An Internet E-mail List Service once started because of spam. Mark Fletcher was imperfect to a business of the spam feature, so he decided to start a mailing list web application to his parents called ONElist to keep in touch. The service started very small because it was intended to be used by family members. Initially, it was only to be used for keeping in touch. The e-mail list service was only for his own pleasure, not as a business. It wasn’t gonna happen, but it did.

The big turning point started when the Need To Know newsletter had came and Mark Fletcher’s service was recognized by the press. Usually, it will be forgotten after a month or so, so Fletcher started quickly.

He thought of journals, blogs, news and other written materials to be sort of “in” because the Internet has been growing in that time in computer history. Bloglines users were growing and more users were getting the hang of it. Most reporters interviewing Fletcher would mention that they were Bloglines users, even. Having a 150-person company would lessen their funding because they don’t need much people on handling a company like this. Maintaining is only the thing to do. In economical perspective, the startup is a success with lesser people because the profit they make doesn’t acquire all people in the company. That’s why Fletcher often didn’t want Vendor Companies to lead his company to the highest level. He wanted to do it on his own.

Their biggest competitor became News is Free, and even they are still better and has the competitive advantage, they didn’t mind the problem of competition. The scary thing, at first for Fletcher would be that the system would be in danger because of crashes and data corruptions. After a while, the pager existed and helped him to become more aware, but in great distance to be able to monitor the system.

Finally, the easy thing about web-based service applications, is that when the application has a bug, it can be fixed in less than an hour or so, and the software can be fixed without upgrades. This is one of the greatest breakthrough in computer history and it eases software maintenance.