With the right financial backing, Six Apart turns a pet blogging project into an international success. In the spring of 2001, Mena Trott was doing design work in San Francisco when she began a quirky weblog called Dollarshort – a personal outlet that gave her a place to tell childhood anecdotes, illustrate the humor of daily life, and share links to interesting sites. Within a few short months, Mena's pet project grew wildly popular. Yet Mena was quickly outgrowing the blogging software being used to support it. Mena and her husband, Ben, then set out to develop their own blogging tool. By the fall, Mena and Ben released their tool – Movable Type 1.0 – and more than 100 people downloaded it with the first hour of its release.

Mena and Ben quickly realized that the scale of Movable Type's popularity was much greater than they had ever expected. It had become a full time job for both and the donations they were receiving for its development were barely enough to pay the rent. Those factors, coupled with the growing interest in blogging, lead to the formation of Six Apart. Six Apart began with a mission of moving blogging from a tool to a hosting service that anyone could use, even people who lacked technical experience or desire to fiddle with code.

Soon a niche service that was created without any capital other than sweat equity was growing larger than Mena and Ben could have imagined. The co-founders decided that they wanted the chance to grow the company into something bigger and started down the path of venture investment, beginning with Japan-based Neoteny Venture Capital.

Attracting venture backing was not a problem for the young company whose name was getting bigger by the day and saw its market was exploding. Over the next three years, approximately $10 million in equity financing followed Neoteny's original investment, as both prominent angel investors and August Capital were attracted to Ben and Mena's vision. Six Apart leveraged those dollars to grow a management team, talented employee base, and expand its offices. With those fundamentals in place, the company was able to execute on its strategy to build leadership in the fast-growing blogging market.

Doing that meant that Six Apart needed to be able to move fast and stay nimble, which is precisely what they did. The company went on to develop and launch an entire suite of innovative blogging tools. And while their in-house innovation was paying off, they recognized that acquiring some new technologies could help advance their leadership position even further. Six Apart had enough cash in the bank to move them toward this objective – yet they didn't want to be distracted by the notion of potentially falling short. According to Six Apart's Chairman and CEO Barak Berkowitz, "We were looking for a cash buffer that would give us more runway to reach our key objectives, but at the same time, we were not looking to take on more equity investments. We felt that we had the right strategy in place to meet these goals, and we did not believe that we need to take on more dilution in order to get there."

Six Apart decided venture debt was a smarter alternative. Berkowitz and Andrew Anker, Six Apart's Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, looked at multiple providers and ultimately decided on Lighthouse Capital Partners. "Lighthouse offered us very competitive terms which, of course, were important. But ultimately we decided on Lighthouse because it was clear that they understood our business, our market and the risks. Plus they have a reputation for working with young companies through the various stages of their lifecycle, and adapting to those different phases as needed. Startups don't always know exactly what's around the corner, so we wanted to make sure that we chose a supportive and patient financing partner should anything unexpected come our way. And Lighthouse fit the bill."

With the right financial backing in place, Six Apart was able to stay laser focused on leading the blogging marketplace. Certainly a lot has changed since the days in Mena and Ben's apartment. Six Apart now boasts a well-known management team of industry veterans, successful acquisitions that extend the company's reach into new markets, and a commanding presence in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Along the way, they've developed award-winning products and invented standards such as TrackBack that are now requisite features in other blogging software packages. This progress has made it clear that the future of blogging is limitless – and with the right people, strategy and financing in place – so, too, is Six Apart's potential.

To learn more, visit the company’s website at www.sixapart.com.