3by9

Being Unsexy In A Web 2.0 World

BusinessWeek had a great article about SixApart selling LiveJournal, and in the article they had a brilliant quote:

Six Apart isn’t a badly run company; it has just become unsexy amid newer Web 2.0 names.

This really sums up a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently and is such a simple and perfect way to say it.

A problem I see in the tech industry, or in the startup field in general, is that companies only get talked about if they’re doing something new or innovative: blowing people’s hair back. Obviously in the tech world or in Silicon Valley, the “tech” part of the “tech business” is what is focused on, not the second half. Not revenues or marketing plans. Not their plans to branch out past the people who know what tagging is. Not how little debt they have. It’s all about the code, the flashy features, the innovative ideas, the talent working on those ideas, the look-and-feel. Everything that makes a company sexy, at least to the eyes of Valleyites. So in the BusinessWeek article, when SixApart was summed up as being “unsexy” I instantly thought it meant the following things:

• Not a lot of flashy or innovative features, at least not the kind that technophiles drool over.
• They make money and have a solid revenue plan.

So they’re unsexy… so what? I don’t think SixApart cares about their Alexa ranking or their trendiness anymore. They are a company with offices in multiple countries, with established businesspeople at the helm, and they’re focused on making money and pleasing customers. They’re not focused on being the talk of the tech circuit and getting a thousand virtual trackbacks. They’re not standing in the media spotlight like some people you know.

I think being unsexy is what startups should shoot for, because all being sexy does is get you writeups on all the blogs that nobody reads, and people signing up for your beta never to return. Being unsexy means you’re thinking about the “unsexy” parts of running a business, namely: making it a business through revenue and planning. If a site is making millions of dollars but looks bad, nobody will talk about it. Do you know how much money this guy makes?!?!? Nobody knew about him before he opened his mouth, but Marcus runs the site by himself, out of his apartment, and makes 5-6 figure AdSense revenues each day. His site’s not sexy but it brings in tons of cash and has a contented userbase. It won’t win any awards at these lame startup-Web-2.0 launchpad conferences, but it makes more money than all of them. 0 debt, tons of cash, and an unsexy interface. I’ll take it.