Mollom

Mollom: The story of my first SaaS startup

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 07:57:37 -0400

Last month, Acquia discontinued service and support for Mollom, the spam service I started more than ten years ago. As a goodbye, I want to share the untold story of how I founded Mollom.

In 2007, I read Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Work Week, and was hooked. The book provides a blueprint for how entrepreneurs can structure and build a business to fund the lifestyle of their dreams. It's based on Ferriss' own experience; he streamlined his business, automated systems and outsourced tasks until it was not only more profitable, but also took less of his time to operate. The process of automation and outsourcing was so efficient, Ferriss only spent four hours a week to run his business; this gave him time and freedom to take "mini-retirements", travel the world, and write a book. When I first read Ferriss' book, I was inspired by the idea of simultaneously having that much free time and being financially stable.

While I was reading Ferriss' book, I was also working on a website spam filter for my blog, called Mollom. I had started to build Mollom as a personal project for exclusive use on my own blog. Inspired by the 4-Hour Work Week, I was convinced I could turn Mollom into a small SaaS service with global customers, complete self-service, and full automation. This would allow me to operate Mollom from anywhere in the world, and would require just a few hours of my time each week. Because I was starting to use machine learning, I enlisted the help of one of my best friends, Benjamin Schrauwen, a professor in machine learning at the University of Ghent.

In the same year, Jay Batson and I met at DrupalCon Sunnyvale, and we had already started to explore the idea of founding Acquia. My oldest son Axl was also born in the summer of 2007, and I was working hard to finish my PhD. Throughout all of this, we were also working to get Drupal 6 released. Needless to say, it was a busy summer.

With my PhD nearly complete, I needed to decide what to do next. I knew that starting Acquia was going to have a big impact, not just on Drupal but also on my life. However, I was also convinced that Mollom, while much smaller in scope and ambition, could provide a path to the freedom and independence Ferriss describes.

Mollom's foundational years

Exciting 2007, I determined that both Acquia and Mollom were important opportunities to pursue. Jay and I raised $7 million in venture capital, and we publicly launched Acquia in November 2007. Meanwhile, Ben and I pooled together €18,000 of our own money, bootstrapped Mollom, and publicly launched Mollom in March 2008.

I always made a point to run both businesses separately. Even after I moved from Belgium to the US in the summer of 2010, I continued to run Mollom and Acquia independently. The Mollom team was based in Europe, and once or twice a week, I would get up at 4 AM to have a two-hour conference call with the team. After my conference call, I'd help my family get ready for the day, and then I was off to work at Acquia.

By 2011, Mollom had achieved the goals our team set out to accomplish; our revenues had grown to about €250,000 in recurring annual revenue, our gross margins were over 85 percent, and we could pretty much run the business on autopilot. Our platform was completely self-serviced for our users, the anti-spam algorithms self-learning, the service was built to be highly-available, and the backend operations were almost entirely automated. Not bad for a side hustle. I often joked about how I could run Mollom from the beach in Greece, with less than an hour of work a day.

However, our team at Mollom wasn't satisfied yet, so instead of sitting on the beach, we decided to invest Mollom's profits in feature development. We had a team of three engineers working on adding new capabilities, in addition to re-architecting and scaling Mollom to keep up with its growth. On average, Mollom handled more than 100 web service requests per second, and we regularly saw peaks of up to 3,000 web service request per second. In a way, Mollom's architecture was ahead of its time – it used a micro-services architecture with a REST API, a decoupled administration backend and relied heavily on machine learning. From day one, our terms of service respected people's privacy, and we never had a data breach.

A photo of the Mollom team at an offsite in 2011: it includes Daniel Kudwien, Benjamin Schrauwen, Cedric De Vleeschauwer, Thomas Meire, Johan Vos and Vicky Van Roeyen. Missing in the picture is Dries.

In the meantime, Acquia had really taken off; Acquia's revenue had grown to over $22 million annually, and I was often working 60 hour work weeks to grow the company. Acquia's Board of Directors wanted my full attention, and had even offered to acquire Mollom a few times. I recognized that running Mollom, Acquia and Drupal simultaneously was not sustainable – you can only endure regular 4 AM meetings for so long. Plus, we had ambitious goals for Mollom; we wanted to add many-site content moderation, sentiment analysis and detection for certain code of conduct violations. Doing these things would require more capital, and unless you are Elon Musk, it's really hard to raise capital for multiple companies at the same time. Most importantly, I wanted to focus more on growing Drupal and driving Acquia's expansion.

Acquia acquires Mollom

By the end of 2012, Ben and I agreed to sell Mollom to Acquia. Acquia's business model was to provide SaaS services around Drupal, and Mollom was exactly that – a SaaS service used by tens of thousands of Drupal sites.

Selling Mollom was a life-changing moment for me. It proved that I was able to bootstrap and grow a company, steer it to profitability and exit successfully.

Selling Mollom to Acquia involved signing a lot of documents. A photo of me signing the acquisition paperwork with Mary Jefts, Acquia's CFO at the time. It took three hours to sign all the paperwork.

Acquia retires Mollom

By 2017, five years after the acquisition, it became clear that Mollom was no longer a strategic priority for Acquia. As a result, Acquia decided it was best to shut down Mollom by April 2018. As the leader of the product organization at Acquia, I'm supportive of this decision. It allows us to sharpen our focus and to better deliver on our mission.

While it was a rational decision, it's bittersweet. I still believe that Mollom could have continued to have a big impact on the Open Web. Not only did that make the web better, it saved people millions of hours moderating their content. I also considered keeping Mollom running as part of Acquia's "Give back more" principle. However, Acquia gives back a lot, and I believe that giving back to Drupal should be our priority.

Mollom's end-of-life announcement that replaced the old https://mollom.com.

Overall, Mollom was a success. While I never got my 4-hour work week, I enjoyed successfully creating a company from scratch, and seeing it evolve through every stage of its life. I learned how to build and run a SaaS service, I made some money in the process, and best of all, Mollom blocked over 15 billion spam comments across tens of thousands of websites. This translates to saving people around the world millions of hours, which would otherwise be devoted to content moderation. Mollom also helped to protect the websites of some of the world's most famous brands; from Harvard, to The Economist, Tesla, Twitter, Sony Music and more. Finally, we were able to offer Mollom for free to the vast majority of our users, which is something we took a lot of pride in.

If you were a user of Mollom the past 10+ years, I hope you enjoyed our service. I also want to extend a special thank you to everyone who contributed to Mollom over the past 11 years!

Rest in peace, Mollom! Thank you for blocking so much spam. I'll think about you next time I visit Greece.

Managing comments on multiple WordPress sites

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 07:26:08 -0400

There is a pursuit we all share; not having to deal with spammers. The promise of a clean spam-free web.

With that in mind, I'm pleased to announce that we released a new version of the Mollom plugin for WordPress. Mollom is an anti-spam solution for websites that offers some unique features not available in other solutions like Akismet. For example, the new Mollom plugin for WordPress ships with complete support for the Mollom Content Moderation Platform – enabling you to moderate all of your WordPress sites from a single unified interface.

This is a great feature for organizations that have many sites. If you have 20 WordPress sites and 10 Drupal sites, you can now moderate these sites from a single user interface that offers powerful moderation workflows.

The new WordPress plugin leverages Mollom's PHP library that implements Mollom REST API. The library is the basis for the Mollom module for Drupal but was designed to be reused by other systems. If you have a content management system other than Drupal or WordPress, you can also connect it with the Mollom Content Moderation Platform.

Give it a try! You may like it.

New Mollom content moderation platform launched

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:07:02 -0400

Today I'm excited to announce that we've released the next generation of Mollom - our Content Moderation Platform. For the past five years, we have worked hard to help companies stay ahead of the curve when it comes to content moderation. With today's release, I feel like we've secured our place as the leading enterprise-ready content moderation system.

With over 2 years in development, and 600 beta users, the new content moderation platform is built to help companies handle extensive amounts of user generated content with ease. The main features of the Content Moderation platform are:

Easy team management. Site admins can add moderators, assign privileges, and monitor how moderators are performing - keeping an eye on productivity while trusting that no malicious content is making it to their site.
Fast moderation. If we know it's spam, your team never sees it. If we're sure it's good content - we'll publish it to your site. For the content we're unsure about - moderators now have a very easy user interface where they can view the contributor, their comment, and their reputation, spam, and profanity score all within seconds. They can approve or decline, and even take bulk actions to speed things up.
Custom filters. The system allows each user to create custom filters so they can focus on a specific subset of commenters. If they only want to see users with low spam and profanity scores - creating a filter takes just a couple seconds and they now have a customized view.
Multi-site management. All customers can have from one to hundreds of sites in their system - which makes moderation for big brands with multiple site properties very easy. Adding a site takes just a couple minutes, and customers can view analytics separately across all site properties.

You can learn more on the Mollom site or in the press release we issued this morning.

I'm really excited to finally show this off to the world, and continue to help more companies embrace social without fear!

How does it feel to sell your company?

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:28:29 -0400

I've acquired other companies, but the sale of Mollom to Acquia, was the first time I sold a company of my own. Being the seller felt quite different. It's a interesting mixture of satisfaction tinged with loss. During the negotiation phase you feel joy and excitement. Then you feel frustration as you go through the due diligence process. It's a lot of work. Eventually, the day you hand over the keys you feel like you sold your baby. At the same time, you feel a sense of achievement.

Selling Mollom was a life-changing moment. Not because it was a big financial transaction (it wasn't), but because it proves that I was able to bootstrap and grow a company, steer it to profitability, and successfully exit. It was a great experience, because I know that at some point, I'll have the desire to do that again.

Mollom acquired by Acquia

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:00:44 -0400

We're excited to announce that Mollom has been acquired by Acquia.

For the foreseeable future, Mollom will continue to be offered as it is today. I will continue my role as general manager of Mollom, Ben will continue to lead the development of our products and the Mollom team will remain unchanged. If you are a user or customer of either Mollom or Acquia, everything will remain exactly the same.

When Ben and I started Mollom almost 5 years ago, we wanted to do something important. While most people were trying to figure out the social web, we were paddling out ahead of the wave, knowing that many websites would soon have to deal with increasing amounts of spam and content moderation. In the past five years, we have helped tens of thousands of people fight spammers on their websites, including some of the world's leading organizations.

We have blocked almost a billion spam messages since we started. It has been very rewarding for us to see that we have helped make the web a slightly better place. At the same time, we also built a healthy business. We successfully bootstrapped Mollom, and organically grew a team of 6 people.

The social wave keeps on growing; we're helping more and more people and organizations every day. But now that social wave has grown so big, we can't rest on our laurels. There are more business opportunities to explore, some of which we have been working on for a while.

At the business level, it made a lot of sense to merge Mollom into Acquia. Ben and I were looking to raise capital for Mollom to help fund future product development and expand our operations. It was clear that it would require a long-term commitment of my time – just at the point when I wanted to focus more on promoting Drupal globally and driving Acquia's growth and expansion. By having Acquia acquire Mollom, I can still be a part of Mollom, and Mollom could receive the resources to accelerate our efforts and create an even more exciting future for Mollom. It also allows me to double down on Drupal and Acquia. In short, I'm really excited to have Mollom as part of the Acquia family.

Keep an eye on us!

Mollom.com website redesign (Woot!)

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:13:41 -0500

We're proud to present a new design for the Mollom.com website.

We first launched the Mollom.com site in 2007. For more than four years, Mollom.com was using the same design. As we grew Mollom, we wanted to address some of the issues that we've been stewing over since our original design. We have been planning to redesign the site for over a year now but work on the Mollom web service and developing new Mollom products have always had a higher priority so we haven't found the time to complete the new design until now.

The old Mollom.com design that we used from 2007 to early 2012.

The new design is the first step in our plans to reorganize the website. We still have updates to make to the content of some pages, for example. Already, we think the new design is a fresh new change that improves usability.

Take a look at the new mollom.com, we hope you like it!

The new Mollom.com website design.

Mollom 2011 retrospective

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:39:16 -0500

2011 was another excellent year for Mollom. We ended the year having blocked 630 million spam messages, up from 352 million spam messages blocked in 2010 – and that doesn't even count some of our largest customers like Netlog and other large social networks. And, as in 2010, we ended 2011 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%, meaning that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom.

The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 28,000 at the end of 2010 to almost 45,000 at the end of 2011. Revenues grew by more than 50% with virtually no sales or marketing efforts.

All our revenue is invested back into the company. In 2011, we used those funds to grow our team and to fund development on an entirely new product, which may end up rebooting or repositioning Mollom altogether.

Specifically, we have been worked hard on what will be a "hosted comment moderation interface". That interface will provide an optimized moderation environment that will make it easier to moderate multiple websites, either as an individual or as part of a team of moderators. To do so we introduced a new backend with a REST-based API to replace our original XML-RPC API, we rewrote the Mollom module for Drupal, and started to change our website.

We also faced some new challenges in 2011 – our support requests increased substantially, mostly due to the variety of sites that are now using Mollom. Based on many of these user requests, we tweaked our classifier performance, which resulted in a dramatic decrease in how often Mollom presents a CAPTCHA challenge, and in doing so, solved a number of real-world issues our clients were having with Mollom performance. Rolling out changes without impacting our up-time statistics was no small challenge – every change we made on the backend has to be weighed against the impact it has on the effectiveness and responsiveness of Mollom on the client side.

2012 may also bring us some additional competition – some of the world's best venture capitalists invested $8 million in a company called Impermium. Investments like this validate our belief that the social web needs good anti-spam filtering solutions. Impermium is still building its first product but will definitely be a company to watch.

Regardless of what happens in the social web spam market, we'll be busy in 2012. The first half of 2012, you'll notice some new things popping up on Mollom. Our primary goal for 2012 will be to make the "hosted comment moderation interface" available commercially and to refresh our website. Along with launching a new product, we plan to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts. It is time to do so now the Mollom technology has matured after years of intensive investment. We've also got additional work to do to continue to improve accuracy, maintain our high uptime statistics, and work with other open source developers on improvements to Mollom clients for non-Drupal systems.

In short, 2011 was a great year for Mollom. We're happy doing what we do, and we feel that we're helping to make the web a slightly better place. We wouldn't have made it this far without you – our customers, users and friends. Without you, we wouldn't be a company at all. Thank you for 2011! We're looking forward to sharing a great 2012 with you.

Half a billion spam attempts blocked

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:42:32 -0400

We've just reached another huge milestones at Mollom: we blocked our 500,000,000th spam message!

Furthermore, Mollom is currently protecting close to 50,000 active websites, that is a 75% increase since the beginning of the year 8 months ago.

It's sad that our websites get bombarded by idiots. But the fact that Mollom blocked half a billion of their attempts, actually makes me feel a lot better!

Screenshot of the scorecard section on Molom.com.

New features for the Mollom module for Drupal

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:35:11 -0400

We have just released new versions of the Mollom module for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. In addition to various bug fixes, as well as usability and API improvements, we have included two new end-user features. First, we've provided the ability to control the strictness of the text analysis. This allows you to control how aggressively Mollom should show CAPTCHAs and block spam. Second, we ported the profanity checking from the Drupal 7 version of the Mollom module to the Drupal 6 version. This means that you will be able to choose to use Mollom to block obscene language in addition to spam. Progress!

Hosted moderation interface: call for testers

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 10:21:29 -0500

We're about to launch a new add-on product in private beta at Mollom. That new product is effectively a "hosted moderation interface". Our goals are to:

Provide an optimized and intelligent moderation interface – sort and bulk moderate comments by spam score, profanity content and more.
Make it easier to moderate multiple websites – moderate all your sites from a single, unified moderation interface.
Make it easier to support moderation teams – create moderation teams, define their workflows and track the performance of individual team members.
Provide moderation as a service – seamlessly outsource the moderation of your site fully or partially to a dedicated team.

The product is a work in progress, but we believe we'll soon be able to accept a limited number of private beta test users. If you're interested in being an early beta tester, sign up here or leave a comment on this post.