An Email to Bob

A friend emailed me a link to an article about WordPress found Matt Mullenweg. I thought some of you might like to see the reply.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the link http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/the-way-i-work-matt-mullenweg.html. I had to wait a few seconds to get past the commercial. I’m surprised how similar Matt and I are. One  thing I have considered is turning my email off and only checking it 4 times a day. Those urges to read and answer every email that comes in does distract me from my work. Like Matt, who wasted money on getting an office, we almost wasted money on getting an office. It is a complete waste of time. Also, like Matt, I try to work with self motivated people. I do not have the time nor the inclination to look over anyone’s shoulder.

I was just talking with Jim Buckler, the CEO of Soholaunch the other week. We both wondered how Matt made his millions on free software. I guess when you have investors like the New York Times it gets easier. I also see he is a programmer who has done specialized work that is not free. That too is similar to our model. We offer people free listings, free classifieds, free events listings and even access to our free blog. We get advertisers as well as Google Adsense money and web contracts. The software we use is either a small fee or free. All the value goes into the development. People often ask why we charge less than half of the big companies like JPL. We save on the overhead. All the work goes into development and not much money into software. We can do the average $40,000 website contract for $15,000 and so on.

PS I thought I would send you this link since you love your Blackberry. http://blackberry.wordpress.org/ It is another one of Matt’s deals.

To kill two birds with one stone I posted this to our PAontheweb blog. No sense letting a good article go to waste J