The story of Six Apart

Hi, I'm Mena Trott, Six Apart co-founder. In the spring of 2001, I was doing design work in San Francisco when I began a quirky weblog called Dollarshort. My husband, Ben, and I had met in high school and were working together at a small web design firm that seemed impervious to the dot com bust occurring in the early 2000s. For me, Dollarshort, was a creative outlet, a place for me to tell anecdotes about my childhood, attempt to illustrate humorous accounts of our daily lives, and keep a traditional weblog with links to sites I found interesting.

In September of 2001, the small web design studio Ben and I worked for closed its doors and we were suddenly afforded a lot of free time. Concurrently, Dollarshort was growing in popularity, and I felt that I had outgrown the webblogging software I was using at the time. Faced with the prospect of looking for new jobs, Ben and I decided to take some time off and develop our own weblogging tool that we would share with some of our friends. In September I announced we'd be releasing Movable Type. (The original name was Serge, named for the French singer Serge Gainsbourg). One month later, on October 8, 2001, version 1.0 was available for download.

The morning of the Movable Type 1.0 release, Ben and I sat anxiously in front of our computers, fingers ready to make Movable Type available to the public. Were we ready to dive into the world of software development? Could we support our users? Would we be able to develop Movable Type and still have the "real jobs" necessary to support ourselves. Most importantly, Ben and I knew that once we released Movable Type, we were committed to its development. With no turning back, we launched the website and within the first hour over 100 people had downloaded the software.

Prior to the release, Ben and I had told ourselves that we would take three months off to work on Movable Type. After that, we would begin to search for jobs and Movable Type would remain a hobby. Not long after the launch, we realized that the scale of Movable Type's popularity was much greater than we had expected. It had become a full time job for both of us and the donations we were receiving for its development were enough to pay the rent. What had started as a hobby had turned into full-time job, complete with 70 hour weeks. Nine months after the initial release, Ben and I knew that we needed to make a decision about our future and the future of Movable Type.