
Looking Back on Selling Gravatar to Automattic - mojombo
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-selling-gravatar-to-automattic.html
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MicahWedemeyer
The next time someone bitches to me about scaling, I'm going to point them to
this article. It's a perfect example of why designing to scale from the
beginning is usually bullshit.

It's only worth scaling once you know you have something worth it. Why design
all sorts of crazy cache schemes, redundant load balancers, and master-slave
databases when your actual product is crap? All you end up doing is slowing
yourself down. Get some validation first that anyone is going to swallow your
idea.

Sure, he had some late nights and some angry emails, but that's because he was
dealing with the growing pains of being a success. Better that than the
loneliness and depression of working endlessly and never getting anything out
the door.

~~~
mojombo
I've found that it's best to find some sort of sweet spot. Not so simple that
later scaling requires a huge rewrite, but not so complex that you're spending
valuable time up front to scale something that may never need it. I now try to
code the first version as a simple version of the later version. Think ahead,
but build for the present.

~~~
drusenko
keeping scaling in mind helps a lot, but the real problems you'll run into
then are the ones you're not aware of... like a 32,000 directory limit on
linux. as your application grows, you just get blindsided at random, and need
to put out fires constantly.

and that's where experience with scaling comes in handy. if you don't have it,
the next best thing you can do is to have a knowledgeable friend, read up on
best practices, and deal with fires quickly.

~~~
nostrademons
You can also setup a script to load up a million fake users onto a spare box
and then mimic some typical activity. This'll catch a lot of the unforseen
problems that'll show up: it'd catch that 32k directory limit, it caught the
>1000 files/directory slowdown when I tried it, and it'll catch most database
indexing or join problems. And if your test computer is much slower than the
computer driving the requests, you can catch CPU or I/O bottlenecks in the
webserver stack. I use P2/200 Mhz that's 10 years old for this and ping it
from my parent's desktop that they bought last year.

There're still unforseen problems - there always are - but you can flush out
some of the more obvious issues. And the testing can run concurrently with
some of the last minute design tweaks, so it doesn't cost all that much in
development time. Or do it after you launch when you've got a spare moment;
very few websites get big immediately.

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mhartl
I'm so glad Tom shared this. I've always wondered how Gravatar got started,
grew, and ended up being bought by Automattic.

N.B. As many people here know, Tom is one of the GitHub founders. And yes,
GitHub uses Gravatars.

~~~
mojombo
Once Automattic took over and scaled Gravatar out with their amazing CDN,
adoption really ramped up. I use them without pause on my own projects, and
I'm really happy to not have to configure my avatar every place I go!

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dannyr
Tom,

I hope you continue writing posts like this. For an aspiring entrepreneur,
it's inspiring to hear the stories from people who have taken the risks.

By the way, we worked in the same company before in San Diego. I was miserable
so I just quit and moved to the Bay area.

~~~
mojombo
I'm really glad you enjoyed it! Were you at Active? I'll write a post later on
about how I ended up moving to SF. Good call on the move, this area is
amazing.

~~~
dannyr
Yup Active. We were in the same team. Crazy Rob and I know each other. The
Active home page was "cameronized" last week.

Moving here is probably the best decision I've made in terms of my career.
It's easier to meet like-minded people. I got to know startup founders and
employees with no effort at all.

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shafqat
This could be one of the best posts that I've seen here on Hacker News. Great
job Preston.

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azsromej
I would imagine this success made walking away from that other success
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338286>) easier. And, of course, GitHub
is proving an even greater success.

Your story, once written, will be one of a man fighting tooth and nail with
success coming from all directions.

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hollerith
I wonder how much Gravatar sold for?

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mojombo
Unfortunately I'm contractually obligated to keep that information private. If
I could tell you the number, I would have no problem doing so, as it would be
instructive and beneficial to the startup community to have comparison numbers
on which to base their own decisions. Keeping dollar amounts private almost
always only benefits the larger company involved. If other companies had
better/more data, they would have more leverage during negotiations. Such
information is very valuable for evaluating what a fair market price is.

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Harkins
"It was also made clear by Toni that Automattic would maintain Gravatar as a
separate brand and continue its evolution (instead of just absorbing it into
WordPress)."

I just looked at getting a gravatar for my Github account. I didn't do it
because the signup page told me I was actually signing up for a Wordpress
account and I needed to choose a handle I could never ever change. I wanted an
icon, not to make an irrevocable decision and sign up for some unrelated site,
so I gave up. The author writes "Gravatar was a feature"; I felt the same way:
I was left wondering why GitHub would outsource a feature for another company
to confuse.

Lots of nice history here, though. Great blog post.

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mojombo
I think it was inevitable that Automattic would more closely integrate the two
products, but they're doing it in a way that maintains both brands. As far as
having to choose a permanent identifier on signup, it's not the path I would
have chosen (signup forms need to be as dead simple as painless as possible),
but it certainly doesn't seem like too high a hurdle for most people to jump.

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davidw
Cool. I guess it's a 'make something people want' story: it's one of those
things that I look at and say "boring", but people wanted it, so it was
successful.

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paul9290
People have no idea what they want, until the crowd wants it!

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adldesigner
Excellent post. Thanks for sharing.

