Werd I/O

Real talk: Known should list Matter as a cofounder.

Erin and I brought Known, Inc to Matter's third class in May, 2014. Over the next 19 weeks, we honed the fundamental story of our business, learning new techniques to validate assumptions and determine concrete needs along the way. They gave us $50,000 and a new way of thinking about startups.

Matter is a values-based accelerator that funds "ventures that have the potential to make society more informed, connected, and empowered". It's the only accelerator that I would have considered bringing Known to, and I think its mission makes it unique in Silicon Valley.

It funds ventures, not projects. That means you have to be driven - as I am - to create businesses based on these values. It's not good enough to build an interesting software platform; it has to be something that will attract investment or be able to grow through real revenue.

If that's what you have, Matter doesn't end at Demo Day. This last Friday, Corey Ford and I took a walking meeting around South Park. This isn't something that happens every few months: he and the Matter team have been there for us when we've needed help and advice every single time. When we began, I couldn't imagine the support we'd still be receiving almost two years later. (When we joined, Matter was a two-person startup in itself; Corey and Lara Ortiz-Luis have now grown into a much larger team.)

What's not immediately obvious when you read about Matter is the community. I've picked up the phone and called founders who went through the program years ago, and they've been happy to share their time and expertise with me, no questions asked. I could ask a question right now and four founders would give me advice before I've finished my coffee. More importantly: I consider them all friends, and the community persists even for the founders who have exited or closed their companies.

Here's another reflection on why Matter is different: half of Matter Three and Matter Five's CEOs were women. Two thirds of Matter Four's CEOs were women. Two thirds of the Matter team itself are women. I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere, but given the current Silicon Valley climate, that is certainly worth highlighting.

The partners are also awesome. We've enjoyed a close relationship with PRX and KQED in particular. Since we joined the community, Google News Lab, the Associated Press, Belo, Tribune Publishing, CNHI and McClatchy have all joined - and the Knight Foundation, one of the most important forces in American journalism, is a founding partner. They've joined because they see media changing, and they want to be a part of the future. These aren't small opportunities.

I wasn't asked to write this post. If I'm effusive, it's because I'm grateful. As a values-based entrepreneur - I've dedicated most of my career to building open platforms for media and education - I appreciate that Matter even exists. This is a firm that counts Wael Ghonim among its portfolio founders. It's not just an accelerator, and while that $50K seed might be a carrot, it's the least of its value.

So I'm writing this post because of that. I know lots of people who follow me are working on mission-driven ventures. You might be looking for partners, but need to find the right kind of community to protect the value of what you're building. All I'm saying is: Matter Six is open for applications, and it's worth your time.

Known has become the easiest way to create an online community to support your class or group. We've built an easy-to-use platform that lets people publish in a group with a variety of media, from blog posts and photographs to files and points on a map. Each post can be private or public; every Known site as a whole can be private or public. And it all works on any device, from the biggest, strongest desktop to the most entry-level smartphone, as long as it comes with a web browser.

Institutions like Harvard and MIT use it to run classes; so do groups teaching web skills in rural India, activists promoting racial justice, writers who need to control their identities, and open source hackers.

Here's how we got here, and here's where we're going.

Finding a fit in higher education

We arrived at Matter knowing we wanted to give people more ownership over their conversations and content online. As well as investing in our team and creating a structured environment for us to grow our company, they gave us a grounding in design thinking which helped us change the way we think about technology businesses.

It was through this process, and hundreds of hours of conversations with teachers and students, that we discovered a deep need in education for social platforms. 98% of higher educational institutions use something called a Learning Management System - platforms like Blackboard and Moodle - but very few report that they are satisfied with the experience. These platforms focus on administration, rather than learning. While they are often used for classroom teaching, they fall comically short of the kinds of social experiences students are used to.

Enter Known. Our platform runs as a stand-alone community site, but it can also integrate with a school's LMS to add those much-needed social features. We offer single sign on to campuses, and unlike many social platforms, let you publish any kind of file you need to. All our plans come with unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you don't need to worry about capacity. We sell SaaS subscriptions, and enterprise licenses for organizations that want to run Known on their own infrastructure.

We also understand that conversations don't just happen in tiny sites on the web. Known sites can push their content across social networks: audio, for example, can be immediately copied to a SoundCloud account. Using brid.gy, we can pull replies and likes from those social networks back to the community, so everything is always stored in one place.

Social infrastructure for campuses

The possibilities are endless. Any campus can run as many Known communities as they need to. We also know that discovering all the content being created on a campus is key, so we've started to provide social hubs and search engines for all of it. On-campus users can search for content that only they can see; visitors to a campus can search for and discover content that has been made public. The result is an easy-to-use gateway to everything happening at a campus. It's never been done before.

We know that in education, one size rarely fits all. So we offer design sprints, where we'll arrive on campus and run design thinking sessions with students, faculty and staff. These allow us to tailor the product to meet the needs of a particular institution, so it complements their activities, their design, and their culture. (These sprints turn out to be useful whether you end up using Known or not.)

Because that's the other thing about Known: it's open source and extremely customizable.

An open source core

In VentureBeat, Lightspeed's John Vrionis writes:

The OSS companies that will be pillars of IT in the future are the companies that leverage a successful OSS project for sales, marketing, and engineering prioritization but have a product and business strategy that includes some proprietary enhancements. They’ve figured out that customers are more than happy to pay for an enterprise-grade version of the complete product, which may have security, management, or integration enhancements and come with support. And they also understand that keeping this type of functionality proprietary won’t alienate the community supporting the project the way something such as a performance enhancement would.

This is our strategy. Our core platform is available on GitHub: you can get it right now. We offer a fully-managed service, with unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you don't need to worry about server maintenance or capacity. But we also offer premium features like LTI integrations, file uploads, and searchable user directories.

We love our open source community. Thousands of people use Known to publish on their own site as an indieweb blog, and the activity helps us build a better platform for everyone. Every single page on every Known site has a little heart icon. Click it, and you're prompted to send us feedback. We read every single message personally, and it allows people who aren't developers or designers to contribute to the community and help us develop the product.

John goes on to say:

OSS businesses turn the customer discovery process completely upside down. Open source software is put into the wild, and the company immediately receives signals from those who are interested. Entrepreneurs get the benefit of real data and usage to help them decide where to focus engineering and sales-and-marketing resources. This is tremendously helpful and important. Data, not guessing, drives prioritization of the limited resources at a company’s disposal.

The combination of an open source development model and a design thinking product process means that we can rapidly prototype new ideas, and get strong signals from real people about the desirability of our platform.

Beyond education

It's obvious that a flexible community platform that runs on any device has applications beyond education. With LDAP / Active Directory integration, you can run it alongside your intranet to support a project or a company. Because you can make a community private, we've even seen families use it to share photos of their children that they wouldn't feel comfortable publishing on Facebook.

Mozilla's CEO Chris Beard said today that he thought of revenue as "a means to do better for the world". We agree: it is important to be a growing, valuable company, but in service to being able to provide a platform that can support any class and give anyone in the world a voice in a space they control. The total market for Known in education is measured in billions of dollars, but our potential goes beyond that.

We're living in a world where everyone can be connected, but only a handful of companies control those conversations. Censorship and surveillance are growing threats. By creating an open, easy-to-use platform that works on every device, we can help everyone own their own conversations. Not only can top-tier universities and companies benefit, but we can help disadvantaged communities, too. From non-profits sharing resources in developing nations to vulnerable groups who need to protect their identities right here in America, we believe we can make a difference.

Our role as technologists is to build a better future where everyone is represented. That's the promise of the web, and it's something core to our mission and beliefs. We're building what I call respectful software, and by showing it can be successful, we will encourage other vendors to follow.

Today, it's the best way to build an online community. But Known has an even brighter future ahead of it. We're excited to bring it to you.

Get involved

Check out our website, and follow us at @withknown on Twitter.

If you're a developer, you can find our core platform on GitHub, and you're invited to join the developer mailing list.

And you can always email me at ben@withknown.com. I'd love to talk to you.

Prologue:

The first time I ever visited South Park, the tiny patch of grass in downtown San Francisco that the Matter garage would later back onto, Biz Stone bought me a coffee. We circled the park and talked about Elgg, our open source social networking product, and Twitter, the startup he was working on at the time.

The most important piece of advice he gave us was this: hold something back. It's fine to open source your code, to release an open product, but you've got to hold back the thing that will make you valuable.

This was the most important advice we received about Elgg. We ignored it completely.

Six years later: September 2014.

Erin and I stepped down from the Paley Center stage in New York, exhausted. Most accelerators have one demo day. Because Matter is so closely tied to both media and technology, it has two: one at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, in the heart of SoMa, and the other in New York, the city where most of America's media companies call home.

Known, we told an audience of media luminaries like Jeff Jarvis and industry investors, was a way for post-secondary students to save their coursework, notes and discussions on a site that they controlled. In a world where students are used to delightful apps and beautiful user experiences, the Learning Management Systems used by 93% of institutions are an abomination that actively hinder learning. Worse, when a course is over, all of the discussions and resources that were collaboratively made by the class are deleted forever. With Known, students can publish to their own site, and syndicate to these other platforms, allowing them to take control over their learning using a beautiful, mobile-first user interface.

Better yet, we told the audience, Known has an open source core. We know that one size doesn't fit all in education. With Known, every single feature has an API endpoint, and every single feature can be customized to fit both the needs of the institution and the student. The first pilot is happening right now, and we're getting great feedback.

Applause. Seven minutes later, we were done. This was day zero for our company: the next day, the hard work would begin.

Skip forward: September 2015.

I looked around the table at Garaje. Most of the alumni from Matter's third class were here, and had great stories to tell: Musey were thriving and building beautiful design apps; LocalData were helping to improve American cities; Louder were preparing their acquisition by Change.org. Over in New York, Stringr were delivering video to more and more news stations.

In some ways, Known was doing well. Our software was powering tens of thousands of websites. We had received great coverage at our launch, and continued to get fantastic feedback from educators all over the world. People were using Known to teach on five continents.

Yet at the same time, we didn't know how we were going to pay rent, and growth was linear. For a project, we were doing well. For a company, we weren't doing well - and there were still only two of us.

What went wrong?

First, you have to understand open source.

Open source is best defined by its four freedoms, which are inspired by Roosevelt's declaration of the four freedoms that every human should be able to enjoy. These dictate that you should be able to:

0. Run the program as you wish, for any purpose
1. Study how it works, and modify its function
2. Redistribute copies “so you can help your neighbor”
3. Distribute copies of your modified versions

The intention is that open source software is free as in speech: it grants you liberties over the code you run that you might not get with other products.

Unfortunately, the word "free" is overloaded: it has multiple possible meanings. In reality, open source has become synonymous with free as in beer: software that you can use without incurring any direct licensing costs.

Our strategy was to create an open core that people could freely distribute, and then layer premium services over the top. If you didn't want to worry about managing servers, we had an excellent SaaS product. If you didn't want to worry about managing APIs to third-party platforms, we offered Convoy. Finally, we wanted to provide access to a network of trusted consultants who could create customizations for institutional customers.

Our utopian vision was to have organic growth through sharing, leading to institutional customers. This didn't happen - at least, not as fast as we needed it to.

Second, you have to understand startups.

We have exact numbers internally, but a good rule of thumb in San Francisco is that, to break even, we need to bring in $10,000 per employee per month. This covers below market rate salaries, as well as all the overheads you incur when you're running a business (for example, taxes and moderate infrastructure costs). It doesn't cover some of the extra investment you really need to put into sales, marketing and product development.

To be relatively comfortable as a two-person company, we need to clear $240,000 per year. That's a tough ask for many businesses, which is one reason why investors are useful: they back your team and put money into your company, making a bet that you'll be profitable later on and will be able to pay them back and then some.

Consider, also, that most teams are not limited to two people. I've got a development and product management background; Erin is an analyst and user experience expert. We need to bring on a full-time technical lead and a front-end designer. I can't do either my CEO (sales! research! business development!) or web development jobs justice, and Erin can't do her user experience or front-end jobs justice. We also need to have redundancy on our staff, so if one of us is sick or out doing sales work, the company can continue to be productive. As soon as you start talking about building a real team, those numbers explode.

I don't believe it's possible to start a consumer startup as a full-time endeavor without significant investment. Unlike businesses, only a tiny minority of consumer users are willing to pay money. You need to have enough runway (the time left in your company before it runs out of money) to reach a mass-market audience, and then make sure you're either solving a problem that they are willing to pay for a solution to. Because it's so hard to get money from consumers, these businesses often make their money through advertising: reaching targeted, engaged audiences is absolutely a problem that advertisers will pay for a solution to.

Enterprise startups potentially require less investment, but the sales cycle - the time it takes to sell to an individual customer - is potentially much longer, and the total cost to acquire a single customer is much higher. You need to have enough money in the bank to make this work; investment is a useful vehicle to bring your company to the next stage of its development.

Investors protect their money by minimizing risk. In this context, open source is a liability: remember the free as in beer problem? By giving away the portion of your product that captures value, you're essentially devaluing your business to zero. Why would anybody invest in that? I'm sincerely grateful that Matter did invest in our team. In return, the least we can do is be a good steward of investor value.

That $240,000? It's a baseline. Biz was completely right: you need to hold back the thing that makes you valuable.

Feedback is a gift - and so is open source.

When they work well, open source communities are amazing things: collaborative groups of disparate people all agreeing to make software together for use by the commons. As a methodology, it's beautiful, and can showcase the best of humanity.

When you're building a product for sale, it's important that you've identified a problem that people will pay money to have solved for them, and that you're solving it well. That means talking to a lot of people, and both making and iterating a lot of rough prototypes. Your product has to be compelling, well-made and scalable. As it's concisely described in design thinking circles, you need to constantly be testing its desirability, feasibility and viability.

When your product is open source, you'll get a lot of feedback from the community. This is important to take on board, and the community is a hugely valuable part of your ecosystem - but at the same time, it's unlikely that open source community members are customers. It's possible that they're users; it's also possible that they're open source enthusiasts who are just happy to see another project join the movement.

Open source projects, as a whole, have famously bad usability. That's because their feedback loop is constrained to other developers. One recent example of this disconnect is a heated debate about using Slack vs Internet Relay Chat. To non-technical users, IRC is arcane and unfriendly (which also accurately describes many of the discussions that take place there), yet many open source maintainers couldn't understand the problem.

When you're building a compelling product, the license should be irrelevant. It should be compelling whether it's completely closed or released under the GPL: the license is how you distribute the product, not something that's inherent to the product itself.

Unfortunately, in the case of Known, I think a lot of people liked it because it was free and open source. This was a bad signal - and certainly not one that will lead to paying customers and a thriving business. (It's worth saying here that a consistent voice of real support has been the indie web community, alongside companies like Reclaim Hosting, which legitimately wants to see us succeed.)

I'm not Donald Trump, but ...

The biggest surprise I've had since starting Known is the amount of feedback complaining that we're trying to make money with it. Usually this comes with some kind of a complaint about startups and capitalism.

If you know me, you'll know that my politics err on the liberal side of liberal; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the US politicians who best describe the country I want to live in. I'm hardly a hardcore conservative capitalist. Nonetheless, I was taken aback to discover that we'd accidentally joined an anti-capitalist movement: we've been very open about being a business since the day we announced our existence.

In fact, I really wanted to show that it was possible to create a profitable, thriving business creating respectful software that gives users full control of their data. I think it's important.

Here are some real things I've heard about making money from open source:

• We should have a universal basic income so people won't have to worry about how they'll make money.
  A universal basic income is not money from the sky; it's a proven way to create a real safety net, but it does rely on taxation. It doesn't work if everyone relies on a basic income, and the idea that you should have to live at the lowest possible income if you're going to build respectful software is both ridiculous and kind of offensive. Welfare is important, but not as a way to pay for open source software.
• We should be striving to build a post-money society.
  I mean, to be fair, I'm a Star Trek fan too.
• We should just build software for the love of it and not worry about making money.
  Most egregiously, we've heard this from people who literally take our free product and sell services around it.

All of these are obviously detatched from reality.

This culture of anti-capitalism in open source is actively harmful. It's a reason why so few women (1.5%!) participate in open source projects, for example, and why people in disadvantaged communities are underrepresented. Having the ability to work on a project for free represents enormous privilege. At its best, open source can be a way for people to contribute to a global commons and freely exchange ideas; at its worst, it's exploitative and exclusionary.

It's devalued our time. I get personal requests on all channels on a daily basis - email, Twitter, Facebook, even unsolicited phone calls - asking for free help. (I no longer give free personal help, except on the mailing list, where it can be used to grow a commons of support information that everyone can use.) Sometimes these calls for free help come from people who are making money from our labor.

Open source doesn't need folk songs. It needs a way to fairly compensate the people who participate in it. I'm not at all against anti-capitalism - but it sure is hard to build a business on it.

But aren't there a lot of profitable open source businesses?

No.

We've most often been compared to WordPress, which powers over 23% of the web. Automattic is valued at over $1.1bn, has a huge team worldwide, and is widely held as the poster child for open source businesses.

In reality, the WordPress open source project is held by a non-profit foundation. Automattic concentrates solely on hosted services.

Ghost, another project we've been compared to, is a non-profit entity in its entirety. It made a lot of its money by crowdfunding as a WordPress plugin, before switching to becoming a node.js project. This technical change made it much harder to install, making their paid, hosted services an easy choice.

Ind.ie hasn't really launched Heartbeat, their distributed social network, but their project is significantly better-funded than Known. This is partially because they crowdfunded as a smartphone, before choosing to shift their attention to a more focused problem.

Mozilla has a long history that stems from Netscape. Their success is not something that a new entrant to the market could replicate.

Red Hat is held up as a model open source business: its current market cap is $14.8bn, or roughly 2.8% of a Google. It provides professional services and support licensing around its Linux distributions.

Infrastructure is a more profitable place for open source to thrive: MongoDB, CoreOS and Docker are all examples of well-funded open source startups. Each one sells better support, trustability and reliability - which makes sense to pay for if you're building a business on top of their technologies.

For these businesses, open source allows them to build a bigger market for their products, which they can then capitalize on. It's a smart strategy that has very little to do with freedom, and everything to do with growth.

What about other funding methods?

BountySource, the crowdfunding platform for open source projects, is one oft-mentioned funding method. It's actually a pretty great idea, that I think will wonderfully for hobbyists, and will encourage developers on distributed projects to work on smaller bugs and features. I don't foresee it covering our costs.

Similarly, Patreon works very well for personal projects, and is redefining how some artists make their money.

We currently make a significant portion of our income through professional services, but this isn't sustainable for a number of reasons. As Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint Ventures pointed out earlier this year in this excellent analysis:

The data suggests that customers are willing to pay 20%+ margins on price points of greater than $200,000. Less than that price point, the data shows it to be difficult to operate a professional services team at better than breakeven.

When you consider all of the overheads inherent to running a company, you would actually make more money just being a freelance developer. Professional services jobs are often one-offs, and while they sometimes lead to contracts, it can be an equal effort to go find the next one. It's not a great way to grow.

That also negates the common argument about making money by providing tertiary services like support and customization. These strategies add more risk to the business, and don't cumulatively add value. At lower price points, it's not even a lifestyle business: it's hand to mouth.

What's next?

None of this should be a downer. I want to open a real conversation about making money sustainably with respectful software. Between Elgg and Known, I've spent the majority of my career working on these issues. I think they're solvable, and I think the result will be a better software ecosystem.

Known isn't at all going away, and we continue to release new versions every single month. We're evaluating the services we provide around it, but we love how the community has rallied around it, and we love how it's being used. We expect it to live and breathe for a long time.

However, we're learning from companies like Automattic, and non-profits like the WordPress Foundation. We're thinking hard about how the project is supported. And it should go without saying that we're committed to building a valuable, growing business.

There's a strong movement around creating alternatives to software that tracks and spies on us. I think that's a fantastic thing. Building software is about empowering people to do things they previously couldn't. But a part of building empowering tools is to make sure they can be provided sustainably. If you're doing something good, you need to be able to keep doing it - and whether you like it or not, that means money.

We need to have a stronger conversation about money in open source, and about building healthy businesses on respectful software.

Conclusions

As either Milton Friedman or Alfred P. Sloan said: "the business of business is business". Build a healthy business; don't be led by ideology. You're not helping build a more open world if you're showing that being open is unsustainable or detrimental; show that you can do well.

And when you succeed, use the fruits of your labor to do good.

We'll be here, cheering for you.

I wrote a follow-up to this post: why we built Known.

September 11, 2001

I was in Oxford, working for Daily Information. My dad actually came into the office to let me know that it had happened - I had been building a web app and had no idea. For the rest of the day I tried to reload news sites to learn more; the Guardian was the only one that consistently stayed up.

The terror of the event itself is obvious, but more than anything else, I remember being immediately hit by the overwhelming sadness of it. Thousands of people who had just gone to work that day, like we all had to, and were trapped in their office by something that had nothing to do with them. I remember waiting for the bus home that day, watching the faces in all the cars and buses that passed me almost in slow motion, thinking that it could have been any of us. I wondered what their lives were like; who they were going home to see. Each face was at once unknowable and subject to the same shared experiences we all have.

I was the only American among my friends, and so I was less distanced from it than them. I remember waiting to hear from my cousin who had been on the New York subway at the time. I'm kind of a stealth American (no accent), so nobody guarded what they said around me. They definitely had a different take, and among them, as well as more widely, there was a sense of "America deserved this". It's hard to accurately describe the anti-American resentment that still pervades liberal Britain, but it was very ugly that day. On Livejournal, someone I followed (and knew in real life) posted: "Burn, America, burn".

One thing I agreed with them on was that we couldn't be sure what the President would do. America had elected a wildcard, who had previously held the record for number of state executions. It seemed clear that he would declare war, and potentially use this as an excuse to erode freedoms and turn America into a different kind of country; we had enough distance to be having those discussions on day one.

There were so many questions in the days that followed. Nobody really understood what had happened, and the official Bush explanations were not considered trustworthy. People brought up the American-led Chilean coup on September 11, 2003, when Salvador Allende had been deposed and killed; had it been symbolically related to that? Al Qaeda seemed like it had come out of nowhere.

Meanwhile, the families of thousands of people were grieving.

September 11, 2002

I had an aisle to myself on the flight to California. The flight had been cheap, and it was obvious that if something were to happen on that day, it wouldn't be on a plane. Airport security at all levels was incredibly high; nobody could afford for there to be another attack.

I had graduated that summer. Earlier that year, my parents had moved back to California, mostly to take care of my grandmother. They were living in a small, agricultural town in the central valley, and I had decided to join them and help for a few months. This was what families do, I thought: when someone needs support, they band together and help them. Moreover, my Oma had brought her children through a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia, finding creative ways to keep them alive in horrifying circumstances. My dad is one of the youngest survivors of these camps, because of her. In turn, taking care of her at the end of her life was the right thing to do.

In contrast to the usual stereotype of California, the central valley is largely a conservative stronghold. When I first arrived, it was the kind of place where they only played country music on the radio and there was a flag on every house. Poorer communities are the ones that disproportionately fight our wars, and there was a collage in the local supermarket of everyone in the community who had joined the army and gone to fight in Afghanistan.

The central valley also has one of the largest Assyrian populations in the US, which would lead to some interesting perspectives a few years later, when the US invaded Iraq.

Our suspicions about Bush had proven to be correct, and the PATRIOT Act was in place. The implications seemed terrible, but these perspectives seemed to be strangely absent on the news. But there was the Internet, and conversations were happening all over the social web. (MetaFilter became my go-to place for intelligent, non-histrionic discussion.) I had started a comedy site the previous year, full of sarcastic personality tests and articles that were heavily influenced by both The Onion and Ben Brown's Uber.nu. Conversations were beginning to happen on the forum there, too.

I flew back to Edinburgh after Christmas, and found a job in educational technology at the university. Dave Tosh and I shared a tiny office, and bonded over talking about politics. It wasn't long before we had laid the groundwork for Elgg.

September 11, 2011

I was sitting at the kitchen table I'm sitting at now. It had been my turn to move to California to support a family-member; my mother was deeply ill and I had to be closer to her. I had left Elgg when she was diagnosed: there were disagreements about direction, and I was suddenly reminded how short and fragile life was.

My girlfriend had agreed that being here was important, and had come out with me, but had needed to go home for visa reasons. Eventually, after several more trips, she would decide that she didn't feel comfortable living in the US, or with marrying me. September was the first month I was by myself in my apartment, and I found myself without any friends, working remotely for latakoo in Austin.

Rather than settle in the valley, I had decided that the Bay Area was close enough. I didn't have a car, but you could BART to Dublin/Pleasanton, and be picked up from there. The valley itself had become more moderate over time, partially (I think) because of the influence of the new UC Merced campus, and the growth of CSU Stanislaus, closer to my parents. Certainly, you could hear more than country music on the radio, and the college radio station was both interesting and occasionally edgy.

I grew up in Oxford: a leafy university town just close enough to London. Maybe because of this, I picked Berkeley, another leafy university town, which is just close enough to San Francisco. (A train from Oxford to London takes 49 minutes; getting to San Francisco from Berkeley takes around 30.) My landlady is a Puerto Rican novelist who sometimes gave drum therapy sessions downstairs. If I look out through my kitchen window, I just see trees; the garden is dominated by a redwood that is just a little too close to the house. Squirrels, overweight from the nearby restaurants, often just sit and watch me, and I wonder what they're planning.

Yet, ask anyone who's just moved here what they notice first, and they'll bring up the homeless people. Inequality and social issues here are troublingly omnipresent. The American dream tells us that anyone can be anything, which means that whens someone doesn't make it, or they fall through the cracks, it must be their fault somehow. It's confronting to see people in so much pain every day, but not as confronting as the day you realize you're walking right by them without thinking about it.

Countless people told me that they wouldn't have moved to the US; not even if a parent was dying. I began to question whether I had done the right thing, but I also silently judged them. You wouldn't move to another country to support your family? I asked but didn't ask them. I'm sorry your family has so little love.

I don't know if that was fair, but it felt like an appropriate response to the lack of understanding.

September 11, 2014

"I'm Ben; this is my co-founder Erin; and I'd like to introduce you to Elle." Click. Cue story.

We were on stage at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, at the tail end of our journey through Matter. Over five months, we had taken a simple idea - that individuals and communities deserve to own their own spaces on the Internet - and used design thinking techniques to make it a more focused product that addressed a concrete need. Elle was a construct: a student we had invented to make our story more relatable and create a shared understanding.

After a long health journey, my mother had finally begun to feel better that spring. 2013 had been the most stressful year of my life, by a long way; mostly for her, but also for my whole family in a support role. I had also lost the relationship I had once hoped I'd have for the rest of my life, and the financial pressures of working for a startup and living in an expensive part of the world had often reared their head. Compared to that year, 2014 felt like I had found all my luck at once.

Through Matter, and before that, through the indie web community, I felt like I had communities of friends. There were people I could call on to grab a beer or some dinner, and I was grateful for that; the first year of being in the Bay Area had been lonely. The turning point had been at the first XOXO, which had been a reminder that individual creativity was not just a vital part of my life, but was somethign that could flourish on its own. I met lovely people there, and at the sequel the next year.

California had given me opportunities that I wouldn't have had anywhere else. It's also, by far, the most beautiful place I've ever lived. Standing on that stage, telling the world what we had built, I felt grateful. I still feel grateful now. I'm lucky as hell.

I miss everyone I left behind a great deal, but any time I want to, I can climb in a metal tube, sit for eleven hours while it shoots through the sky, and go see them. After all the health problems and startup adventures, I finally went back for three weeks last December. Air travel is odd: the reality you step out into supplants the reality you left. Suddenly, California felt like a dream, and Edinburgh and Oxford were immediate and there, like I had never left. The first thing I did was the first thing anyone would have done: I went to the pub with my friends.

But I could just as easily have walked out into Iran, or Israel, or Egypt, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Those are all realities too, and all just a sky-ride in a metal tube away. The only difference is circumstance.

Just as so many people couldn't understand why I felt the need to move to America, we have the same cognitive distance from the people who live in those places. They're outside our immediate understanding, but they are living their own human realities - and our own reality is distant to them. The truth is, though, that we're all people, governed by the same base needs. I mean, of course we are.

My hope for the web has always been that getting on a plane wouldn't be necessary to understand each other more clearly. My hope for Known was that, in a small way, we could help bridge that distance, by giving everyone a voice that they control.

I think back to the people I watched from that bus stop often. You can zoom out from there, to think about all the people in a country, and then a region, and then the world. Each one an individual, at once unknowable and subject to the same shared experiences we all have. We are all connected, both by technology and by humanity. Understanding each other is how we will all progress together.

Known, the company I founded with Erin Jo Richey, is the third startup I've been deeply involved in. The first created Elgg, the open source social networking platform; I was CTO. The second is latakoo, which helps video professionals at organizations like NBC News send video quickly and in the correct format without needing to worry about compression or codecs. Again, I was CTO. In both cases, I was heavily involved in all aspects of the business, but my primary role was tending product, infrastructure and engineering.

At Known, I still write code and tend servers, but my role is to put myself out of that job. Despite having worked closely with two CEOs over ten years, and having spent a lot of time with CEOs of other companies, I've learned a lot while I've been doing this. I've also had conversations with developers that have revealed some incorrect but commonly-held assumptions.

Here are some notes I've made. Some of these I knew before; some of these I've learned on the job. But they've all come up in conversation, so I thought I'd make a list for anyone else who arrives at being a business founder via the engineering route. We're still finding our way - Known is not, yet, a unicorn - but here's what I have so far.

The less I code, the better my business does.

I could spend my time building software all day long, but that's only a fraction of the story. There's a lot more  to building a great product than writing code: you're going to need to talk to people, constantly, to empathize with the problems they actually have. (More on this in a second.) Most importantly, there's a lot more to building a great business than building a great product. You know how startup founders constantly, infuriatingly, talk about "hustling"? The language might be pure machismo, but the sentiment isn't bullshit.

When I'm sitting and coding, I'm not talking to people, I'm not selling, I'm not gaining insight and there's a real danger my business's wheels are spinning without gaining any traction.

The biggest mistake I made on Known is sitting down and building for the first six months of our life, as we went through the Matter program. If I could do it again, I would spend almost none of that time behind my screen.

Don't scratch your own itch.

In the open source world, there's a "scratch your own itch" mentality: build software to solve your own problems. It's true that you can gain insight to a problem that way. But you're probably not going to want to pay yourself for your own product, so you'd better be solving problems for a lot of other people, too. That means you need to learn what peoples' itches are, and most importantly, get over the idea that you know better than them.

Many developers, because they know computers better than their users, think they know problems better than them, too. The thing is, as a developer, your problems are very different indeed. You use computers dramatically differently to most people; you work in a different context to most people. The only way to gain insight is to talk to lots and lots of people, constantly.

If you care passionately about a problem, the challenge is then to accept it when it's not shared with enough people to be a viable business. A concrete example: we learned the hard way that people, generally, won't pay for an indie web product for individuals, and took too long to explore other business avenues. (Partially because I care dearly about that problem and solution.) A platform for lots of people to share resources in a private group, with tight integration with intranets and learning management systems? We're learning that this is more valuable, and more in need. We're investigating much more, and I'm certain we'll continue to evolve.

Pick the right market; make the right product. Make money.

Learning to ask people for money is the single hardest thing I've had to do. I'm getting better at it, in part thanks to the storytelling techniques we picked up at Matter.

Product-market fit is key. It can't be overstated how important this is.

Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

The problem you pick is directly related to how effectively you can sell - not just because you need to be solving real pain for people, but because different problems have different values. A "good market" is one that can support a business well, both in terms of growth and finance. Satisfy that market, and, well, you're in business.

We sell Known Pro for $10 a month: hardly a bank-breaking amount. Nonetheless, we've had plenty of feedback that it's much too expensive. That's partially because the problem we were solving wasn't painful enough, and partially because consumers are used to getting their applications for free, with ads to support them.

So part of "hustling" is about picking a really important problem for a valuable market and solving it well. Another part is making sure the people who can benefit from it know about it. The Field of Dreams fallacy - "if you build it, they will come" - takes a lot of work to avoid. I have a recurring task in Asana that tells me to reach out to new potential customers every day, multiple times a day, but sales is really about relationships, which takes time. Have conversations. Gain insight. See if you can solve their problems well. Social media is fun but virtually useless for this: you need to talk to people directly.

And here's something I've only latterly learned: point-blank ask people to pay. Be confident that what you're offering is valuable. If you've done your research, and built your product well, it is. (And if nobody says "yes", then it's time to go through that process again.)

Do things that don't scale in order to learn.

Startups need to do things that scale over time. It's better to design a refrigerator once and sell lots of them than to build bespoke refrigerators. But in the beginning, spending time solving individual problems, and holding peoples' hands, can give you insight that you can use to build those really scalable solutions.

Professional services like writing bespoke software are not a great way to run a startup - they're inherently unscalable - but they can be an interesting way to learn about which problems people find valuable. They're also a good way to bootstrap, in the early stages, as long as you don't become too dependent on them.

Be bloody-minded, but only about the right things.

Lots of people will tell you you're going to fail. You have to ignore those voices, while also knowing when you really are going to fail. That's why you keep talking to people, making prototypes, searching for that elusive product-market fit.

Choosing what to be bloody-minded about can be nuanced. For example:

Technology doesn't matter (except when it does).

Developers often fall down rabbit holes discussing the relative merits of operating systems and programming languages. Guess what: users don't care. Whether you use one framework or another isn't important to your bottom line - unless it will affect hiring or scalability later on. It's far better to use what you know.

But sometimes the technology you choose is integral to the problem. I care about the web, and figured that a responsive interface that works on any web browser would make us portable acros platforms. This was flat-out wrong: we needed to build an app. We still need to build an app.

The entire Internet landscape has changed over the last six years, and we were building for an outdated version that doesn't really exist anymore. As technologists, we tend to fall in love with particular products or solutions. Customers don't really work that way, and we need to meet them where they're at.

Non-technical customers don't like options.

As a technical person, I like to customize my software. I want lots of options, and I always have: I remember changing my desktop fonts and colors as a teenager, or writing scripts for the chatrooms I used to join. So I wasn't prepared, when we started to do more conversations with real people, for how little they want that. Apple is right: things should just work. Options are complexity; software should just do the right things.

I think that's one reason why there's a movement towards smaller apps and services that just do one thing. You can focus on solving one thing well, without making it configurable within an inch of its life. If a user wants it to work a different way, they can choose a different app. That's totally not how I wish computers worked for people, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: what I want is irrelevant.

Run.

Run fast. Keep adjusting your direction. But run like the wind. You're never the only person in the race.

Investment isn't just not-evil: it's often crucial.

Bootstrapping is very hard for any business, but particularly tough if you're trying to launch a consumer product, which needs very wide exposure to gain traction and win in the marketplace. Unless you're independently wealthy or have an amazing network of people who are, you will need to find support. Money aside, the right investors become members of your team, helping you find success. Their insights and contacts will be invaluable.

But that means you have to have your story straight. Sarah Milstein puts it perfectly:

Entrepreneurs understandably get upset when VCs don’t grasp your business’s potential or tell you your idea is too complex. While those things happen, and they’re shitty, it’s not just that VCs are under-informed. It’s also that their LPs won’t support investments they don’t understand. Additionally, to keep attracting LP money, VCs need to put their money in startups that other investors will like down the road. VCs thus have little incentive to try to wrap their heads around your obscure idea, even if it’s possibly ground-breaking. VCs are money managers; they do not exist to throw dollars into almost any idea.

Keep it simple, stupid. Your ultra-cunning complicated mousetrap or niche technical concept may not be investable. You know you're doing something awesome, but the perception of your team, product, market and solution has to be that it has a strong chance of success. Yes, that rules some ventures out from large-scape investment and partially explains why the current Silicon Valley landscape looks like it does. So, find another way:

Be scrappy.

Don't be afraid of hacks or doing things "the wrong way". If you follow all the rules, or you're afraid of going off-road and trying something new, you'll fail. Beware of recipes (but definitely learn from other peoples' experiences).

Most of all: get over yourself, and get over why you fell in love with computers.

If empathy-building conversations and user testing tell you one thing, it's this: your assumptions are almost always wrong. So don't assume you have all the answers.

You probably got into computers well before most people. Those people have never known the computing environment you loved, and it's never coming back. You're building for them, because they're the customer: in many ways the hardest thing is to let go of what you love about computers, and completely embrace what other people need. A business is about serving customers. Serve them well by respecting their opinions and their needs. You are not the customer.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but the more I embrace it, the better I do.

Need a way to privately share and discuss resources with up to 200 people? Check out Known Pro or get in touch to learn about our enterprise services.

I previously co-founded Elgg and served as CTO at latakoo, but Known is the first time I've been a CEO. Candid reflections have always been important to me to learn from; maybe someone will find these useful, too. If not, then, well, my first point applies:

Writing is an important way to organize your thoughts.

In many ways, as a founder, your job is to be the company storyteller, the company cheerleader, and the person who will fix the sink if the plumbing breaks. There are so many strands that I've found writing - and in particular, blogging - to be a great way to order them into a coherent narrative. A lot of times, when I post here on my own site, I'm thinking things out in public. You're all a part of my thought process. Congratulations?

This is one reason why I'm adamant that you should hire people who can write well. I don't mean their spelling or punctuation, particularly; I'm talking about their ability to convey information. That also speaks to the kind of order they will bring to other tasks. It's a core skill.

Related to this:

The elevator pitch is more important than I thought it would be.

We were part of the third class at Matter, an awesome values-based accelerator in downtown San Francisco. Throughout, we were encouraged to condense our story into a seven-minute pitch. The pitch itself wasn't the thing; the process forced us to create a coherent story for our company, mostly for ourselves, which would itself inform our company's decisions. Who would buy this? What was the concrete problem we were trying to solve?

It's harder than you think to condense this into seven minutes. We live and breathe our startups - how can we cut and edit that down to a seven minute story? Help! we all thought to ourselves, while nibbling slack-jawed at our accelerator's complementary snacks. We need more time!

If only we'd known.

Seven minutes is an acre of time. It's a boundless ocean stretching out to the horizon, rippling gently beneath a benevolent sun. You can fit lifetimes in seven minutes. And in front of a captive demo day audience, to boot!

No no, my optimistic, accelerator-cheese-string-eating past self. You have got it very wrong. Try fifteen seconds.

"What is Known?", someone will ask. Ignore the existential double meaning of the question, because you have about fifteen seconds to convince the person in front of you that your idea is compelling and different. If you succeed, they might ask you a follow-up question: something easy like "are you making money?" or "doesn't WordPress do that?". Be ready.

In fact, the existential double meaning does matter, because your answer, despite being tweet-sized, will depend on all the research and insights you've gathered, and everything you know. It's likely to radically change over time as your understanding of your business improves. Your fifteen second description is the tip of the iceberg, but it's a tip that encapsulates everything below the waterline.

Arguing with investors is a clear indicator that you have work to do. On yourself.

This is something I've avoided, but I've seen other founders do this more times than I can count.

Here's what happens. A startup founder takes a meeting or walks on-stage at a pitch event. They've brought a presentation that they've slaved over, had sleepless nights over, maybe even wept over in the darkness of their shared office space at 3am, and they are proud of it. It is, as far as they can tell through their sleepless haze, the perfect encapsulation of what they've worked on so tirelessly. It is beautiful. Were it journalism, it would surely win the Pulitzer.

And the investors tear it apart.

At least, to the entrepreneur, it feels like that. In reality, they're asking important due diligence questions: trying to pick holes in the story, and figuring out, within the constraints of the space and time they have, whether this startup is a smart place to put their money. They most often want to help the entrepreneur, by asking them to strengthen their argument. But it flies directly in the face of the founder's conviction, not to mention all of their single-minded hard work, and it hurts. So they misread the situation and become defensive. They might even get visibly angry. And that's where it all falls down.

An early-stage investor is like a cofounder (or at least, they should be). They probably have a lot more experience with young companies than the founder does, and can offer pertinent advice based on things they've learned from other companies. Who would want to work with someone who gets angry when presented with that experience?

It's okay to correct people, of course, but the right way to do it is with your facts, and all the great research you've done. Your faith means nada: all startup founders have faith that they'll succeed. You've got to show investors that you have the skills, the knowledge and - ideally - an unfair advantage.

Take care of yourself.

Here's what I have experienced personally: the crushing feeling of having your work swept out from under you by that investor experience. There's a tight line to walk. Investors really do have a lot of experience, and really do want to help you. Most of the people I've met are driven by helping entrepreneurs, so the advice they give comes from a good place. But at the same time, you have to stay true to yourself, too: sometimes you do need to take a leap of faith to create something new. Whether anyone comes with you is all on you.

That's hard. Running a startup comes with intense highs and lows, sometimes within the same 30 minute period. Often that 30 minute period will be late at night, or on a Sunday, or at 6am. By its nature, it's incredibly unhealthy, both mentally and physically.

When you're terrified about money, and worried about your own lack of sleep, and there's a strange new pain somewhere in your body and you're not sure when it started happening but it's probably stress-related but maybe it's something that will kill you, and people have started looking at you strangely on the street, it can be very hard to make stable, considered decisions. But that's what you have to do. You have to be calm, and you can't let criticism go to your heart.

Take time away from your startup. Go to the gym. Eat well (not string cheese). Consider drinking tea instead of coffee (you don't need higher cortisol levels). Enjoy the countryside. Go for walks. Be with your friends. Do what makes you happy. Above all: remember that it's a business, not your entire life, and any criticism or praise you receive is not a commentary on you as a person.

Those things will make you a better person, a better entrepreneur, and a better decision-maker.

And for god's sake, stop eating the string cheese.

Don't tilt at windmills.

Fail hella fast. Don't spend years on something that isn't going to succeed for you. You only get one life. If something isn't working after you've spent a reasonable amount of time and effort on it, move onto something that does. Don't get so emotionally invested that you can't let go. (This applies not just to startups as a whole, but to features, target customers, user flows, logos ... you name it. Repeat after me: this is business.)

A mantra that's commonly (rightly) repeated for startup founders is, "you are not Steve Jobs". In other words, you need to do user research and testing. You need to build prototypes to get feedback on, so you can make better decisions.

But, okay, time out. Here's a quick question which should be easy to answer with no thought at all: what is success?

Does success mean building a unicorn or a dragon? (That's startup-speak for a company worth at least $1bn, and a company that returns $1bn to a particular investor, respectively. Yes, I know it's ridiculous. Have you been here?)

Does success mean building the dreaded lifestyle business? (That's startup-speak for a company that allows its founders to live comfortably but will never be described in terms of mythical beasts.)

Does success mean making a positive impact on the world? (That's startup-speak for "won't get funded". I kid - these kinds of startups can also make a lot of money, and Matter, as well as Better Ventures, Double Bottom Line and a few other social impact investment firms are orientated to this. I'm glad they exist.)

It's actually really important that you know the answer to this. All of these approaches lead to different approaches and decisions, different ways of describing your company, and, frankly, different companies. If you have a cofounder (and you should), you should probably be on the same page on this. If one of you wants to build a unicorn filled with ninjas that morphs into a dragon, and one of you wants to build a lifestyle business with a focus on social impact, you will reach a point where it's not going to be pretty. Founder breakups are like marriage breakups. You don't want it to happen.

Above all else: know where the money is coming from.

A lot of people have been seduced by Twitter's strategy. Here's the in-a-nutshell version of what they did: they built a prototype in a couple of weeks, with the simplest possible features, and let it loose. Over time, the community created its own norms - things like replies, hashtags and retweets - and the company thought about those and figured out how to make them into features. For a few years they didn't even think about money. They concentrated on growing the company, and to do that they paved the deer paths. Lovely!

What's mentioned less often is that to make this happen, Ev Williams personally bought back the shares that had been invested in his company. That money had previously come from selling Blogger to Google. Unless you also have millions and millions of dollars, it is not a strategy that you can repeat. And even then, Twitter partially became successful through a series of smart decisions - putting screens up at SXSW, for example, which took money - and a series of accidents.

To "you are not Steve Jobs", I would like to add: "you are not Ev Williams".

The startup landscape has changed since the mid-2000s. It is expected that you will have built something with traction off your own back. Unless you're a unicorn developer (which in this case doesn't mean you're worth $1bn, but means you can build quickly, can design well and are good at gathering user feedback; stay with me) you will need to bring in other people. That means you're going to need to commit your own money, or be oozing with leadership charisma, or both.

Here's an aside, if you aren't a developer: you can't find a technical cofounder. Technical people get asked to join startups on a very regular basis, and it's become a bit of a running joke. Join a company that will eat your life and pay you very little money in exchange for a tiny amount of equity that amounts to a lottery ticket? "What a great deal!" said no-one, ever. If you want someone technical to join your team as a cofounder, you have to prove that you're worth joining. Most of all, you have to prove that you're not going to lean on them to make your whole product for you - and that means showing that you have skills to bring to the table. Show your research. Build wireframes. Maybe even learn to code a little. And demonstrate, however you can, that your technical cofounder will be an equal rather than - as I heard someone once describe their technical colleagues - "our back-room technicians".

Once you have your working prototype - which, to reiterate, you've built with your own skills and/or money - you're going to need to know where your runway is coming from. Are you going to try and make revenue immediately? Are you going to raise investment because you're creating a consumer startup? Either way, you don't have space to bimble along like Twitter did, finding itself along the way.

Are you going to grow with help from investment? Then make sure people will invest. Are you going to bootstrap through revenue? Then make sure people will actually pay.

There is never enough time. There is never enough money. Somehow, as a founder, you have to make both.

Bonus seventh: don't trust pithy thought pieces on entrepreneurship.

Experience is important to learn from, but seriously. You're your own person. You have your own experience, your own goals, your own creativity and your own special sauce that you're going to bring to the table. There are few communities that are as much about peer pressure, community norms and cargo cultish received wisdom than tech entrepreneurship. Through all of this, you need to maintain your own strong personalty - and the strong personality of your venture.

Let me be clear: this is the best job I've ever had, and I wouldn't change it for anything.

Go out into the world and succeed, whatever that means for you, however it makes sense for you. Make a dent in the universe.

And don't eat the string cheese.

This is a summarized version of my talk at Hacks and Hackers tonight at Matter in San Francisco.

This last summer, Alberto Guzman, a hairdresser in New York, uploaded a picture of him and his husband sharing a kiss on their wedding day. He tagged it with the hashtag #happy, as well as #gaypride and #equalrights. It was a wonderful day for them both.

And then Instagram removed it - for being inappropriate.

It turned out that it had been flagged as inappropriate, which is very easy to do on Instagram. You just click flag, and then tell them why. There isn’t a lengthy procedure to go through, and the moderators typically remove items very quickly.

This happens all the time. Famously, it isn’t safe to upload photos containing breastfeeding to Facebook, because they’re flagged as pornography. The company changed its policy a few years ago, but as recently as last year, mothers were demonstrating outside of Facebook’s headquarters because their photos were still being removed.

Late last year, drag queens had their profiles frozen and removed from Facebook because they weren’t using their “real names”.

In each and every case, these deletions were caused by organized groups of users who wanted the content gone because they didn’t like it.

It’s not just photos of motherhood and same-sex marriages that are being removed.

As the British blogger Elliot Higgins noted last year, Facebook pages about the sarin gas attacks in Syria have also almost all been removed. History is being rewritten.

In fact, the problem is so bad that when Mark Zuckerberg posted in favor of free speech following the awful events in Paris last week, a legitimate question about freedom of expression in the comments was flagged and removed.

These aren’t government requests. All of these were due to ordinary people: civilians making a decision about what people should be allowed to publish and how they should define their identities.

I'm picking on Facebook because they're big. 835 million people access Facebook alone every day. It’s how they get their news, how they talk to their friends, how they learn about the world. Smartphone users check Facebook 14 times a day on average.

We’re all familiar with Edward Snowden, and his revelations about illegal NSA surveillance. But the truth is that we’re all spying on each other, too. The content standards that Facebook sets, and its policies regarding inappropriate content, have a real impact on how people learn about the world.

And it’s a real impact. The PEN American Center found that the number of writers in democracies who report that they self-censor the topics they write about is approaching the number of writers in non-democracies who self-censor. Which is to say that one third of writers in so-called “free” countries self-censor because of surveillance.

I would argue that we have the cloud to thank for this. This famous slide from our friends at the NSA describes the best place to intercept data being stored in Google’s cloud. “The cloud” sounds fluffy and nice, but it actually means that you’re storing your stuff on someone else’s hard drive. If you store your data on Google’s cloud, you’re storing it on Google’s hard drive. If you store your data on Facebook’s cloud, you’re storing it on Facebook’s hard drive. Their hard drives, their rules.

And as we’ve seen, it’s easy for someone to get your content removed if they don’t like it, whether they’re the government or just a person who disagrees with you. In a world where reach is everything, no wonder writers self-censor.

And yet, the Internet is amazing. It’s the most powerful engine for communications and learning the world has ever known. It’s an important driver for free speech and it’s changed the way we do business. And we shouldn’t have to give up any of those things.

The early Internet was designed to be resilient: the opposite of the giant siloed stacks we now pour all of our content and conversations into. The idea was to connect up universities and military labs to share resources, in a decentralized way.

That decentralized structure allows us to use services like Google, Twitter and Facebook through a single browser window, but what if we rethought how we shared data online? What if each of us had our own service? What if our conversations and ideas lived on our own devices, in our own living rooms and in our newsrooms? And what if these devices were as easy to use as an iPhone?

We’re beginning to see this future emerge. The Intel Compute Stick is a tiny computer that costs just $89, while platforms like Sandstorm turn publishing and talking to people online from your own server into a one-click operation. Sandstorm, by the way, just announced $1.3 million in funding.

In the old days, Microsoft disrupted the tyranny of mainframes and timesharing by imagining a world with a computer on every desk. Today, I believe we should be imagining a world where we all own our content and conversations online.

I’ve spent my career writing open source web applications that are designed to be used by non-technical users. Elgg was a social networking platform that was described at the time as “MySpace in a box”. Known is a web platform that allows you to share and communicate from your own domain as easily as posting to Twitter or Facebook.

Elgg was ultimately used by organizations like Stanford, Harvard, Oxfam, Greenpeace and the World Bank. Known’s open source community is growing fast.

Here are some lessons I’ve learned from both projects.

1. It’s not about you

As a developer, it’s easy to approach software development as a way to “scratch your own itch”: building around your own needs and frustrations.

This is an important place to start, because it means you’re “dogfooding” the product: using it yourself, ideally every day. But it can’t be the only way you drive development, or even the most significant driver.

External feedback is one of the most important aspects of any software project. If you’re building software for a particular market, you need to talk to people in that market, show them prototypes, and react accordingly.

In a successful open source project, you’re getting feedback all the time, but it’s important to be aware that the people leaving issues and bug reports are a subset of your users. They’re the technically involved ones, who can manage GitHub (or wherever you host your project) and understand how to fill out a bug report. You can’t limit your feedback to the open source community, either.

When we were building Elgg, we regularly held meetups in pubs, in order to talk informally with the people who were using the product in the real world. With Known, we had the benefit of Matter’s accelerator program, which is heavily focused on design thinking. Over the first five months of our company’s existence, we spent over half the time talking to people, getting feedback on iterations of the product, and understanding their needs.

I’m convinced that good software development is a social process.

2. It’s not about the technology

Both Elgg and Known are based on PHP and MySQL.

Somewhere, a programmer is gasping. In the distance, a dog howls. A baby is crying.

One of the attributes of an open source project is that you can run it on your own infrastructure. That’s particularly true if you want it to be useable by less-technical users.

The web hosting landscape is dominated by shared hosts that allow you to upload files using FTP, install applications using cPanel and Softaculous, and pay $4 a month for the privilege. The people who buy these products in droves aren’t going to care to set up a Digital Ocean droplet or find an image in the AWS Marketplace.

It’s a strategic decision. If you want to use the in-vogue evented server platform, go right ahead. If you want distribution on the hundreds of millions of shared hosting accounts that non-technical people are using all over the web, then you’re going to need to meet those users where they’re at.

There’s also this: I’ve worked with PHP for years, and the language has never been better. In particular, PHP 5.4 has seen it turn a corner and become a modern web platform. So, at the very least, it’s not as bad as you think.

And you’re doing this to build a genuinely useful product, not because you just want to code, right? Right.

3. Design isn’t something you do at the end

Design encompasses the entirety of how your users will interact with your product. Yes, it’s the UI and the visuals, but it’s also the experience associated with everything from the initial installation, through using it day-to-day, to what happens if your users decide to move to another product.

See above: it’s not about you. Get as much feedback as you can. Watch people using your product; just stand behind them and take notes, and ask them questions at the end. Do this as often as you can. It can be heartbreaking, but it gets less heartbreaking over time.

Remember, too, that your product is open source. It’s okay if you’re not a designer. You’re almost certainly already thinking about how to involve engineers in your product development process. How can you attract and involve designers, too?

Confession: I don’t fully know the answer to this. On Elgg, we hired Pete Harris, a wonderful designer who defined the look and feel of the product. He didn’t know it, but he was the most highly-paid person in the company. On Known, my co-founder, Erin Richey, is a brilliant user experience designer. We’re very interested in attracting more designers to the open source community, but how this works is an open question.

4. Benevolent dictatorships are (mostly) A-OK

I’ve been a benevolent dictator in both open source communities. That means that I’ve had the final say about product direction and feature development. A lot of people believe that this isn’t appropriate in an open source community, but for this kind of user-facing product, I think it’s important. (Also, I’m a control freak.)

I believe that someone has to be able to say no on an arbitrary basis. A lot of projects and communities devolve into endless conversations, and sometimes argument, that hamper development. Being able to cut through this quickly is important - as long as you can act decisively!

All good products have an underlying vision that informs development. Someone needs to stick to their guns and be the keeper of that vision - while also engaging the community and being as open as possible to ideas, code and features. You’re a project leader, not a vanguard; keep an open mind.

5. Open is as open does

Your code needs to be super-readable and well-documented. Unlike most projects, lots of people are going to be reading it in order to understand your software. While some developers believe that you should be able to read the code, I think a documentation block above each class and method (at the very least) goes a long way.

Ideally, you need stand-alone documentation that can be read on its own terms. This is the equivalent of writing a book about your software at the same time as writing the software itself. Read The Docs is a great project that makes it easy to host searchable documentation.

Finally, you should keep the code as presentable and neat as possible. I’m not above using an automatic code beautifier to make sure that tabs, spaces, braces etc are all in line and standard throughout the codebase. If the source code is consistently formatted, it’s easier to read.

6. Your project is a community

Lead by example.

I favor lots of small source code commits over longer ones. Not only does that make it easier to roll back the source code incrementally, but it also lowers the barrier to entry for other people. If you’re committing a couple of lines here and a couple of lines there, it’s easier for someone else to follow suit.

It’s never okay to be a dick. There are open source project leaders who have become infamous for berating contributors for writing code they don’t like. That’s not only a great way to get a reputation for being an unpleasant human being, but also limit the kinds of people who contribute to your project. It hurts your software. Don’t do it.

Similarly, RTFM culture should never be tolerated. RTFM is a UNIX-era term for “Read The Fucking Manual”, which is how some communities interact with newcomers asking simple questions. That’s a horrible way for any community to act, and it limits growth.

Open source has a diversity problem. Being personally inclusive, watching for abuse, and protecting the culture of your community help you widen the gene pool of ideas. The greater the variety of people who contribute to your project, the stronger and more useable your project becomes.

7. Don’t over-integrate; don’t over-prepare

It’s easy to add a gazillion hooks into your software and prepare for any eventuality. I’ve seen projects spend months doing this legwork before producing something users can see.

Don’t do it.

Your project is already open by definition. It’s a great idea to add some hooks that allow other developers to build on top of your software. Both Elgg and Known have plugin APIs that have helped the projects grow healthy third-party ecosystems. But those APIs evolved over time, as a result of feedback.

The truth is, you don’t really know what’s going to be useful until the need arises. Real-world feedback is important. It’s a great idea for you to experiment and build your own extensions to the software, but remember that your platform isn’t set in stone: if you need a hook later on, you can create it. If someone in the community needs a hook that doesn’t exist, they can create it, or ask someone to make it for them.

It’s much more important to put your product in front of users and start getting feedback. Don’t spin your wheels on maybes.

8. Make it sustainable

If you’re doing something good for your users, you owe it to them to keep doing it.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is worth over a billion dollars. WordPress powers 23% of the web; there’s no way they would have reached this market share, or helped all those users, if they hadn’t been able to pay themselves to keep working on it. A flash-in-the-pan platform that hooks people in and then goes away is arguably harmful.

If you’re building a product for real-world users, you need to think about a funding model as a feature. And - sorry - donations are not a real funding model.

Known provides a fully-hosted service for people that don’t want to worry about the technical aspects of running a site. Our Known Pro product is an easy, turnkey solution for people who want to host their own professional website and reach their audiences across social media. We also have educational subscriptions, enterprise licenses, and organizational support.

From a business perspective, our open source product is a very cost-effective way to get wide distribution. It’s also core to our values: we believe that using open software is a core component of having control over your space online. That alignment between business and ideological considerations is at the heart of what we do.

Don’t shy away from making your open source project into a friendly, open business. You’ll reach more people, create a more useful product, and potentially change the world in the process.

Imagine a global social network that nobody owns, where your profile can be uniquely your own, and you have full control of your identity.

In May, Erin Jo Richey and I started work on Known as a full-time startup business. Our mission is to empower everyone to communicate from their own websites. We love social networks like Twitter, but we think there’s a lot to be gained by controlling the form as well as the content of the spaces that represent us online.

We quickly found allies in Matter Ventures, who invested $50,000 in us as a participant in their third accelerator class. From their offices, we did as much research as possible, in order to validate our assumptions and find a focused place to start. Everything big started small; our global ambition needed a village-sized launchpad.

We spoke to mothers who had shared beautiful photographs of their children with their extended families - using Posterous, which disappeared into the ether. We spoke to marketers who thought of Facebook as a frustrating black box that kept changing its behavior. And we spoke to students, whose class content was deleted from their campus learning management systems as soon as it was complete.

While each of these groups resonated with us, we chose to begin with students. We had an unfair advantage in higher education: my previous project, Elgg, was one of the first social platforms to be used by universities, and is still heavily relied upon worldwide. Harvard, Stanford, Oxfam, NASA and the World Bank have all been Elgg users. Known builds on those ideas, so it made sense to get feedback from those institutions, too.

Educational technology is undergoing a massive change, informed by the wider change in networked software, and sparked by tools like Elgg. Learning management systems like Blackboard are costly, and cumbersome to use: while 93% of institutions run one, 65% of those say they have terrible usability. The total cost of ownership of one of these platforms is over a million dollars a year for a large institution. But most importantly, they don’t help you learn.

Just as many of us have moved from intranet platforms like Sharepoint to more social platforms like Slack, many educators are moving towards connectivism as a way to think about their teaching. It has been shown that self-reflection makes a meaningful impact on a student’s grades. A growing number of educators have been choosing to use blogging as a major component of their courses, encouraging students to reflect on their learning, and comment on each others’ reflections. They’re called “connected courses”, after one of the most popular.

Known makes this easy. We had already built a beautiful, social profile that you can run on your own website. We sell a hub platform that makes deploying these profiles at an institution easy, and creates class spaces that students can participate in from their own sites. Once you’re logged into your own site, you click once to see content from all your classes, and click again to see content from a specific class. You can post right there in the stream: short notes, blog posts, photos, audio, and more. You can also comment, star or share a piece of content, just as you might on Twitter or Facebook.

Of course, the difference is that this is all on your site, and it’s all under your control. Our platform is open source, or we have a fully-managed SaaS product. You can run it on your own server, or you can leave all of the technical infrastructure management to us.

It’s not a million miles from WordPress’s business model, which is intentional. WordPress powers 23% of the web, and we love their platform, their attitude towards their customers, and the way they look at the world. We also think there’s an opportunity for a personal social platform to grow in a similar way.

I’m proud of what we’ve been able to put together using a small amount of investment. It’s also been exciting to see peoples’ reactions, and to hear what they want to do with it.

Most gratifyingly, we’re already getting a lot of interest from outside education. We’ve heard from individuals who want to use Known for their own publishing, and from organizations who want to use it to run communities. And the cool thing about open source is that our community has built integrations to scratch their own itches, expanding our product to fit their needs: links with WordPress, Buffer, Diigo, LinkedIn and more.

We stole one of our best features from Pulse, the iPad reader app that was bought by LinkedIn last year. They launched with a little heart icon at the top right of their app, through which any user could send the team immediate feedback. We now have a similar feature: if you’re logged into Known, you see the heart on every page. Whether you’re self-hosting or running your Known site on our service, you can send us direct feedback in a click. We do our best to reply to every message quickly, because we learn something from every interaction.

We’ve had a lot of interactions. Each one has allowed us to become a better company, and build a better product. The feature took us less than an hour to build, but it’s one of the most important things we’ve ever done. We’ve gained customers through it; we’ve discovered new opportunities; we’ve learned about bugs. Most importantly, we’ve heard a lot about which features are valuable to people, and, most fundamentally, why people use Known to begin with.

The result of that learning is Known Pro: a managed version of Known for professional groups and individuals.

Just as in education, we believe in growing our company through direct revenue, at a fair price. So this is an experiment for us: we’ve gathered together some of our most-requested features, as well as others that just made sense, and offered them as a pre-sale for 30 days. The total cost is just $10 a month, but the pre-sale is a discount on that: $96 for a year.

We considered a crowdfunding campaign, but selling our product directly just felt right. Unlike a crowdfunding campaign, we won’t charge anybody’s payment card until the product has actually been delivered and is in their hands. That means nobody’s asked to spend money for something they don’t have.

You can pre-order Known Pro right here.

This is the next step on our grand adventure. We believe in a world where everyone owns their content and identity online, and we would love for you to join us on this journey.

The web is the most powerful platform for collective discussion in the history of human civilization. However, the form and content of these conversations are effectively owned by a small number of companies.

The photo sharing service TwitPic shuts down for good on Saturday:

It’s with a heavy heart that I announce again that Twitpic will be shutting down on October 25th. We worked through a handful of potential acquirers and exhausted all potential options. We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met. Normally we wouldn’t announce something like that prematurely but we were hoping to let our users know as soon as possible that Twitpic was living on.

With it goes a vast archive of images uploaded by tens of millions of users over a period of six years, including the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River, the G20 protests in London, and countless moments in its users' lives. In the days before Twitter had support for built-in photos, Twitpic added a layer of visual immediacy that added value to the platform.

It's just the latest in a series of closures. Companies go out of business all the time; when they do, they take their sites with them. A power user will pour years of their lives into a social networking profile, with photographs, status updates, checkins and other details. One site closure can wipe out millions of years of collective personal history.

By placing our online personas in a few centralized locations, we make them vulnerable to single points of failure. That's only part of the problem.

Each service has made design decisions about what their platform feels like to interact with, and with it, the form of the content that's hosted there. Twitter, of course, is limited to 140 characters. Facebook supports a few common formats like status updates, photos and videos. Foursquare is made up of checkins and reviews. And each one contains a logically separate network of contacts, even though we may be connected to the same people on multiple sites.

We all have multiple personae: the version of us at work, in our family lives, and so on. When we publish content, we usually do it from one of those personae and for an audience of people related to that persona. These divisions between sites force us to think in terms of which site we'll communicate with: are we going to publish this content on Twitter or Facebook? Medium or LinkedIn? The implication is that each social network is its own distinct community of people with its own characteristics.

The reality is that the communities connected to each of our personae probably aren't split across social networking lines. These are artificial barriers, which serve the needs of the service owners more than the needs of the content creator. An audience of people may be individuals with specific interests who may be on a combination of social sites, or no site at all.

By limiting a message to a particular social networking service, rather than to an audience of individuals, we unnecessarily stunt our work.

Compounding the problem, many social networks enforce a "real names" policy, and require that you maintain a single profile that represents you online. This forces us to conflate our personas, so that our work connections, our family connections, our friends and our fandoms all sit on top of each other. The intention may be to make our online profiles into a better reflection of us, but in practice it does the opposite; we hold back what we publish, worrying that, for example, a piece of content for our friends may offend our coworkers.

We see these problems in schools and universities, too. The form and design of learning management systems places tight constraints on learning, by having even more limited content types than consumer social networks. Online spaces for classes are removed once the class is over, denying students the ability to build on this content as they continue their learning journey.

Content on the web is not living up to its full potential.

We designed Known to be a focal point for your content. You control where it's hosted (whether it's on our service or somewhere else); you decide what it looks like; you choose what you post and who can see it.

There's no need to have just one Known site. There aren't any regulations about the name you use, or whether your site is public or private. You can syndicate content to reach your connections across networks, and our intention is to allow people to reach each other person to person, and slowly forget about the divisions between networks.

Being able to host and extend your own profile means that you also get to choose the kinds of content you post there. Very few social platforms iterate on the core content types: posts, status updates, photos, videos, bookmarks, checkins and events. Our fellow Matter portfolio members GoPop do a good job with this, and we hope that over time developers will create new kinds of content. We also hope that they reinvent what the content container looks like: there's no need to limit online content to a reverse-chronological stream. We've built easy-to-extend APIs into the heart of Known, and we're delighted that developers are beginning to use it as a lab.

Because your site is fully under your control, you're not subject to the kinds of shutdowns we've seen from TwitPic, Posterous and others. Even if Known the company goes away (not that we have any intention of going away!), your Known-powered site will be alive and well.

Every independent content creator deserves to own what they publish, and to reach their community directly. That's our mission, whether you're an educator or an artist; a developer or a demagogue. We're building a new kind of platform, and we hope you'll join us on this journey.

This post was also published on LinkedIn and Medium.