Doodlekit is a free online website builder that helps you build a personal or business website. One of the tool's creators, Heath Huffman, credited 37signals and our book Getting Real as inspirations in his post Doodlekit takes on Business 2.0.
One day we came across a blog post from a small internet startup company called 37Signals that changed everything. The blog post, How To Shoot A Bullet Through Your Startup, railed against Business 2.0. It defied Corporate America’s view on how to run a web company. It denounced the waste, bureaucracy, and mindset of these entities that limited others from pursuing their dreams.
We loved it.
37Signals explained that you could start your own Web 2.0 company with hardly anything down and just one or two people. They had done all this themselves and had great success. Ben and I raced out to their website and purchased their online book, Getting Real, that explained in more detail how to achieve this type of success. We sat down and read the whole thing in one night...
The next day we started Doodlekit. We scrounged up $300 each, grabbed an old refurbished PC from Ben’s basement, slapped in some extra memory from my old computer, and we were off ‘getting real’!
A year and a half later (just 4 months ago) we had our first major release of Doodlekit. Since that time our membership base has increased to over 15,000 and our revenues have gone up 10 fold. We have zero debt.
Most of our competitors are multi-million dollar startups from the Business 2.0 way of doing things. Many of them still have yet to break even. We compete head-to-head with these companies and hold our own. How? Because Doodlekit is a much better product than what they offer...
We aren’t out to be the next MySpace or YouTube. We aren’t measuring our success based on millions of dollars. We just want to make a decent living doing what we love doing – building websites! Doodlekit and 37Signals has given us both this opportunity, and for that, we are very grateful.
Thanks for the shoutout Heath. Great to hear our ideas have inspired you and that it's all worked out so great.
