SmugMug's Don MacAskill

We’ve had this program for awhile, but as always, we suck at PR so you probably didn’t even know. 🙂

It’s pretty simple: Want to build something on SmugMug’s API? You’ll get a lifetime free Pro account ($150/year value) for doing so. Just sign up for a free trial and then drop us a note letting us know what application you’re gonna build, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Already have a SmugMug account? No worries, we’ll upgrade it and make it free for life. Just let us know.

And yes, we’re cool with everyone building commercial apps on top of SmugMug. Thrilled, in fact – we already have hundreds of them. There are only two exceptions we can think of: ‘SmugMug-in-a-box’ where you’re re-selling SmugMug (lots of people sharing a single account), and a situation where SmugMug is basically a database, like an ad server. When in doubt, just ask. Other than those, go wild.

I sold mine unopened. How a company could make so many blunders, I’ll never know.

It reminds me of how they blew the music player market too. They owned music. Literally. Discman was theirs. Walkman was theirs. They even owned one of the big music labels. Yet Apple is the one who now dominates the market.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist back then to see how Sony could have won, well before Apple even entered the market. How do I know? Because everyone was talking about it online. The recipe for success was on everyone’s lips, ready for the taking. Sony could have made the dominant music player but chose to ignore the customer.

History repeats itself with PS3.

I pray I never lose sight of what our customers want. Thank goodness our customers are very patient with us and keep reminding us of all of our flaws. I promise – we’re listening and working on them.

Chris MacAskill, my father and SmugMug’s co-founder, covers it best: Be different or be damned. It’s in the April 9th issue.

We were lucky enough to be part of a BusinessWeek cover story last November, too.

I was talking with a friend last night about commercial OSes, specifically Linux and Solaris. It dawned on me that those of you in the midst of your own startups would find our experience useful. Sorry I didn’t think about blogging this earlier.

First of all, I love open source. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a major OS problem and not have access to the source code and a community with access to it as well. I love the idea of building companies on open source and then using the success of that company to give back to the people and the community that made it possible.

There are lots of ways of contributing back, but the low hanging fruit for a tiny company like ours is simply buying service and support from one of the open source players, like MySQL or Red Hat. It’s a win-win, theoretically – they get funding to continue to build and test great software, and you get the service and support you need to grow your business.

We’ve been through a few commercial open-source OS distributions at SmugMug. All the gory details after the jump.

Read more…

ETech is next week, and I’m doing a session called Scalability: Set Amazon’s Servers on Fire, Not Yours. I’m not paid by Amazon or anything (quite the contrary – I’m paying them a lot of money), so this will be a real look at them from someone in-the-trenches. It’ll mostly focus on S3, both business and technical aspects, but I’ll touch on EC2 and some of the others, too. (I had hoped to be using EC2 large-scale by this talk, but ironically, a hardware vendor supply issue is preventing me from rolling out that software). I’ll leave plenty of time for questions, and you can give me some in advance. I will post slides here.

Web 2.0 Expo is coming up, and I’m giving a shorter talk there as one of three speakers on Web-scale Computing. Ditto on slides.

And finally, I just got invited to sit on a “build or buy” panel at MIX07. Since I’ve done both, and ended up with a hybrid approach, I hope I’ll have something intelligent to add. Doubt there are slides for this, but if there’s an audio recording or something, I’ll link to it.

I’m attending, but not speaking at, the MySQL Conference and D (the WSJ uses SmugMug for their D photo sharing, which is cool), too, so if you’re going and want to chat about Amazon or SmugMug, you’ll have to find me in the halls. (I’m definitely a “halls” conference goer, though I lean towards “party” now and then).

As always, if you’re wearing SmugMug gear (you can get some older stuff at CafePress and newer stuff at Zazzle or home-make some if you’re adventurous) at a conference I’m at, I’ll give you a comp’d lifetime Pro account at SmugMug. Just come up and say ‘Hi!’

Oh, yes, and I’ll be Twittering at all of them, assuming Twitter doesn’t collapse under ETech’s load. 🙂

UPDATE: ETech 2007 slides are up.

The Penny Gap post by First Round Capital that I talked about in my last post got me thinking. He had a provocative statement: “I can’t think of a single premium service that has achieved truly viral distribution.”

As I posted on his blog, I guess it depends on your definition of “truly viral” (and maybe even “premium”, which I took to mean “no free offering”), but there were two mentioned in the comments: Netflix and SmugMug.

Obviously, there’s orders of magnitude difference here, but the point remains. Netflix grew initially much by word-of-mouth using loyal customers and those bright red envelopes of theirs. They’re clearly a massive success, clearly premium, and clearly truly viral.

60-80% of SmugMug subscribers are referrals from other SmugMuggers. There’s a gray area where we don’t have enough data, hence the range, but we think it’s on the high side of that figure. We’ve had >100% growth every year, every customer pays, our subscribers are akin to religious fanatics, and we’ve been profitable since year one. Our marketing budget mostly consists of customer service costs – there’s almost no money spent on traditional marketing. (We view Customer Service, or our Support Heroes as we call them, as a marketing expense. I should blog about that sometime…). By my definition, we qualify.

So that’s two. But surely there are more and I’m just having a brain fart. Can anyone think of any others?