Dollarshort

Five Facts About Mena Trott

When meeting new people at Blogher, every introduction inevitably starts with the "what's your blog?" question. For the first time in the past seven years, I don't have an easy answer. The answer, for years, has been rote -- I'm dollarshort.org, but I blog at something called Mena's Corner. But that hasn't been true for a while. Then I blogged privately at Vox -- an answer that didn't really excite those who wanted to check my posts out. As I awkwardly explained this answer to one woman, I jokingly said "I need to come up with a better answer for tomorrow."

So if the answer is "dollarshort.org," here's a view into the old Mena and five fun five facts about the new Mena.

I still speak at conferences now and then.

I'll be speaking tomorrow at Blogher about taking back "naked blogging." It's all about pulling back from the blogging spotlight and retreating for various reasons. The past week has caused me to do a lot of thinking about my choice to stop blogging publicly (I've blogged consistently and privately on Vox for the past couple years). For example, not making this list of the "50 Most Influential 'Female' Bloggers (don't know what the awkward quotes around female are all about) gave me a chance to reflect on my role in the blogging world. On one hand I questioned if making myself so forgettable was a good thing. On the other hand, I didn't the same pangs of jilt (I like that phrase), I would have felt if this list had been posted a couple years ago. This makes me feel I made the right decision to pull away. That said, I still want to participate and build back my blog. And I still want to be out there and speak. So I'm taking more speaking engagements lately, including The Start Conference in August.

I've been blogging at another blog -- Nested -- off and on since I was pregnant.

This has been a quite a fun project of mine because I started completely anonymously. I wanted to see the blogging experience from the point of view of someone starting completely fresh and didn't want to rely on any of my connections in the blogging world to build traffic. I'd love to get back to the two to three posts daily schedule, but am still struggling to find the time to do this and take care of my daughter, Penelope. Which brings me to the next fact.

I'm a stay-at-home mom now.

When you are a co-founder of a company and your spouse (and co-founder) still puts in crazy start-up hours, it's impossible to ever really be removed from the day-to-day. I'm part-time now which means I come in once a week (with Penelope in tow) and work from home on a individual project basis. I actually have been putting in almost full-time hours designing a project launching soon and have had a chance to blissfully do some pure design work. I'm a stay-at-home mom that just happens to work-at-home too.

 

Having a child has changed me (in a good way).

I had no idea I was going to be the parent I am right now. Many of the neuroses I carried with me my entire life seemingly vanished overnight. This isn't too say I'm still neurotic, I'm just less neurotic. I like to think of it this way -- I'm like the patient in the mental ward (figuratively) who has gone from self-soothing through rocking to just looking like there's a good song playing somewhere.

Being a mom has forced me to become less self-centered and more aware of the small thing/big thing differences in life. Yes, I still have dreams that I'm being picked on by my seventh-grade classmates but when I wake up I'm able to laugh it off a bit better. Being at Blogher has made me more aware of this change. For example, in 2005, when I attended the first Blogher someone had written a post about how (and I paraphrase) "Mena Trott had the chance to talk to all these fabulous and interesting women at Blogher and instead chose to sit by herself and bury herself in her computer." The person didn't take in account that I'm actually quite shy when it comes to introducing myself. I almost never approach anyone because I'm intimidated, but once we're in a conversation I'll become quite extroverted. Since Penelope has been born, a lot of this fear has disappeared, though I still find it difficult at times to go up to a person and say hello.

I'm so so proud of Six Apart and everyone at the company.

Once again Blogher has been a massive reminder of why we do what we do. I have met women at this conference who have used our products since inception and they're incredibly complimentary and effusive. I've been wanting to say this for a long time: Yes, we seriously messed up when we changed our licensing FOUR years ago. The industry was a bit different then and for a company that (at the time) had only about 500k in funding, we wanted to be sustainable. We may have been stupid with our decisions and execution, but we were always ethical. And, we paid the price by losing a number of our best customers. But to this day, we're a company of bloggers for bloggers who really want to do the best for this industry. Hating Six Apart is so 2004.

Bonus Fact

I'm even more proud of our customers and all bloggers (whether they use our products or not)

Back to Blogher. When I'm talking to these women, I'm amazed how far we all have come. When I go to my dentist or see a relative, I don't have to explain that my job has something to do with "online journals that are often written daily and in reverse chronological order." If someone has internet access, they read a blog (even if they don't know it). It has been a revolution and any tool that can make a person feel less isolated and connected to a greater group is remarkable. I've talked to bloggers who have been saved emotionally (and physically) because of blogging. And that's a really awesome thing.

Five Years with Anil Dash

I'd be remiss if I let the anniversary of Anil's five years [1] at Six Apart pass without a post here on Dollarshort. Especially since Valleywag already mentioned his dedication in their own special way. 

Whether you like Anil Dash or not, few can honestly doubt his passion for blogging and for our company. Even the fine folks who like to accidentally misspell his first name in comments will have to admit he has a zealousness to his craft of evangelism that very few in our industry possess. Even if he drives you crazy with his desire to play devil's advocate or his need for a little exaggeration here or there, Anil does so with such sincerity it's difficult to truly fault him. 

Anil is Six Apart -- as much so as Ben or I am. And it's been a pleasure to work with him and learn from him. We were friends before we were ever co-workers and this friendship began as a result of this pathetic post that Anil wrote in 2001. Even if Anil now takes pleasure in mocking his tendencies to bloviate, he is, deep down a person who can still be humbled by some praise or a sincere gesture by a friend. 

Since Anil isn't dead and I'm not writing his obituary, I should probably wrap this up. What better way to end a post about his commitment to blogging and Six Apart than with a photo that shows the dedication writ large?. Here is a photo from the week five years ago when he became an "official" employee. He's crashing on the couch in our office -- aka the spare bedroom in the Trott apartment -- after a long night of work. 

 

[1] Today is also the five-year anniversary of our first funding announcement and our intentions to launch TypePad.

More About Roots & Growth

The first few paragraphs of our news post about the launch of Six Apart Services and Six Apart Media do quite a nice job of connecting the work we did in the early years to the direction we're going in today. While Six Apart has come a long way since our core business model was all about "recently updated" keys[1] and installations by Ben, these new additional services are clearly evolved from those roots (plus the addition of tons of talented people -- a nice change from just the two of us).

We're incredibly happy to have the Apperceptive folks join Six Apart. You may not have heard about them prior to the announcement, but you most likely have seen and admired their work. A warm welcome to the entire team, especially co-founder David Jacobs. They're quite a talented team who understand what a good blog (and good blogging) is all about.

[1] In the early days -- from October 2001 to about January 2004 -- I sent out all the recently updated keys personally. There was a little script I'd run that would generate a random key after I entered the donor's email address (which I got from PayPal). Then, I would send an email to the person with the key(s). Even though I used a form letter, I'd always make sure to greet them by name -- which required me to check out their blog. This, of course, didn't scale well but I refused to automate it further -- I liked the personal connection to these folks. Even though the task became a bit overwhelming, I now look back at it with much fondness.

And, I still remember who the first donor was -- Dawn M (from a life uncommon). It's great to see she's an accomplished photographer and powers her site with Movable Type 4. And she had a daughter too!