Blogger was “one of those scratch your own itch things.”

Evan Williams created the blogging service, Blogger, way back in the early days of the internet circa 1999.

A few years later, in February 2003, he sold it to Google.

So how did he come up with the idea? In Evan’s words:

It was one of those scratch your own itch things.

So, I had had a personal website and started reading what people called weblogs at the time.

I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna make my EvHead.com into a weblog.’ And because I knew how to write code and web applications, I wrote a very simple script that let me go and type in a box, and I hit a button, and that was at the top of my homepage.

And I remember doing that, and it’s that feeling that we’re all very familiar with now, where you have a thought and you consider putting it on the Internet, and closing the gap to doing that to literally seconds.

That’s where the inspiration came from.

So initially it was just a way for him to write stuff on his own website. Then he made it a platform other people could use as well, and called it Blogger.

I don’t know exactly how or why that transformation happened, which would be interesting to find out, but the pattern remains:

Build something for your own use → other people want to use it too → let them → sell to Google.

Source: https://mastersofscale.com/ev-williams-never-underestimate-your-first-idea-2/