10+1 Questions with Vernon Lun of TheGoodBlogs

Vernon Lun is a partner at TheGoodBlogs. He’s a veteran software engineer (if you look hard enough you’ll find that he calls himself, “A 40-something Knight of the Old Code”) with tons of big corporate experience.

And now he’s a bootstrapping, working like a maniac and lovin’ almost every minute of it, entrepreneur.

Vernon’s also a smart guy. Duh. He’s got a Ph.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. In his thesis he formulated a framework for distributed real-time intelligence. Whatch you talkin’ about Vernon?

Vernon and I sat down in the virtual world known as sending emails back and forth and did a quick, entertaining interview. 10+1 questions about himself, his experience and of course, TheGoodBlogs.

First, let me give you my explanation of TheGoodBlogs. It’s a “widget” that you can install on your blog. When you join TheGoodBlogs you get a snippet of code. Copy and paste that into your blog (most typically in the sidebar) and you’re set. What it does is display a list of links from other blogs within your category. So if you’ve got a business blog, you’ll see links from the general and business categories. Your audience can click the links to find other valuable content and blogs. And of course, your posts are displayed on other people’s blogs as well.

On my own blog I’ve had the widget in place for about 2 weeks. In that timeframe I’ve received 67 clicks to my blog, and 56 clicks have gone out to other blogs. You can judge those results for yourself…

Interview Highlights

Some quick things that stuck out for me:

• The catchy use of the phrase, “burn your own boats”
• When Vernon says, “For us, failure is an option every day.”
• Vernon’s recognition of his own passion is awesome.
• Vernon’s honesty about the money making opportunities from blogging.
• His understanding of difficulties facing Web 2.0 businesses.
• He’s drank the Kool-aid as they say. He’s a believer. Rock on, Vernon.

On With the Interview!

1. What’s the 7-second elevator pitch on TheGoodBlogs?

TheGoodBlogs is a network that allows bloggers to promote each other on their own blogs. If you have 5,000 views or less a day, then you’re potentially a good blog waiting to be discovered. We help bloggers and their readers discover each other.

2. Why did you start it?

We’ve always been interested in the dynamics of communities and mass collaboration since the Cluetrain Manifesto and the extremely long tail in the blogosphere was a great opportunity to do something very different. No one to our mind actively promotes blogs as much as we do especially the ones in the long tail. Frankly, that’s where the real stuff is, the high volume blogs tend to skew their content to attract and maintain their audience. 95% of the long tail blog because they have a passion for writing and sharing.

3. Do people really click on the links in TheGoodBlogs widget? Do you have any metrics on things like clickthrough rates, etc.?

We run a pretty complex engine at the backend that tracks every widget view and every click through. Promoting bloggers is no different from advertising except we don’t promote product, we promote bloggers. We can tell you down to the hour how your blog is doing and where your traffic is coming from. The metrics are changing so fast it’s hard to pinpoint a number. We’ve scaled from 0 to 7 million promotions in 3 months. Clickthroughs can vary wildly from to 2-10% across the network depending on the day and what’s in the news. That’s not bad considering there’s so much going on in an average blog from links in stories, ads, blogrolls, widgets etc.

4. I know you and your partner are self-funding the project. I believe on your blog you wrote (and I’m paraphrasing), “We believed so much in this we quit our jobs and went into debt.” How are you enjoying bootstrapping?

It’s scary and at the same time exhilarating. So many projects are done part-time for good reason but you’ll find the quality of service suffers, features and bug fixes take a long time. We put in 10-12 hours every day and there’s never a lull or a dull moment. There’s definitely more focus and determination if you burn your boats!

5. Are you planning on taking angel or VC money? Have any angels or VCs come sniffing around?

We’ve had a couple of inquiries but our strategy is to try and stay independent a little longer for a couple of reasons. Our first and foremost one is to build a loyal community. Sometimes taking money too early forces you to make decisions that may improve your business model but hurt your community long-term. By staying small, we can be extremely agile and take risks and experiment. For us, failure is an option every day. Also, it takes an enormous amount of time courting VCs and the due diligence that follows, etc., right now we simply don’t have enough time to do a good job doing that and make sure we have the right partners on-board.

6. How challenging is the development / technology aspect of TheGoodBlogs? You’re a techie - is this taxing your tech-skills?

Both Tony and I have extensive development backgrounds. However, we leverage a tremendous amount of open source as a starting basis. When you’re shaping the business, it doesn’t make sense to spend 6 months building an infrastructure that you may have to throw away because your business is evolving so rapidly. Open source isn’t free, there’s a lot of customization and the learning curve is steep (usually documentation is sparse.) But you can build and ship prototypes in weeks instead of months. For me, personally, it was a struggle to get back to my roots after 8 years of building teams at a VP and CTO level instead of writing code. But it’s good to do that again, I guess that was always my passion.

7. What barriers to entry do you have against competition starting similar businesses? Do you care about competition? Who is your competition?

Hmm, today, there are very few barriers to entry for any technology. I think giving customers choice is a good hedge against extinction. For example, many people have 2 or 3 ad networks on their blogs. At the end of the day, the only barrier against large corporations like Google who have many smart and well-paid engineers is to build your community (technology is not a barrier) and providing personalized one-to-one service. e.g. we’re still small enough that we’re willing to spend time helping you fix your blog.

8. Briefly, what’s the business model?

we’re trying to figure that out. The obvious one is advertising and it is enough to sustain us as a small company. I think the community and the market will tell us along the way. The problem with Web 2.0 is everything is pretty much free and that’s a hard price to beat. We decided early to concentrate on creating huge value to our members beyond paying them like many ad networks do. In truth, the majority of bloggers in the long tail in the blogosphere will never make enough money to call it a living. It’s like the government giving the country a tax break of a billion dollars and each taxpayer ends up getting 10 bucks. Instead of paying 10,000 bloggers a dollar each, I think a better use is to take 10,000 dollars and create a market drive that promotes all of them. I think it’s terrible when bloggers are told they can make lots of money blogging when it’s not true for most of them.

9. On your website you have a “blog promotion” counter — is that representing the number of blog links that have been displayed in TheGoodBlogs widgets?

Yup, it is the number of times bloggers have been promoted via the widget either on our website, our members’ blogs or Google, Netvibes, Windows Live desktops.

10. Do you have an exit strategy?

Right now I think we’re in this one for the long haul. If an exit did emerge, I would need to be sure that the community would continue to flourish and grow in any new environment.

11. From your entrepreneurial experience to-date what’s the most important lesson you’d want to pass on to others thinking about starting a business?

The most important thing is to start. There are always naysayers, competitors, impediments that will cause you to falter. Then there’s our human side that hesitates for fear of failure. And when you take that plunge, it always seems daunting. The key to not getting stressed by the tremendous mountain you’re about to climb is to ask yourself every single day, “if there’s only one thing I can do today, what would it be?” and then do it. Also be prepared to fail everyday because there’s a lot of learning to be had from each failure.

Conclusion

I wish Vernon nothing but the best. I don’t know if Vernon will succeed or not. Vernon doesn’t know if he’ll succeed or not! But he’s darn sure going to try, and he’s doing what so many others want to do (or are doing.)

TheGoodBlogs has been good to me so far. The biggest bonus (which I didn’t really expect) is that I’m looking at the widget in my sidebar and clicking to content that looks interesting. It’s like a personal, recommendation service for finding great blogs.

If they can keep the quality of the content they’re distributing high (i.e. they can’t let every blogger in!) and people continue to find what they want when they click a link, I see good things for TheGoodBlogs in the future.