Soup.GroundPlane.org

“

Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal excitedly told me about their master plan in the summer of 2008. They were going to build a new blogging service where users would send posts by email instead of by using a web interface. It was to be called Posterous, and I don’t think they had written single a line of code at that point. I laughed at them. “Another blogging service? Don’t we have enough of those,” I asked. “And by email? That’s just a feature any other service can add. You’re crazy.”

Tan and Agarwal hunkered down in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, MA and wrote thousands of lines of code. They launched Posterous on June 28th, 2008. Within weeks, thousands of people were actively using the service. It has now been about two years since they launched, and Posterous is visited by millions of people every month. I use it almost every day. You’re reading this on a Posterous blog.

Posterous took an idea and executed it extremely well. They launched early, with the minimum viable number of features, and then tested their theory that email was a better interface for posting — and of course it is, because everyone has an email account. Then they rapidly iterated. They added features one-by-one until finding themselves with a complete product that really is the dead simple way to post anything anywhere. They found a missing market in the blogging industry.

”