Plaxo Todd

So this past week was my first week writing a blog and a few interesting things happened. First, my post about Plaxo phasing out update requests got much more pickup than I had anticipated. The AP, various newspapers, techcrunch and lots of other bloggers all seemed to think it was noteworthy. In fact, moments after it got on techcrunch I got a flood of “hey! checkout techcrunch (not in a good way)” e-mails from friends. I’m glad that Ben jumped in and said some things better than I could.

I also got an e-mail from Seth:

….so the about you section on your personal blog, and then the main blog that “you” wrote, don’t sound like you. did you really write them? they sound like a PR / mkting person wrote them……

Thanks a lot Seth, I wrote all of that But I guess maybe I just talk like a marketingy person now… not sure I can do much about that, but I’ll try to keep it more informal. Mark Jen has been giving me blogging tips and claims that the appropriate way to blog is to spew out some thoughts, not edit, and try to make it as much as a conversation as possible. So this post is the first in that style.

On starting companies

I noticed an interesting post from Caterina from flickr on how it’s a bad time to start a company. Caterina:

it’s a terrible time to start a company, especially here in the middle of it all, in the Bay Area. Why? … Everybody else is starting a company. It’s crazy. Every single person who leaves a tech company isn’t going to Microsoft or Google or Apple or whatever, they’re going to a startup. Trying to operate in this environment is crazy. I’m getting late-onset ADD from trying to keep track of them all, and it’s impossible to get attention for your product amidst all the buzz (er, noise).

While I think Caterina is exactly right, I don’t think that should discourage anyone who is thinking about jumping in. The problems that she states are all problems most people would love to have. If you are worrying about hiring, competition or the “lack of obscurity” then you are already doing well. Those are start-up problems, which means you have a start-up, which means you are out there doing something. But for most people, taking that first step is really the hard part.

I meet up with people all of the time who are thinking of making the jump to something entrepreneurial and need a little push. Normally the pep talk I give them goes something like this:

There is no better time to start a company than right now. You are only getting older, getting more responsibility (marriage, mortgage, kids, etc) and more comfortable. There will never be a time that is convenient to uproot your daily life, so if this is what you really want to do with your life, don’t wait until it’s too late.

The worst case scenario usually goes something like this: “I’ll quit my job, think of an idea, try it out for a while, and if it fails, I’ll just find another job like the one I already have.” So if you think about it, the worst case scenario is doing what you are doing right now. So there really is no excuse to not get out there if you are already at a local minimum.

You need a vehicle — I know a lot of smart, ambitious, extremely motivated people. And if they don’t have something to do, they will apply that energy to collecting the most wood ever in warcraft, or amass the world’s largest collection of legos. You are much better off getting a small group of people together and working on anything.

Entrepreneurship has the lowest barrier to entry of any profession — the only requirement is that you do anything. It’s just the act of starting that is the hard part.

Failure and false starts are just as much of the process as anything else, so while it might not be the best time to start a company, if this is what you want to do, there is no better time to start working at it and maybe by the time you fail enough and work through it, times will have changed and you will be ready for it.

One last minor point, Caterina points out that Silicon Valley is not the right place to be if you want to start a company. David from 37Signals also had a similar take on this point:

You don’t need to live in San Francisco to make it big. Or rather, if you want to make it big, don’t live in San Francisco. You’ll get sucked in to the myths (you need VC!) and drowned by the parties. Most of the worlds talent does not live in that tiny spot of land. I developed the Basecamp, Backpack, Tada List, and Writeboard from Copenhagen, Denmark. And we have one of the greatest developers I’ve ever met in Provo, Utah. While the rest of the company is in Chicago and New York. The Rails core team includes people from Germany, Canada, Austria, and all over the US.

I couldn’t disagree more. As a smart Roman said a long time ago, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” The amount of ideas, connections, people, money, talent, and technology all in this little spot is amazing. Sure you can start a company anywhere, but you are putting yourself at a significant disadvantage and reducing opportunity. But yes, avoid the parties and all that fluff stuff.

Oh, btw, if you work for Plaxo, please disregard all of the statements above because they are deeply flawed. We need you to stay right where you are and help build a great online service

So I’ve posted my first real blog entry today, but to the main Plaxo blog. I’ve included it below, but the basic idea is that we are starting to cut down on the number of Plaxo Update Request e-mails we send out:

If you’re not a Plaxo member, chances are you have gotten an e-mail that went something like this: “Hi, I’m updating my address book. Please take a moment to update your latest contact information…” For three years now, this has been a key part of the Plaxo service as millions of people have used our update tool to quickly and easily regain control of their address books. But as of a a few weeks ago, you should start seeing fewer and fewer of these e-mails, as we’ve shifted our product functionality away from address book update.

When we started Plaxo, we had a vision to create a self-updating address book. The idea seems pretty simple: I maintain my own contact information, and when I change it, it automatically updates in my friends’ address books. Similarly, when my friends update their information, it changes in my address book. If everyone uses Plaxo, then like magic, everyone stays up-to-date and never has to worry about this problem again. Better yet, Plaxo would plug in to Outlook and other popular address books, for maximum convenience.

The big ‘if’ in all of this was of course convincing everyone in the world to use Plaxo — and contact management is not always the sexiest of problems. Until large numbers of people started using Plaxo, automatic updating wouldn’t provide much value.

We therefore came up with a model where people could still find value in using our service without there being a large network. I could download Plaxo and in a few steps e-mail contacts asking them for their up-to-date information. Then, usually within a few days (usually more like a few hours) my contacts would respond and my address would be updated. Some of my contacts would see this as a valuable service, and also start using Plaxo. In doing so, they would introduce Plaxo to more of their friends, but the real magic happened when they became members — because from that point forward they would no longer send out Plaxo update requests — everything would just happen automatically.

Obviously, a lot of people loved this feature, but some people did not. Journalists, A-list bloggers, and anyone else who is known by more people than they know were inundated with requests. We quickly responded by adding opt-out and throttling features, but we’ve always known that the update requests were a means to an end — our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we’re finally getting to that end.

As of last week, we’ve past 10 million members. We are now growing at over 50,000 users a day. Due to this great growth, the depth of our network, plus our heartfelt desire to be good net citizens, we have started phasing out update requests.

This feature will probably always exist in some form, but we are no longer aggressively pushing new users to send out e-mails and are adding restrictions to prevent existing users from sending out large batches. Within the next six months (allowing for releases and upgrades to our base), you should see these messages drop to a trickle. In specific, here’s our plan:

* The new plaxo plug-in for Mac does not include this feature
* The plaxo plug-in for Thunderbird does not include this feature
* The Plaxo AIM Triton integration does not include this feature
* New versions of the Outlook plug-in limits e-mail batch sizes for all users

And coming soon:

* The new user flow for Outlook will not direct users to send out update requests.

These changes in specific affect non-Plaxo members, but we’ve also got a number of related changes to trim down our member-member communication. More details to come.

This must be incredibly funny to anyone who knows me well — getting a blog was one of the things I said I’d never do. But I also thought the whole “web” thing was a fad too, so looks like I’m just a little slow

So why now? When we started Plaxo, we took the classic engineer mentality: no marketing — let the product speak for itself. Turns out this was a phenomenally bad idea and it looked like we were hiding something. Since then, we’ve grown, strengthened our product, and attracted a loyal userbase of more than 10 million members. However, we still haven’t done a great job letting people know what it is we do exactly or how we make money. This blog is a tiny step in fixing that.

So stayed tuned; I’ll try to write something interesting. And many thanks to Mark Jen for the hosting and the prodding.