In order to raise some funds for his business without giving in to the strings that came attached to true venture capital funds (he had an offer on the order of 1.5 million if he wanted it), Dean Allen– author of Textpattern had a good idea. He offered up 200 spots (the VC200) to those who wanted to pony up $199 for lifetime hosting on his new TextDrive hosting service (and a free t-shirt). He sold all the spots in around 80 hours. I am happy to be one of those early adopters.
This is getting a lot of notice in blogging circles, with much of the focus being on how effective this rather simple idea was. It’s certainly a financial no-brainer. I can ill afford to waste extra cash, but if the service were to last only two years I would have saved double my investment in hosting fees while supporting a developer, service, and software that I enjoy.
That last clause is the important aspect of all of this. Dean didn’t raise 40k in three days. Dean was rewarded with a 40k investment after years in the weblog community, creation of the Textile markup system and then the elegan Textpattern software, and a consistent record of good-natured, excellent, responsive interaction with those who use his software.
Dean (and his partner, Jason) continue to hit the right notes. Interested in the service but using the other popular blogging tool WordPress? No problem, sign up and he donates 10% to the WordPress development fund. Have a question about a feature or specs? They’ll not only give you a straight answer, but the answer might contain a useful look at the personal philosophy driving their business
That’s what caused me to make the investment (and stick with TextPattern through my growing pains). I don’t always agree with Dean, but I respect that he has a passion for what he does and a direction he wants to go. Some things I might like to see in Textpattern aren’t going to appear there just because I want it– or even because it is considered “popular”– if it doesn’t fit in with the elegant and productive Textpattern model of content management.
I look forward to TextDrive following the same path and offering a focused, powerful, and useful suite of tools that make sense for users like us (”us” being Dean, Jason, and the Textpattern community) rather than a poorly maintained batch of “features” that exist solely to populate a matrix comparing competing services. What makes Textpattern special– and what will set TextDrive apart– isn’t captured by such crude assessments.
[...] I was talking with Jason Hoffman of Joyent over a few pints in London about the early days of Text Pattern and how Dean Allen originally turned his personal passion into a real business. It is a perfect example of why things are different today than before, but it is also clearly about business in the age of personal power and open, participatory networks. Dean could not have found a better partner than Jason. He is clearly one of the smartest people I have ever met in the Valley, and I have met quite a few people in my 5 years living there. I can’t do the entire story justice here (Chris Lott did), but the interesting part I want to share is the story of the VC200 - which was the 200 people who answered Dean’s call for pre-paying for a year’s worth of hosting at $199 each, giving the company enough money to get up and running without having to sell their soul to the venture capitalists. [...]