Building in the Open

Building something you believe in that’s never existed before and getting people to follow you, and even getting some to buy what you are building is not an easy chore.

Doing so without marketing and a typical sales team doesn’t make it easier, or maybe it does when the founder is out engaging people on the web and openly sharing with the world what they’re building week to week and the good things their team is doing.

As we build the LexBlog Library, an extension of democratizing legal publishing, I thought of introducing digital publishing to lawyers twenty-three years ago. When I discovered a blog and the ability to share your insight and commentary with your audience, I was hell-bent on introducing the concept to lawyers and to empower them with a “turnkey” legal blog solution. I was to going to help lawyers and the people they served.

I grew legal blogging and LexBlog by being open and frank about what I was working on, sharing observations as I went. People commented on my blog site and cited what I was sharing on their blog and in mainstream media. This added to LexBlog’s reputation and its growth.

We don’t have comments on blogs like we used to. But the channels are still there. My blog, LinkedIn too. LinkedIn feels different than my blog. More news and social activity. It builds relationships, but it’ feels a world apart from the openness of a blog.

The clearest example of how this down-to-earth candor works is WordPress.

Look at Matt Mullenweg. He co-founded WordPress in 2003 while at the University of Houston. The same year I started LexBlog.

I stayed away from WordPress at that time. It would have taken me a few lines of code, something that would have been like climbing a mountain for me. Small community. Open-source, not a company a laMovable Type from Six Apart, a typical company that I began to use for LexBlog customers.

Look at WordPress today: 42% of every website in the world. Around 60% of every site with a content management system.

The vast majority of digital legal publishing runs on WordPress. Yet most legal professionals have probably never heard of WordPress, unless they used WordPress in high school or college.

How did WordPress grow like this?

Matt. Here are just a few things he did.

• A founder blog (Unlucky in Cards at ma.tt) with a real voice. Personal. Frequent. He shared what he was building, what was breaking, what he was reading.
• A stated why, repeated. “Democratize publishing.” “Code is poetry.” He never stopped saying it.
• Showing the work in public. Roadmaps. Decisions. Debates. Tradeoffs.
• An annual State of the Word. Once a year, telling the community where things are and where they’re going.
• Crediting the team and the community by name. WordCamps in cities around the world. Contributors thanked publicly.

Heck, when I shared on my blog back in 2003 that I didn’t think WordPress was mature enough for the legal community, Matt jumped on me in a comment on my blog, letting me know about the capability of their coders, the quality of WordPress, and that age doesn’t matter.

I apologized, saying that they weren’t a company à la Six Apart. I was pretty naive. It took us a year and a half to migrate our blogs from Movable Type to WordPress, which our tech team and I now swear by.

This type of frankness and engagement builds a following and growth for an organization.

That model used by Matt and me in the early days of LexBlog works, and is how the Library is going to grow.