Marketing Pilgrim

The development, launch, growth and (minor) failure of Odeo, is a strange story. When the company, founded by Blogger co-founder Evan Williams, launched back in February of 2005, it raised $5 million in VC, but never really raised our attention.

Evan has publicly spoken about why the company missed the mark and now a new chapter is beginning for the company. Evan and the other “Odeos” have created a new company called Obvious Corp and have bought back all of Odeo’s assets.

Evan explains the model for Obvious at his own blog.

The Obvious model goes something like this:
* Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.
* Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they’re focused and easy to understand)
* Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently

What started as a part-time project for Evan is now a full-time effort. He used his own money to buy back the company - which must be at least the $5m pumped into it - and so, I suspect we’ll see a more concerted effort from Evan and the team this time around.