Was Six Apart ready to launch its own Social Networks ?

You couldn’t blame Ben and Mena Trott for feeling satisfied, even a little smug. The couple’s San Francisco software company, Six Apart, had helped fuel one of the Internet’s hottest trends—blogging. And it had not one, but two hit products. Movable Type, designed for corporate users, boasted clients like Boeing (NYSE:BA) and General Motors (NYSE:GM). TypePad was a leading product for personal bloggers. By mid-
2005, Six Apart had raised some $10 million in venture capital and had more than 100 employees.

But the Trotts were not satisfied. In fact, they were worried. Blogging was still big, but Six Apart was facing tough new rivals, most notably Wordpress, a popular new open-source product that could be downloaded free of charge. Meanwhile, the tech world seemed less interested in blogging than in social networking. Ventures like MySpace and Facebook were growing at astounding rates, and new sites were being showered with venture capital.
The Trotts had a promising social networking idea of their own and were eager to diversify. But given the speed at which the market was moving, they didn’t have much time.
The pair, high school sweethearts from Petaluma, California, scarcely could have imagined facing such issues when they launched Six Apart in October 2001. It was the early days of blogging, and Mena was enthralled. She wrote a blog called Dollarshort, in which she mused about her childhood and daily life, and started gaining new readers every day. Many of those readers were bloggers themselves, and both Mena and Ben, a programmer, could sense a trend emerging. They also were frustrated by the lack of good software for bloggers. So they built their own—naming it Movable Type, after Gutenberg’s printing press. Working out of their apartment, they created a website and began selling the software as a download. “Almost 200 people downloaded it in the first hour,” Ben says. “We were saying, ‘This is real.’”