Tech~Surf~Blog: MindTouch Is Kicking Wiki Butt
When I read an article recently in Information Week that compared various options for content management systems, including wikis, I thought it was strange Mindtouch wasnt included. So, I asked cofounder Aaron Fulkerson, who was equally perplexed. “Were seeing 500 too 600 installations of our software every single day, and yet many in the media dont seem to know us,” he said. Aaronfulkerson “Weve seen 2304% growth in adoption in the last year. And a 1666% growth in just the last three months.” Similar open-source companies, like SugarCRM and Zimbra, he told me, have had $20-30M in investment and drive similar adoption rates to what MindTouch has achieved with just a $3.5M investment to date. I say thats a pretty powerful entrepreneurial story. “Weve achieved the success we have so far by being open, honest, and authentic. We listen to our tribe,” said Fulkerson.
Yes, apparently MindTouch does know how to build community. I think we’ve proven this. Our company’s growth is directly attributable to our ability to build a community around our products. Personally, I’m amazed how quickly we’ve done this. We only just launched Deki Wiki July 25, 2006. We have managed to cultivate a vibrant community in one short year!
To be clear, our ability to build community is largely attributable to our product. However, all the cool community technologies in the world are useless if you’re not honest, authentic and attentive to the wishes of your tribe. We listen to our tribe. They know best.
When I say our product I want to be clear about something. Deki Wiki isn’t MindTouch’s product. It stopped being MindTouch’s product about four months ago when it “hit” big and we went from 50 downloads a day to a few hundred a day. When I say our product I’m including the extended community of users and developers in that ‘our’. In short Deki Wiki belongs to the tribe. MindTouch is only the primary implementer of the tribe’s desires and needs. This tribe has increasingly steered the development of Deki Wiki. Beyond the product road map the tribe has also dictated things like product messaging and pricing. MindTouch is only adapting to the input provided by the tribe.
Aaron Fulkerson 