Iain Dodsworth
TweetDeck
Iain Dodsworth founded TweetDeck in London in 2008. TweetDeck is a personal “browser” that enables users to monitor Twitter, Facebook and other social networking feeds in a dashboard.
Prior to TweetDeck, he worked as a contractor in London’s financial district. He developed TweetDeck to solve his own difficulties with too much information on Twitter. Witnessing TweetDeck’s explosive growth, Twitter bought the start-up in 2011 for a reported $40 million. At the date of sale, TweetDeck had more than 20 million downloads.
Pedro Santos: How did TweetDeck start? How did it start as an idea, and how did you go from there until you actually launched it?
Iain Dodsworth: It started as an idea through trying to use Twitter to consume a lot of the information that I found of value, and actually finding it quite difficult. As more and more of the data came through, it became harder and harder to actually ingest it all, and understand it, and keep up with it, and then obviously respond to it as well. So for me, personally, there was quite a problem using it, especially as it was growing in its user base, and therefore in its utility. This would have been around early 2008. And so in playing with it and finding these issues, I started thinking, “How could I just solve this problem for me?”
It wasn’t really a case of trying to start a company, or founding a business. It was more the kind of excitement and satisfaction in solving a problem, my problem, not looking for somebody else’s problem, which I think is generally the best approach to doing this kind of thing, and getting a level of satisfaction from it.
So I developed an app. I wrote an interface to Twitter which solved my problems. It also happened to solve my problems with Facebook and other social media as well. There seemed to be quite a lot that I could do with this interface, it felt extensible.
I gave the app, which I called TweetDeck, to a few technical friends, in the same area of engineering as myself and they were impressed. So much so they ignored my instructions to not distribute it and sent it out far and wide.
I was simply solving my problem which, of course, I thought was rather unique. The fact that there was no product that solved these problems already on the market led me to believe that there was no one else having these kinds of problems. So, it kind of shocked me to see people react as positively as they did.
The thing that they were talking about that really made the product stand out was that it was very different from anything else. It was very dark. It had a lot of data moving around at the same time. It didn’t adhere to the conventional wisdom that says you don’t create a black application because that’s bad for readability, battery life etc. I wasn’t creating something for anyone else, I wasn’t trying to create something huge. I didn’t have to adhere to anybody else’s rules and that was important to making it stand out.
Having no constraints and being able to just create whatever I wanted is a wonderful way of producing something, which is certainly an approach I would seek to adhere to in any future projects.
So anyway, I gave it to a few people. They were quite blown away by it. The fact that it was full screen was another interesting feature they’d never really seen before. Some would ask why do you need a full screen application for something as simple as Twitter?
Dodsworth: But, when users started to use it they saw the benefit of actually doing one thing very well, and actually giving yourself the maximum space to do it in as well. Again, this wasn’t really normal in the Twitter ecosystem as it was at the time.
It’s become popular now, but I think quite a few other products have taken, should we say, inspiration from TweetDeck, and look somewhat similar. And so from there, it was a fairy tale in many respects. I had no interest in the product getting out there at the time or snowballing, but that’s exactly what it did. I had no PR and no push.
I didn’t know anybody in the industry, and it just took off very organically, very naturally. Early adopters in Silicon Valley saw it and started talking about it, and were on the phone to me, asking to get a beta of it just to see what it was that people were making a bit of noise about.
So that was a very interesting time. I think over a couple of weeks thousands of people were using it, but the right thousands of people. It was the early adopters, the influencers, and then other people who were listening too. So again, I think there was a certain amount of freedom in the actual design of the product itself and its functionality.
But there was also very much a sense of luck because the timing seemed to be perfect as well. There appeared to be a lot of other people that had exactly the same issues as me and were looking for this kind of product.
Santos: How did you actually develop it, because you were having a full-time job at the time, correct?
Dodsworth: I was a contractor in the city here in London. I worked for several different banks, and my contracts had pretty much come to an end at much the same time. So I was having about six months off. But having that time off also gave me, again, freedom to sit down and play with a product, play with the system or a platform like Twitter, which was still very much in its infancy.
Santos: So you got the first version out in less than six months in that period of time?
Dodsworth: Yes, actually I built the first version in about two weeks because there wasn’t a huge amount to it and it was more a concept. It was about proving the concept than actually a fully fledged product, but that is what took off.
Santos: And when was the moment that you actually realized there was a business here and let’s build it?
Dodsworth: That’s an interesting question. Over the first couple of months it just ramped up in the number of users. I was bankrolling the project and there were a lot of people giving me donations just to keep me developing it. So that was a small signal that certain people had the kind of engagement with this product that they would probably pay for it. But it got me thinking around that time about monetizing it. I was actually more bothered about what happens when all these early adopters have the product, and perhaps some of them have donated generously. That’s very nice. What happens next? Is it literally just the iterative process of adding more and more features? Or is there something a bit more to this?
I think over time it became very apparent that to keep up the iterative process, I needed more staff. I needed help to just keep doing this. We needed to integrate Facebook, and LinkedIn, and more recently Foursquare. To make it more of a hub than simply a Twitter client.
So, yes, it didn’t take very long for me to start thinking in that way. It did take quite a while to actually move on it though, to actually start turning it into the company. I got funding offers from a number of different sources. And again, part of what I consider my fairy-tale story with TweetDeck is that I didn’t have to go out and look for any funding, it came to me.
There was nothing else to be proved—I just had to have the right kind of investor that didn’t require a business plan to get excited about the traction and where this potentially could go.
Twitter was showing great growth and TweetDeck was showing its own traction as well. There’s a subset of people that are very interested in this kind of power product. I remember speaking to Betaworks, an investment and incubation group in New York, and they were extremely clued in. They had already grown Summize, which had been sold to Twitter and become Twitter’s search product. So they were in the same space.
Their investment strategy at the time was around Twitter and its ecosystem. They were exactly the right team to invest in TweetDeck. In January of 2009 we completed the seed round and four or five months later we started the second round of approx. three and half million dollars, and that got us to the point where we could get an office and expand. That started mid-2009 and really got things moving.
Santos: Why an investment from New York, considering you’re based in the city that is the heart of the investment in London?
Dodsworth: At the time it was very different. I mean, it’s only a few years ago but I think it was a very different place. There was nobody talking about investing in this kind of company in London at the time, at least not on my radar anyway. One of the first things Betaworks did was to introduce me to similar-thinking angel investors in London, they knew it was important to have investors on the ground in London. As for the lead investor I think it was less important that they were in the same town and more important they were on the same wave length.
Santos: So, after you get the funding, how did you grow? And you, being a former contractor and now an owner of the company, what did it change for you?
Dodsworth: It kind of changed everything. It’s quite a jump from being a contractor to running your own one-man business, to employing a team and raising funding.
It certainly was exciting all the way, some very high moments and very low moments. Some of them not quite so important as I look back on it now, but obviously things that affect you as you’re running the business.
It’s been a big learning curve for me but it seems to be something that I was good at. Never any question of replacing me or bringing in an experienced CEO—at its core TweetDeck was vision-led more than anything else. The board understood the vision and had faith in me that it was running well and that we were obviously on to something and going somewhere.
Santos: You talked about the lows and the highs. Can you give an example of each? Something that pops into your mind.
Dodsworth: What pops into my mind probably doesn’t sound like a low point but there was a very big decision to be made in between the first and second rounds of funding. Namely do we do another round of funding and build the company? I’d done one round of funding, a seed round of $300,000. And the impetus around that was to literally just keep me doing what I was doing, building the product, building the feature set, growing the user base, pretty much what one person can do on their own.
Then there was an opportunity to raise a second, much larger, round quickly with the same investors and some new ones. But it would almost definitely change everything. It had been quite a ride until that point. I’m already talking mid-2009.
The decision was a big one for me personally because it meant I would have to stop what I was doing, and raise money in order to get an office and a team and have a lot of investors relying on me to do something that I had never done before, which is build this company. That decision was basically made over a weekend. I was of two minds because I could easily just carry on doing what I was doing as a one-man band with little investment—and that appealed to me as well.
Santos: What made you go forward with it? What was the main compelling reason?
Dodsworth: It’s a bigger win, it’s a bigger risk. And in the end, after having thought about it all weekend with my wife, I actually just thought, “Let’s go for it. Let’s go for something a lot bigger than this already is, because there’s only so much that one person can do even with funding. There’s a much more exciting and risky element here.”
And I think we’d proved enough in terms of traction, that we had something that we can take much further forward. But I think it was more of a cavalier attitude, having thought it all through and not really come out to a real hard conclusion one way or the other. But just to think, actually the right thing to do is to just throw it all in the air and see what happens. Risk the lot.
Santos: So once you raised this capital, you hired a team. Do you still program on the tool or have you stopped all together?
Dodsworth: No, I came off the engineering side completely. Because A, that made the product better, [laughs] in many ways. But also obviously you hire people that are better than you, especially in that main area of engineering, which is exactly what we did. It then freed me up to think more about, “So now we have all these engineers, and we have the design. And who’s actually thinking about the product, and where does the product go?” And that actually turned out for me to be the most interesting part of the whole thing. Rather than the operational CEO—which with fourteen people we didn’t desperately need—[we needed] more … of a product lead, examining the vision of this product. Where does it actually end up? How do we get there? So that’s what I moved into. That’s obviously what I’ve been doing anyway, but that sort of freed me up to do that full-time.
Santos: And what was your vision for the company? Was it to be acquired as it was? Was it to grow and build other products? At the time, what were your plans? What did you think?
Dodsworth: It moved around quite a lot, which I think is probably quite a common thing. The vision for the product has been very solid, but the actual company itself, where do we go with this, what do we do as a company, has definitely shifted around. I know everybody says you can’t rely on being acquired. But at the same time, I think people are fooling themselves if they say it’s not even at the back of their minds. I was thinking about it, and thinking it would be a great research acquisition.
So that never left my thoughts from a visionary standpoint. It was more a case of what’s the right company? What’s the right price? How do you price a start-up with millions of users using the product, but having no revenue?
I never ignored the acquisition potential, but that wasn’t the main plan. Our real challenge was to figure out how to monetize TweetDeck going forward. And of course monetizing TweetDeck is also part and parcel of monetizing social media for power-users. That was the way I was approaching it.
So the interesting thing [to me was]—how do you monetize this kind of user? This kind of user isn’t going to react very well to low quality, bad advertising. They’re going to be offended by that. But they might react very well to more experimental advertising and high quality advertising.
So we started to go down that road, of thinking about, “We’ve got these columns. What do we do with them? Could we make the column itself an advertising vehicle? Could you have columns sponsored by certain people? Could columns appear in your TweetDeck and disappear based on where you are in the world or a particular event going on at the time?” So we were starting on that route to monetization, but very specifically to TweetDeck.
Santos: And did you find the model that you were confident about? Or were you still searching, and tweaking, and testing different things?
Dodsworth: We didn’t get to roll out any of these ideas. We had some great ideas around it—and, who knows—perhaps they’ll turn up in the future somewhere else. But we had some interesting concepts which we wanted to try. Not sadly, but we just didn’t get a chance to try them.
Santos: About this, I wouldn’t say sadly as well.
Dodsworth: No, no, no. That’s not what I mean. Definitely no sense of unhappiness there.
Santos: And so how did the proposal come from Twitter? Can you talk a bit about that? Was it one-way from Twitter to you, from TweetDeck to them? How did it come to fruition, the actual proposal and the negotiations?
Dodsworth: Well, there’s not a huge amount I can say about that but the general approach from Twitter was pleasant. It was very much a case of they had shown interest and pursued it. It was fairly simple. No fascinating insights unfortunately it all just seemed to fit.
Santos: And how many clients did TweetDeck have at the time of being bought?
Dodsworth: We had well over twenty million downloads of the desktop client. We had a couple of million downloads of the iPhone client. And then our Android client was rapidly reaching the same levels as well. We’re focusing now on the web version of TweetDeck, and so we’re trying to get the usage of that up to match those kinds of numbers. You just go to a web page and it’s there. That’s kind of what we’re working up.
Santos: And what was the growth rate? Was it still very rapid as before or was it showing signs of slowing down?
Dodsworth: No, it wasn’t slowing down, that was the interesting thing. It was really as you categorize hockey-stick growth very early on, and then it went to a very steady upward tick. But it never deviated from that either. It sat at that growth rate for the couple of years it was out there doing its thing. So it’s very solid. I think that, anecdotally, what I used to see happening quite a lot was how as people got on board Twitter they started to play with it and some of them over time would require a bit more of a power tool, and they would start to look around [and say], “[What] else can I do with Twitter?” And they would find TweetDeck, and they would graduate to TweetDeck. Obviously not everyone “graduates”, not everyone requires more power.
So we would always see this trickle of users, brand-new people every day, downloading, and using, and then starting to use TweetDeck. But quite rarely were these new Twitter users. These are almost always the power-users, as I said, graduated up to something a bit more powerful.
Santos: Roughly in, I believe it was end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, there were rumors that TweetDeck was considering launching its own social network. Is there any foundation to this?
Dodsworth: No, no. Obviously we saw that as well, so it was quite interesting reading that. I see why people would think that when they saw Deck.ly, which was a service that we introduced to post longer than one hundred and forty characters. And the impetus around posting longer than one hundred and forty characters was that our user base was asking for it. And so this was not an attempt to go against the core tenant of Twitter. But just that our users, who are big lovers of Twitter in pretty much every respect, every now and again were wanting to tweet a little bit longer to the same audience.
So they didn’t really want to put it up on a blog post or put it somewhere else or on Facebook. They wanted this content to go to the same users. They wanted to use the same tool that they were using to tweet that they were already comfortable with. So, it seemed to make a lot of sense.
And also, for us, we looked at this as a kind of, “Well, some people might not like this. Some people will love this. We have no idea how Twitter will feel.” But we wanted to see what the reaction would be and as an ecosystem company I think it’s healthy to push the platform every now and then.
And also, starting to think about the more revenue-based side. If we have pages with these decks and posts on them, that’s a lot of landing pages. That’s a lot of SEO goodness coming through. We should put some ads on there, or at least be pushing our own products more to, say, people that aren’t using them.
There seemed to be a number of different things inside Deck.ly which were of interest. Not fully fleshed out. We didn’t have a huge advertising model on the Deck.ly pages. In fact, we didn’t even get to the advertising on those pages. But we did have the pages up. There were millions of Deck.lys created a day. It was a very useful service. I can quite easily see how people can sort of misrepresent that or misunderstand that as kind of a play.
It’s still an interesting concept, nonetheless. Starting up your own social network for power-users is very interesting. It’s potentially flawed in that do people really want another social network.
How many social networks do we need? Do we need more and more generic, big, social networks? Or is there actually more value in, say, if you’re going to join another network, is it a tailored, niche network that has functionality on it for that niche, for that level of expertise? But you wouldn’t have that on Facebook or Twitter as part of the core platform because it would just feel very out of place.
So I think there’s more interest there. And that’s an area that I’m interested in generally—niche social networks, very small social networks. I still haven’t seen that take off. It might not be an area that ever takes off. But it’s not just about grouping similar people together, as far as I’m concerned, into a niche. It’s grouping people together with similar interests into a niche and then giving them tools which no other niche would want or have any value with.
You’re not going to supplant Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Foursquare. That, to me, is not an interesting proposal. I don’t find any interest in trying to go out there and build something to destroy another product. I think that’s quite mediocre. What I would actually like to do is create a product that’s never been created before. I think niche networks potentially fill that gap.
Santos: Did you have any misconceptions from Twitter’s side, regarding this? Or they just saw, understood the message, and then went in on the hype that was going on at the time about Deck.ly?
Dodsworth: No. I mean, I never heard anything negative from directly. I don’t think they greeted the feature set with open arms and I don’t think they thought it was a wonderful idea, because obviously, it does go against the principle of their platform. But then they’re not looking at it, or weren’t looking at it, from our point of view. They were purely looking at it from their point of view, whereas I think now that we’re all one company, they can kind of see the impetus, the reasoning behind putting this in place. I think it never really met with any hostility. Certainly, they didn’t seem to think that it was anything more than it was.
Santos: So, I don’t know if you can talk a bit about how it is to run TweetDeck now inside of Twitter, if you see huge differences, if you see huge opportunities or huge hindrances. What are the main differences of being, now, inside of this giant that Twitter has become?
Dodsworth: I don’t have a huge amount of insight at the moment. I will over time, obviously. It’s only really been about a month or so since we were acquired. We are slotting into the organization. We are carrying on, essentially doing what we’re doing and catering to our audience that we’ve grown, and also any kind of brand that comes onto Twitter in the future as well. It’s quite a continuation of what we were already very good at doing, but obviously, we’re doing it as part of a bigger company.
I can imagine, I mean, I’m kind of realistic enough to realize that things will change. From the point of view of running the company itself, obviously, I’m now running the team as opposed to running the company. And then the product itself is a Twitter product. It needs to become a Twitter product. It can’t just stay as a third party. It needs to really feel, when you open the product, that it’s really something that Twitter has produced with the comfort and reassurance that being part an official product should bring to its users.
So I can imagine there’ll be some changes there. Nothing, I would imagine, desperately drastic, but this is really what we’re working out now. It’s an interesting kind of exercise, but I think it’s one that seems to take quite a long time. They’re very respectful of the fact that we are the experts in this field. We know how to deal with this audience.
So I think it’s going to be fascinating. And obviously, couple this with the growth in the platform and the products. Twitter itself is still growing. It seems to be growing up hugely. And I’m excited. I’m excited because, for me, Twitter has become less of “this is what I had for breakfast,” and much more of “this is how I get my news.”
For me Twitter is the news source, globally, locally, into certain niches. For example I love Formula One and motorsport in general. That’s how I get all my news, first and foremost. It’s all these different pockets of news brought into one platform, which leads me off to web sites and blogs and anywhere else.
If that can get unified in a global way, then the sky’s the limit. The Twitter platform could be everything. And that’s quite a big claim, and I think a lot has to happen for that to really become material. But I’m very excited to be on the inside of that now.
Santos: TweetDeck was based in London. Will it still be based in London, or are you guys flying to San Francisco now?
Dodsworth: No. We’re all based in London. We are flying to San Francisco back and forth quite a bit, and will be. But what’s quite nice, is we remain the same team in London, working on the same products and new products and with the same audience. But there’s a little bit of stability there as well, because obviously an acquisition can be a fairly hairy time for everybody involved. You don’t know what’s going to happen with the business going forward, and is anybody going to be sacked, and all these kind of questions that go through your mind, especially as CEO with a responsibility to your team. It’s nice for me to feel that, from a day-to-day standpoint, from the team’s perspective, not a huge amount of change. I think that’s quite settling for people.
On the other side, as well, they have new opportunities in San Francisco if they so desire.
Santos: Did you feel a lot of tension in the employees of TweetDeck at the time of the acquisition negotiations? Or did they take it easily from your standpoint?
Dodsworth: I think there was certainly some tension. It’s fear of the unknown, isn’t it? If this does become an actual acquisition, what happens next? How do things change? You hear about deals not working out as intended all the time. And I had it as well. Of course I had it. I was in the middle of it. So, yes, an interesting time to say the least.
I don’t particularly class the acquisition itself as an enjoyable event, the actual negotiation, managing the team through it whilst keeping the product and the company moving forward. I didn’t enjoy that in the slightest. Obviously, the outcome is wonderful and I couldn’t be happier. I just expected to enjoy that process a lot more than I did.
Santos: Well, yeah, there was a lot of negotiation and tensions between both sides, I’m sure.
Dodsworth: Yes. The negotiation “game” takes on a very different aspect when you, the founder, stand to lose or win big on a personal level.
Santos: Only when it’s done and dusted and you wake up the next day and you realize it’s true, I think, [laughs] then you can breathe.
Dodsworth: [laughs] I’m still doing that now. Can’t quite believe it. But yes, exactly. Exactly.
Santos: How did you feel and what did you do the first day after? Did you go on holidays? [laughs]
Dodsworth: Gosh, what did I do afterwards? I can’t quite remember. I do think I sat down with my wife for quite a while, quite stunned, a little bit shocked. I mean, it was a fairly lengthy process anyway, talking with different companies. It wasn’t a well-rigged kind of acquisition by any stretch. I think the biggest emotion was relief, rather than out and out joy, that it had happened. I think we’re only starting to enjoy it now.
Santos: A relief that the negotiations were over?
Dodsworth: Yes, relief that it was done. I mean, there were a lot of moving parts. We’d been talking to various companies for the previous six months. So by the time we’d actually got to completed acquisition that was a long, hard-fought process. You wonder if it’s ever going to happen and start to question if it’s even the right thing to do. As the founder it can be an emotional response. But yes, definitely relief, without a shadow of a doubt.