There are certain unwritten rules for today's start-up set. You should make sure you're under 30 (and it certainly helps if you're a college dropout). You should set up shop somewhere in Silicon Valley (or at least nearby). You should avoid entering a market where another massive incumbent already has a billion users. And, most importantly, you should never, ever write a manifesto.
Ello founder and CEO Paul Budnitz is breaking every one of those rules. He even went so far as to write his anti-Facebook manifesto from a company office in Burlington, Vermont. And yet, in just a few months, Ello has grown from a tiny online hangout for about 90 artist friends into a backlash-worthy viral phenomenon. Budnitz and company won't say how many people are actually using their social networking service---an ad-free alternative to Facebook---but more than one million people have lined up to join the invite-only "beta" version.
This week, the tech press alternated between marvel and cynical lassitude at the company's explosive growth, with the Verge calling Ello the "doomed utopia we can't stop building." Here at WIRED, Jessi Hempel opined that, like so many anti-Facebookers before them, Budnitz and company "have it wrong." Indeed, many have tried to make this kind of thing work in the past---and failed. But Budnitz, a 47-year-old Yale alum, takes it all in stride. He's used to skepticism. "This is usually the reaction to anything I'm going to do," he says.
People told him that his two earlier businesses were doomed too. When he decided he wanted to sell exquisitely designed titanium bicycles, a friend in the bike industry told him he was nuts. Before that, he created a toy company where all the toys were designed by his street-artist friends in limited edition and sold to adults, and inevitably, he remembers, the response was a sarcastic "Great business plan, Paul."
But the toy company, Kidrobot, was a success. His limited edition bunny-like creatures have hooked Pharrell Williams, among others. And now, he's attracting even more attention from the technorati.
He was once more of a programmer than an artist or designer. As a teenager, Budnitz---the son of a professor and a social worker---spent his evenings biking his ten-speed up to Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science to hack the night away on university computers. Then he decided to study physics at Yale. But after switching to fine arts midway through his undergraduate degree, he spent time selling silk-screened shirts, and then importing vintage clothes to China. He once sold a $35,000 pair of 25-foot-long Levis, specially designed for a circus stilt-walker, to a Japanese collector.
His many businesses, he says, were really just ways of subsidizing his "insane art films." But underneath everything else, he was still a computer geek. When WIRED first wrote about Budnitz in 1996, we were impressed that he'd hacked Adobe's Premier DVD-editing software to cut his 16 mm movie, 93 Million Miles From the Sun. It's no surprise he would turn his attention to the internet.
Budnitz knew that something was deeply wrong with the net when he saw his first ad on Tumblr. He still remembers the way it stood out on his page and made him feel awful. It was a JC Penny ad. For women's leggings. "It just seems like the internet has become one big billboard," Budnitz says. "After a while, it's just kind of disgusting to me. There's a better way to do things. I feel like we've been in the networked TV age of the internet, where the game is: 'How many ads can we show you before we drive you away?'"
So last year, he and some designer friends decided to build their own social network.
With help from a Denver consultancy, Mode Set, they built a service characterized by minimalist black-and-white graphics and no ads. Gradually, it became the social network that Budnitz and close to 100 of his artsy friends wanted to use. "It was totally private. The problem was that as we got toward the end of that year, there were thousands of our friends who wanted to get on Ello."
So they raised $435,000 from a Vermont venture capital fund to create something that could grow. Budnitz says that the idea is not to take over the world, but to keep building something that he---and others---will want to use. That means it will remain a service with no ads. "People keep asking are we competing with Facebook?" Budnitz says. "And I actually believe that Facebook is not a social network at all. It's an advertising platform. We are a social network. That's all we do. Facebook is there for the advertisements."
Ads can work against the users. That's what the founders of the ad-free GitHub social network say too. But GitHub has figured out a way to get big businesses to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for its code. Now, Ello must make some money as well, and it thinks this will come from the users themselves.
When it emerges from beta, Ello will offer a bare-bones interface for most, but users will be able to pay for extra features. "We're going to sell features for $1 or $2 just like an app store," Budnitz says. "You can pick and choose what you want and then you can change your Ello to be like you want it to be. But everyone doesn't have to have it like yours."
He says the site is "purposely very simple. We took Dieter Rams' 'less but better' philosophy to heart. There are no nested menus in Ello."
Right now, Ello is still slightly buggy, and maybe a bit too slim on features for some. Search sucks. But the company has clearly tapped into a deep desire for a Facebook alternative. When the site launched in early August, there were just 90 members---all friends of Budnitz---who had been operating their own private social network for about a year. On Monday, Ello was peaking at 50,000 new member requests per hour. "We kind of expected to scale," he says, "but we kind of didn't expect to scale this fast."
The site really took off a week ago, after Facebook started cracking down on its real-names policy. Ello---whose manifesto, declares "you are not a product" and is fine with aliases---rolled out the welcome mat. "Some people live in places where if you're out, it can be quite dangerous," Budnitz says. "So suddenly there was this giant queer exodus to Ello and all we did was say: 'Come on over. We love you.'"
That doesn't mean the site can challenge Facebook. It doesn't mean it will be a money maker. But it has certainly found a purpose.
