It's Working

Thursday, July 23, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Good evening.

I'm taking off for a few days, both pleasure and business, but before I take a hike, a big loose end to clean up.

On June 1, in Recasting, I said there was doubt whether my company, UserLand Software, would go forward. We were going to take Frontier commercial, and I wanted to be straight with our users, I wasn't certain that it would work.

This morning, in a phone coversation with one of our users, I was reminded that I had never closed the loop on this. Now I'd like to do that.

It's working. We're going forward. We were profitable both in June and July. We made our July number on the 10th, and sales have stayed strong thru the month. We're developing a surplus and it feels like we're just getting started.

We're doing important deals. The first one that's public is the Sports Illustrated Goodwill Games site. We're working on others privately that we're very excited about and looking forward to showing off.

We're learning how our three products tie together and where they are separate. Clearly DaveNet, Scripting News and Frontier are related. Now we're starting to get formal about the relationships. We're acting like a business. Sorting out our priorities and our brands. We're aiming more before we pull the trigger. People are motivated by stock options. The usual company things. This is a group of people that very much wanted to be a real company. We're doing it.

XML-RPC is rolling. We've learned that steady consistent evangelizing works better than trying to make it happen fast. This is a technology we're serious about investing in because it plays so well to the strengths of our product and the skills of our community. It's a longterm deal. It's taking a while for the lightbulbs to go on, but it is happening.

So it's still about people and technology and money, and now it's also about sales and customers too. We have great ambitions. We're going forward and I wanted everyone to know that.

Dave Winer