Matt Mullenweg

  • Speaker: Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Wordpress and Akismet (anti-spam)
  • Started the company Automatic software company
  • What is the problem with scaling your community?
    • Shows screenshot of a web forum
    • Shows Wordpress weblog
    • Shows Godin’s blog, no comments
  • What is scaling?
  • How do you keep the intimate feeling of a rock concert when you’re speaking to a half-empty room?
  • You have to set up a good Foundation
  • Steps
    • Start as simply as possible
      • Break things down in the simplest way you can articulate
      • Everything that is currently free will always be free
      • We will never sell your email address
      • Don’t just promise, visualize
    • Bootstrap
      • Be your most passionate user
      • Get outside your blog or website and talk to people
      • Pre-moderate
    • Let it go
      • Release some control of your community
      • If you’ve bootstrapped well enough, your will have raised people who are even more enthusiastic about your site than you are
      • Your users will steer it better than you may be able to
  • Use open source
  • Embrace and extend
  • Personalization
    • Different from Customization
    • Every action your user makes on your site is sacred. Every tag, every click.
    • Personalizaiton is fundamentally a filter. Work to filter in only things people want, based on past actions or defaults
    • Keep it fresh
    • Make it magical. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Make your application give users the willies.