Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study

Mark Fletcher

(Founder ONElist, Bloglines)

ONElist was founded by Mark Fletcher as a senior software engineers for Sun Microsystems. It is a free Internet email list services in 1997. ONElist was a side project until he receives funding. Sooner it was acquired by Yahoo and renamed it eGroups by June 2000. By 2003, he also created Bloglines, a web-based hew aggregation services. This website is for managing his own bookmark but when it launched, Bloglines was fast on its way to become the most popular new aggregator on the Internet. Soon also it was acquired by Ask Jeeves in February 2005. 

He started ONElist that became eGroups that have been brought by Yahoo. He started another company, an anti-spam company that was called Trustic. When he was starting that, he was doing other thing on the side, which became Bloglines. He had a bookmark list before for about 10 sites. He figured out there had to be a better solution and how he found out about RSS. At that time there were a couple of desktop-based aggregators that you can download but the quality of the programs weren’t good. He did that while running this spam thing. It became very apparent that the anti-spam business is not a fun thing to be in because everybody hates you. You will have an error on blocking, so hr quickly gets out of it. Bolglines was actually just for Fletcher use, he doesn’t even think that it would be very popular. No body knows what a blog is but he decided to throw it out there and see hot it goes. 

He uses the name of the company he had set up for the anti-spam, the Trustic. His big turning point was when they went online in late June of 2003, that they started getting presses coverage almost immediately. Not so many people knew blog that time but because of the press people got educated of what a blog is.

Three things I’ve learn are; first the philosophy of consumer-based company, that you don’t need to worry about the business model initially. If you get users, then everything follows. Second is, what makes the company valuable was the users because it can never be copied. Third was, startup was somehow amazingly fun but also amazingly stressful because you need to make things better.