Blogger: 8 scrappy lessons on how a farm boy turned an almost sure-to-fail business into multiple millions

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Hey rebel solopreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

You're convinced you need to be an expert before you can teach or help others.

But here's the thing - while you're waiting to become "qualified enough," someone else is already helping people and building a business.

This perfectionist trap costs you years of income and impact, you know?

But what if your beginner's perspective is exactly what people need?

Evan Williams from Blogger.com discovered that sometimes being a regular person solving your own problem creates a $30+ million solution.

Let's investigate his secret formula!

🍹 The humble beginnings...

Picture this: Evan Williams grew up on a farm in Nebraska, helping his dad with farming chores.

He was always entrepreneurial and dropped out of college because he refused to work for anyone else.

In the middle of the 1998 tech boom, he moved to California where all the internet excitement was happening.

Even though he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he took a job at O'Reilly to learn web development.

He left O'Reilly and worked as a contractor at Intel and HP to pay the bills.

In January 1999, he finally started his own company called Pyra Labs.

His big plan was to build a web-based project management tool for business clients.

This was before Basecamp or Asana existed, and he had specific ideas about doing it better.

His friend Meg Hourihan got excited about the idea and joined as co-founder.

They had no connections in the startup world and couldn't get funding from VCs.

So they kept their contracting jobs at HP to pay the bills while building their product.

They hired their first employee, Paul Bausch, in May 1999.

Both Evan and Paul were web geeks who had personal websites and wrote their own scripts to post thoughts online.

At that time, blogs were just beginning to be talked about in tech circles.

They built a little internal website for their team to share information and called it "Stuff."

It was like a blog, but more of a workplace collaboration tool.

Paul made a tweak so certain posts from their internal blog automatically appeared on their external company blog.

They were one of the first companies to have a blog on their website.

But then Evan got distracted by another idea that wouldn't leave him alone...

1. 🧠 Stop overthinking and start building

Evan saw how useful their internal blogging tool was and got excited about turning it into a product.

In March 1999, he registered the domain Blogger.com and could totally picture its potential.

But here's the crazy part - he had a major problem.

He'd started 30 projects in the past year and finished none of them.

"My total weakness was not focusing on things," Evan says.

He was terrified that working on Blogger would kill his main company like his previous ventures.

But wait - instead of overthinking it to death, he decided to build it anyway in August 1999.

Paul and Evan spent just one week building and launching Blogger while Meg was on vacation.

But when Meg returned, she was furious about launching a whole product without her...

2. 💰 You don't need a revolutionary idea to win

Get this: Blogger's functionality was dead simple - just a basic tool to post thoughts online.

The technology wasn't new or groundbreaking at all.

Web geeks were already doing this by hand or with their own scripts.

Evan just took his existing script and made it accessible to other people.

There was nothing revolutionary about the concept or the execution.

But he had figured out something important about what the web was actually good for.

"It was about freshness and about frequency, and it was about the democratization of media," says Evan.

The real surprise was how quickly people started using it...

3. 🎯 Let your customers tell you what you're really building

Evan thought Blogger would just be a marketing tool to attract people to his "real" product.

He assumed only web geeks would use it and it would never make money.

But slowly, it caught on way more than they expected.

Well-known tech thinkers started using Blogger and pointing others to it.

His "side project" was getting more buzz than his main collaboration tool.

Evan had to make a tough choice - focus on the boring product businesses would pay for, or the exciting one people actually wanted.

By late 1999, he realized that blogging was going to dramatically impact the web.

Then the dot-com crash happened and everything got complicated...

4. 😰 Survive the valley of death by getting creative

After the 2000 dot-com crash, they couldn't raise more money and were running out of cash.

They tried to merge with other companies, but the offers were terrible lowball deals.

In January 2001, Evan had to lay off everyone, including himself.

He was the only one left in the company with thousands of users depending on Blogger.

The servers were slow because they couldn't afford better hardware.

Instead of giving up, Evan did something radical - he asked users for help.

He posted: "Hey, we know Blogger is slow. We need hardware but don't have money. Give us money and we'll make it faster."

Thousands of users donated around $17,000, way more than they needed for servers.

But even with working servers, Evan's personal nightmare was just beginning...

5. 😔 Push through when everyone thinks you're crazy

After laying everyone off, Evan's relationship with co-founder Meg fell apart and she left.

All his employees, including close friends, abandoned the company and bad-mouthed him in their community.

"I basically went underground and did nothing but try to keep Blogger going," says Evan.

Friends looked at him resentfully, thinking he'd screwed over his team for money.

He had to teach himself Linux system administration and Java just to keep the servers running.

"Everybody I knew just thought I was crazy," says Evan.

But he kept going because thousands of users were counting on him.

He slowly built features that would let him charge money, starting with removing ads for $12/year.

Finally, things started turning around in 2002...

6. 🚀 Scale by focusing on what actually works

Evan hired contractor programmer Jason Shellen and launched Blogger Pro, the paid version.

It became a hit and started bringing in real money.

They got a big licensing deal in Brazil and hired a completely new team.

By this time, blogging had exploded and lots of competitors emerged.

But the growing trend lifted everyone, and Blogger established itself as a major player.

When O'Reilly introduced them to Google, Evan was shocked to learn it was an acquisition meeting.

"Why don't you just come here and do all that stuff?" Google asked.

After four hard years of struggle, Evan had to decide whether to sell his baby.

He wasn't desperate for money - they actually had a $1 million investment offer on the table.

The decision to sell would change everything...

7. 🎉 Trust your gut even when it goes against conventional wisdom

Everyone thought Evan was crazy for not taking earlier acquisition offers.

The Industry Standard magazine even called him "The Idealist" for not selling when he had the chance.

People wrote parodies mocking him for turning down millions.

But Evan's gut told him to wait, even when the pressure was intense.

"I think one of the things that kills great things so often is compromise—letting people talk you out of what your gut is telling you," says Evan.

In 2003, Google acquired Blogger for a rumored $30+ million.

All those "terrible" decisions to keep going ended up being the best choices he ever made.

Looking back, Evan realized the power of accidental success...

8. ✨ Sometimes your side hustle becomes your main thing

Evan originally built Blogger as a distraction from his "real" business.

He thought the collaboration tool would make money and Blogger would just be a free marketing tool.

But users voted with their attention and wallets for the simple blogging tool.

"I think I was also surprised by the success of something so simple," says Evan.

"What we built wasn't that amazing. It was the idea of putting a couple of things together and being able to establish a lead by doing something really, really simple."

Sometimes the thing you build for fun becomes the thing that changes your life.

The key is staying open to opportunities even when they don't match your original plan.

The real lesson? Sometimes the best business strategy is just following what works...

💰 The epic win

Blogger grew to host hundreds of millions of blogs and became a cornerstone of Google's strategy.

In 2003, Google acquired Blogger for a rumored $30+ million.

Evan went from a struggling solopreneur who almost quit multiple times to selling his "simple" idea for life-changing money.

🥂 Your turn to light it up!

That's it, my fellow rebels!

You're convinced you need to be an expert before you can teach or help others.

Evan Williams went from being just another web geek who needed a simple tool to creating the platform that democratized publishing for millions.

"What we built wasn't that amazing. It was the idea of putting a couple of things together and being able to establish a lead by doing something really, really simple," says Evan.

"I think I was also surprised by the success of something so simple," adds Evan.

Stop waiting to become the perfect expert and start helping people with what you already know.

I'm pretty sure you're gonna catch everyone off guard.

Keep rocking! 🚀🍦

Yours 'anti-stress-enjoy-life-while building a biz' vijay peduru 🦸‍♂️