium remains viable even in a weak economy. Fred Wilson wrote a good post about this.
The services surrounding a free product can be very valuable, and even
in the worst economy, people will pay to get help succeeding in
whatever is most important to them.
We're well aware that plenty of others have their own visions of
expanding social media platforms to more people: Ning with better
social networks, WordPress.com with better blogs; Acquia with better,
supported distributions of Drupal itself.
What we will offer as an alternative is a more flexible format
that's still straightforward for average users. And we'll be improving
Drupal all along the way by giving back to the open source project.
Jeff Eaton discusses a number of important breakthroughs we've already
contributed in his blog post.
We'll see over the coming months whether this approach interests
outside investors -- outside investment money would certainly speed
things along. But we're going to keep going in any case.
Where to begin? Since our newly blended journalism/community platform was released on February 11, we’ve received more attention for FastCompany.com [0] in the few weeks than we did over the past five years. The one-two punch of a new FastCompany.com platform and the March 3 launch of FastCompany.TV [1], with famed tech blogger Robert Scoble [2], has certainly caught the attention of the blogosphere. These developments have led to many interesting discussions about the role of community within the mainstream media, as predicted when we first launched [2].
Before rounding up some of the feedback we've received, here's a look at some of our site stats:
*We now have 114,000 members. We’re growing memberships at about 10 percent a month. That’s five times faster than Facebook! (To be fair, I guess it gets a little harder to grow as fast after your membership crosses 50 million.)
*Our members have started about 946 blogs on FastCompany.com. We’re reading your blogs constantly and featuring new ones on the homepage and topic pages of FastCompany.com every day. I’ve been following “The Guide to Business with Earthlings [2]” by Offyd Grinispuffs (yes, I know it’s a pseudonym) and “The World of StartUps Outside of Silicon Valley [2]” by Francine Hardaway.
*User behavior on the site has changed dramatically. Before the new platform debuted, our average user visited just once per month. Our 800,000 or so non-member monthly visitors are still at that same pace; but once a visitor becomes a member, most are coming back several times a month.
Now to the media reviews, which were overwhelmingly positive. (I’ll throw in a couple of negative mentions so I can pretend to be balanced.)
Erick Schonfeld wrote this nice post on TecCrunch [3]:
“On FastCompany.com, you can now start your own blog, join a group, post a video, comment on articles, or suggest a “Fast Talk” question to start a debate. Articles from the print publication are interspersed with blog posts from readers, experts, and staffers, and are arranged in a blog-like chronology on the front page.
The idea is to make it easier for readers to interact with staff writers and contributors, and write their own thoughts, which might be featured prominently on the site. Every contribution a reader makes gets collected on his or her profile page, tagged, and placed into one of the eight sections on the site (innovation, technology, leadership, management, design, social responsibility, careers, and work/life balance). The site is built on top of the open-source content-management software Drupal. And it will support OpenID.
During the dying days of Business 2.0, I remember sitting in editor Josh Quittner’s office brainstorming about how we could do pretty much the exact same thing to save that magazine. We never got beyond the brainstorming. Whether or not this will work for Fast Company depends on how smart its readers are and how willing they are to contribute. But any media site that does not listen to its readers and, indeed, allow them to take over the conversation at times, is doomed for the dustbin.”
David Cohen called me up for his blog, BeatBlogging and wrote an extended piece entitled “What Magazine Websites Will Look Like in Four Years [4].”
“Fast Company, however, is trying to leverage the networking aspects of Drupal [the software platform used to build the site] in every way possible - from user-generated content blogs, to bookmarking, crowdsourcing questions and letting people make business contacts. They've spread their arms out pretty wide in the hopes that they caught something interesting for everyone. I think they are about 3-5 years ahead of their time in terms of Internet publishing with a major magazine.”
In his blog, One by One Media, Jim Turner had the following to say [5]:
“Fast Company seems to get the idea that a community built around the content and their brand is a good idea. This is a bold move for a property that began on the old school way of generated content and the revenue model of advertising. They see the new generation of how people consume information, and the new movement of the social graph.”
Now for a splash of cold water. Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst at Forrester who writes web-strategist.com, jumped into the fray with a long post about our strategy and design [5]: That’s the link to his FastCompany.com cross-post of his original blog (hey, we might as well at least get the traffic if we’re going to quote some trash talk).
“The deployment looks like the features were determined by the developers and not a user experience designer. Let tools be hidden, and show more on a mouse over or let them cascade out. Think Zen, articles first, social second, features and tools third.”
I like Jeremiah. But, uh, well, no. The opposite is true. We spent five months on design, user interface and usability testing before we even picked our development team. We developed a 120-page design blueprint that was completely focused on user experience. The effort was led by Karen McGrane, of Bond Art and Science [6], who is widely considered among the finest information architects in the world. (She was the lead IA consultant on the redesign of the NewYorkTimes.com, for example.)
We didn’t even know if the thing could be built when we were done -- we wanted to document our vision first, then see if we could get it built second. We were lucky enough to catch the Drupal wave at just the right time -- Drupal is the leading social publishing software platform in the world, and it’s really come into its own since we began our build in early ’07. Drupal is flexible enough to let websites build just about any social media vision they can dream up. Even so, we pushed Drupal to its current limits to get our vision executed.
Anyway, we like our design a lot. We like putting user content and user tools way out in the open. That’s the idea of the site. It can be a bit disconcerting to traditional analysts because it’s less like say, an old-fashioned media site such as CNNMoney.com, which first and foremost pushes its own content at readers, and much more like dynamic sites such as Digg.com and Facebook, where the users take center stage. And hey, the new FastCompany.com won a design award just a month after launch! The Drupal Association named FastCompany.com Best Designed Site at their DrupalCon gathering in March. Here’s a blog post by developer Jeff Eaton [7] about FastCompany.com and Drupal with loads of nice comments about our design.
Closer to home, a few Company of Friends members from the good old days have complained about the change-up in their old listservs. We’re about to go into a six-week code sprint to turn on functionality for “groups.” Better scheduling tools, better moderation tools, and new broadcast/conference call tools are also coming.
On the development front, we’re also investing a bunch more on improving our site performance. When we turned on our platform, we went from a site consisting of static pages to a site about as “dynamic” as anyplace on the Web. With just a click, any one of our 114,000 members can generate FastCompany.com pages featuring all the content ever contributed by an unlimited number of their contacts. Every member’s homepage is completely different and constantly being updated, consisting of their favorite feeds, the latest activity of the contacts and their groups, and the latest from the professional writers and editors at Fast Company.
Innovation can be messy. Lots and lots of moving parts, eating up server space at a ferocious rate. We apologize to users who have suffered because of performance and data issues. Please be assured that we are investing a tremendous amount of time and attention to improving the site in this regard.
Getting readers and Fast Company staffers into an ongoing dialogue is pretty critical to what we’re doing. To that end, I’d like to announce that we are forming a FastCompany.com group around the comings and goings of FastCompany.TV managing director Robert Scoble. You can find the group here [7].
Robert’s show, ScobleizerTV [8] has been going gangbusters. And we’ve recently worked with Robert to redesign his personal blog, www.Scobleizer.com [9], which you can now go to follow his twitter feeds, his Flickr photos, his videos, his Google calendar, and Upcoming.org events.
Robert will be dropping into the group to talk to readers about their tech and innovation insights. But most of all it’s a place where Scoble’s enthusiastic readers can meet and talk with each other.
We are adding groups around Fast Company topics and people of note all the time. Just click on “Find Groups [9]” on top of the masthead on any page of the site to browse through the current crop.
The following is a reponse to a lengthy and thoughtful (though at times off-base) analysis of the new FastCompany.com by Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang. His post can be found at:
I’m the president of Mansueto Digital and built the new FastCompany.com along with several dozen extremely talented strategists, IAs, developers and designers. A true team effort of more than a year.
Now that we have a couple of weeks under our belt, I thought I’d take a few minutes to reply to your thoughtful post. First, many of the day one performance issues and bugs you reported have been fixed — it’s not often that a new, innovative platform gets tried out by so many hundreds of thousands of people from day one, but we’re a popular brand. Intense scrutiny from day one isn’t a problem that the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn had to contend with, but I’m not complaining — we’re glad to be popular. We have loads more fixes and features to iron out still, but from a technical perspective, the site is overall doing very well given we’re in month one.
From a business and editorial perspective we’re doing great also. We’ve signed up sixteen thousand new members since beta launch, joining our existing ranks of tens of thousands of business professionals interested in engaging in a dialogue about business. And we’ve continued our tradition of world-class journalism at the same time.
I think this connection between our journalism and our community isn’t something you fully picked up on in your analysis, perhaps because it was done on day one when the site was full of commentary about, well, the site. So the day you wrote your post, it was a bit hard to see where we would be on day two, three, four and on…
Let me set the record straight: it is not true that community on FastCompany.com is a “full replacement” of edit content, as you said. Actually, pretty much the opposite. The intent of the community is to amplify the discussion about business that our dozens of professional journalists and Fast Company experts spend their professional lives reporting and writing about. We are not slowing down our journalism at all on FastCompany.com.
You may have missed this because slot one of the hompeage on day one was my essay about the new site. On every day since slot one is a feature story from our writers. But slot two is a member micro-blog based on an answer to a daily “Fast Talk” question we pose. We then feature a member blog, before returning to our professionally produced staff blog and expert blog.
All in all, about half the stories come from our writers and experts, and half from members, although the member pieces are mostly based on questions and ideas posed by our editors. This is how we maintain consistency with the brand: we only ask questions and select member content to features about the FastCompany core themes of innovation, technology, management, careers, leadership, design (in business), social responsibility (in business) and work/life balance.
The same is true on the eight topical index pages built around these subjects — about half the content is from our professionals and half of it curated from members. I think this is pretty clear to people reading the content.
Devoting this much space to the members — and what’s more, giving them editorial prominence from a design standpoint that signals equality with the professional journalists — may have been so overwhelmingly different from what you’ve seen from other professionally-produced editorial websites, that you surmised we were just becoming a community site.
But we’re not — we’re a fully blended journalism/community site. And three weeks in, rather than just be hypothetical about what might happen, I can give you some concrete examples. Again, we are only three weeks in:
-We are approaching 1,000 reader posts a day about business topics raised by our journalists.
-Members have set up more than 500 blogs about business.
-We released our annual special edition about the most innovative companies in America, including Google, and featured profiles of dozens of leading executives.
These stories will form the basis of a Q&A with our readers for the next month, which will extend the life of the stories and the conversation far beyond what we ever were capable of before.
-All of the content produced by the members is being stored on their public profiles (even if it isn’t highlighted by the editors on our homepage), so we have hundreds of thousands of readers now able to connect with the readers based on what they are writing about business.
That doesn’t happen on other professional journalism sites, and it doesn’t happen on pure social media sites either. So, for example, take Jeremiah’s blog on the other site where he posted this —
Some people had some really interesting stuff to say. But I have no idea who they are, how to reach them, and what else they may have written recently. If Jeremiah were to become a FastCompany.com blogger (we have some fancier RSS tools debuting soon to satisfy sophisticated bloggers) and I wanted to get to know any of the people who wrote comments on the post, I’d be just a click away from their profile and their contributions to the site — blog post comments like this one, comments to professionally written articles, blogs posts, answers to daily editor questions, a list of the feeds the member subscribes to, articles they recommend, and more.
We think it’s a better model for serious conversation than anything out there. We still have a lot to improve — our interface is pretty elegant, we think (thanks in large part to the very fine folks at Bond Art & Sciences, especially Razorfish’s former lead information architect, Karen McGrane) but we want to make it even better. Improved navigation of for logged in members is coming, as is improved functionality on groups (one feature in particular, due in about six weeks, will be pretty exciting).
Here’s a prediction: not only will other media companies evetually follow some variation of our model, I bet some of them will partner with us to directly join our blended journalism/community network. I have a great few weeks of meetings planned to try to make this a reality.
My kick off blog post actually ran as an article. It's entitled "The Media is Social" and explains why and how we have blended social content with journalism. You can find the link here:
