The power of many at work for Textpattern

Liza Sabater

Something amazing happened at Textpattern over the course of a month. I could kick myself for having missed this.

Dean Allen had been mulling for a while how to go about developing his open-source blogging tool into a sustainable product. So the idea of web hosting came up; something like TypePad but open-source.

Initially though, he talked to venture capitalists. This is where Jason Hoffman, his partner in this venture enters the picture :

Just wanted to start with some comments about Dean and what he's done.

Dean: Now, I've been talking in recent weeks with piqued, twitchy venture capital people about TextDrive's startup, and through that it's become abundantly clear that VC is not the way to go. Startup funding is required, but not at that price.

Oddly enough, I started on the opposite side from Dean (despite having been a Textpattern user - I had first set it up for my wife, a writer). In March, a venture investment group that I consult and do due diligence for wanted to get into the "weblog thing" (one of the partner’s daughters apparently uses TypePad to put up pictures of the grandkids and "a lightbulb went off") and someone on their staff pinpointed Textpattern as the one to target first. MT/Typepad was spoken for, Blogger was Googled, Wordpress was GPL'ed (because it has to be), Blosxom didn’t have an interface, and while there are a few others out there, they thought that Textpattern was the "best available", had a good following and a smart developer.

After some thought, I decided to join Dean's "team" instead and work on getting him the best deal/valuation possible. So all said and done, it was a sweet deal, about as good as they get. Dean would have been able to pay cash for most of his house, a solid salary, the beginnings of a staff, an office in California, and the beginnings of his own NOC.

Amazingly, he ended up turning it all down and asked me to put together a different plan. One that would more closely involve the gamma users and allow Textpattern to go open-source and still provide some people to use Textpattern in commercial settings/applications. We came up with a dual-license approach that allow users to choose, and are focusing on providing services (like TextDrive) to members of the community.

Now, Dean decided this before any of this Movable Type hoopla.

He's a good guy, who was the first Textpattern user and hasn't forgotten it. I, for one, am impressed enough to have been putting a lot my own free time into this.

Together we can turn it into something successful, that will eventually pay Dean a salary.

You first 200 are basically the VCs now.

What Jason means is that, in turning down the VC money, Allen decided to reach out to the community of people that were using his product for free. The first 200 to pay $200 for Allen's new project, would basically buy themselves web hosting service for life. The result? Allen was able to raise in 75 hours the $40,000 in seed money needed to launch TextDrive.

The service should go live today.