Below: Q&A with Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder of GitHub. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Chris and Tom from GitHub have also answered reader questions in the comments section of this post.

What does your company do?
We offer public and private source code hosting to companies and open source projects using either git or Subversion. What we want to do is lower the barrier of contributing to projects, both public and private. Submitting a patch to an open source project should be about the code, not the process of submitting the patch. Working with your coworkers, either in the same office or across the world, should be about moving your project forward and not about managing clumsy tools.

We also offer git training, provide git learning materials, and sponsor open source projects.

How do you explain to “normal” folks (e.g. your mom, someone you meet at a cocktail party, etc.) what your company does?
GitHub is like Wikipedia for programmers. You can edit files, see who changed what, view old versions of files, and access it from anywhere in the world – except you’re working with source code instead of encyclopedia data. Companies use it to build software and websites, while hobbyist programmers use it to find and share projects.

The business model is simple: if you want to share your source code with everyone and make it public, you don’t pay anything. If you need to hide your source code because it’s private and runs your business, you pay.

L to R: Rick Olson, Tom Preston-Werner, and Chris Wanstrath. (Photo by Dave Fayram.)

How big a part of the business is training?
Training isn’t a huge part of our revenue, but if we can make some money teaching people how to better use git then everyone wins. It’s also great to meet customers in person and develop a real relationship with them. Also, we like to send Scott Chacon (our resident git wizard) all over the world.

Sponsoring open source and git learning materials is good for the whole world, but we do that stuff because we love it. If a GitHubber wants to spend some of their time working on an open source project, that makes us very happy.

How did the business get started?
At first GitHub was a weekend project. Tom Preston-Werner and I were hanging out at a sports bar after a local programming meetup when he told me his idea for a git hosting site. It’d be a place to easily share code and learn about git, a git hub. It started more out of necessity than anything else: we both loved git but there was no acceptable way to share code with others. Tom thought I’d be interested in helping fix the problem, and I was.

We began meeting on Saturdays to build the site piece by piece. We’d grab brunch, talk about ideas we had for the site, then get to work. Tom would design pages or features and I’d implement them. As soon as the basics were in place we started using GitHub at my day job, a startup I had cofounded with PJ Hyett. It was a great way to improve the site, as PJ and I were using GitHub daily and really getting a feel for what was missing and what was working.

One thing Tom had learned at his previous venture, Gravatar, was that offering a resource intensive service for free was a losing proposition. In that case it was high traffic image hosting, but in GitHub’s case it was git hosting. Storing and transferring code was going to stick us with a large server bill. We needed a way to recoup costs.

With that in the back of our minds, we launched a free public beta for our friends. The site immediately started taking off. You could create public or private repositories for free and people were starting to use the site for their business’s code – not that surprising considering PJ and I were doing the same thing. Soon, however, we had people emailing us asking how they could pay for private repositories.

At this point we realized GitHub could probably do more than just recoup costs. It could be a real business. We decided to continue to offer unlimited public repositories for free, but we’d charge for private repositories. In other words, we’d charge the people asking to be charged.

PJ became a cofounder of GitHub and we stopped working on our startup. GitHub was now our startup. The three of us launched the site officially on April 10th, 2008 and have been running the business ever since.

The Holga: There’s no on-board flash. No PC connector for an external flash. There’s no shutter speed selection. You get (approx) 1/100 of a second and deal with it. It offers only two F stops: f. 11 and f. 8 (“sunny” or “less sunny”) — you switch a little plastic lever back and forth to choose which one you want. There’s no tripod socket (you can rubber band it or drill one in if you want). The lens is plastic and fixed at medium wide 60mm. The film advance is iffy at best. (The typical solution? Jam a folded piece of cardboard from your film’s box under the spool to hold the film tight.) Here are the focus options:

Focus: 3 feet, 6 feet, 9 feet, or “infinity.”

So what’s the upside? It discourages fiddling around with camera-settings and encourages you to just shoot without thinking too much. The “problems” with the camera also create light leaks and vignetting that can create gorgeous, retro-looking shots.

Plus, it uses professional medium format film which yields dramatic results. David Burnett won top prize in a News Photographers’ award ceremony for this Holga shot of then presidential nominee Al Gore. Burnett said the Holga forces him to simplify, slow down, and “lets you concentrate on what’s really important in a picture.”

Backpacking with a Holga
I remember backpacking through Southeast Asia with a Holga back in 2002. I had another camera that I used for most of my shooting. But the Holga came out every once in a while.

In fact, it started to take on extra meaning. It’s a genuine pain to load so you start to value every Holga shot. A scene would have to earn it’s way into Holgadom. When I came come across a great vista or interesting characters or cool shapes, I’d pull it out. Otherwise, it stayed in my backpack.

Below: We’re getting so many submissions for our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series that it’s tough to find room to profile everyone. So here’s a roundup post featuring a quick look at several different companies that have $1M+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.

Litmus
Litmus is a tool for email marketers. It helps them test their email designs across a range of different email clients. The founders attended 37signals’ Building of Basecamp workshop in Copenhagen and afterwards self-funded the business. It’s now “significantly above $1m in revenue, very profitable, and growing by around 10% every month,” according to founder Paul Farnell.

Litmus shows you screenshots of your email newsletter as it looks across all major email clients.

According to Farnell, there is no exit strategy:

We have no plans for a big “exit”. Being acquired and working for years at a big company sounds terrible to me. Why would we want to give up the flexibility and freedom we have right now? To us it’s not just about money, it’s about enjoying what we do and believing in it.

I wouldn’t advise starting something you’re not passionate about. It’ll be your life for the next 5+ years. Make sure you relish the idea of spending 12+ hours a day thinking about it.

Here’s his take on competitors:

I attended Geoffrey Moore’s talk at the Business of Software conference last year. What he said really stuck with me, and changed the way I think about what we do.

We have a handful of competitor’s doing a similar thing. For a couple of years we watched them closely and tried to keep up with them in terms of features. It felt like there were things we “had” to have, in order to be comparable. That was wrong. What Moore discusses is being competitive by innovation, not by keeping up on features. It’s similar to your own ideas about underdoing the competition.

Since then we’ve made some big calls not to build features that other people already have. We decided they weren’t necessary. Turns out they’re not! Since ignoring our competitors and focussing on what new and interesting things we can build, we’ve been happier, more productive, and seen more success.

Visit Litmus.

A Small Orange
Douglas Hanna is CEO of hosting company A Small Orange and writes, “A Small Orange has had over $1,000,000 in revenue for more than three years now and has been well in the green pretty much since it was founded. We have 13 full-time employees and about 25,000 or so customers.”

Here’s why his company emphasizes customer support:

The hosting industry has undergone a lot of consolidation and bigger companies and investment groups tend to view customer service as a cost center instead of a potential profit center. When I do our books, I’m tempted to split up our support costs as half marketing and half operating expenses. When we provide great service (which we try to do as frequently as possible), our customers notice and appreciate that. A lot of times it results in them telling their friends and social networks about us, which leads to more sales and greater customer loyalty. Companies that view customer service as a necessary evil to prevent customers from canceling miss out on that and have to market with their wallets instead of their customers.

Visit A Small Orange
Photos of the company’s datacenter.

In “Actually, You Might Be Your User,” Jared Spool looks at the pros and cons of self design. That’s designing without relying on things like user interviews, contextual inquiries, surveys, card sorting, and usability testing.

He examines how 37signals gets by without using these things.

They design from their own perspective. If they want to add a feature, they look within themselves to figure it out. No usability testing or contextual inquiries needed.

Jared then looks at the pros and cons of working this way.

Another big disadvantage of Self Design is it only works if the designers use the product a lot. 37signals built Basecamp because they needed to manage their own projects. They use it every day. Their product, Campfire, is their main communication method, since they have team members all over the world. Apple’s team uses their phones every day, all day long.

When there is something frustrating that happens in the daily use of the design, it surfaces pretty quickly. The designers themselves experience that frustration and, because they control the design, focus on eliminating it.

Made me think back to the old adage “write what you know.” If you’re an Eskimo, it’s going to be tough for you to write a book about growing up in the Italian countryside. You’d have to spend months (or years) learning Italian. You’d have to learn the idioms. You’d have to visit your chosen locales repeatedly. You’d have to meet lots of locals and ask them questions. Even if you do a great job at all this research, no one will be surprised if the end result still winds up kludgy and full of mistakes.

Or you could just write a book about growing up as an Eskimo. Then you bypass all those discovery layers and just get to the doing. You already have the knowledge you need.

The same thing happens when you design what you know. You get to bypass the “learning the language” phase and get right to the “building something” phase.

I know it’s not always possible, but, when it is, pick something to work on that you’re around all the time. Something that bugs you. Something that you’ve been paying attention to for years. Solve a problem that you yourself experience. Design what you know.

Typography guru Jan Tschichold on indenting paragraphs:

The indent of the paragraph should be the em of the fount body.

Omit indents in the first line of the first paragraph of any text and at the beginning of a new section that comes under a sub-heading. It is not necessary to set the first word in small capitals, but if this is done for any reason, the word should be letter-spaced in the same way as the running title.

If a chapter is divided into several parts without headings, these parts should be divided not only by an additional space, but always by one or more asterisks of the fount body. As a rule, one asterisk is sufficient. Without them it is impossible to see whether a part ends at the bottom of a page or not. Even when the last line of such a part ends the page, there will always be space for an asterisk in the bottom margin.

Of course, the web is in the process of killing off the indented paragraph. But not everywhere. Some examples of indenting can be found at the following sites:

Joe Clark’s blog

Fray

The Subversive Copy Editor blog

Even back in the day, these rules were often ignored. Why? According to Tschichold, it was because typists were trained by business schools, who were “utterly incompetent when it comes to questions of typography.”

The perfect book and page
Tschichold also came up with a system for the perfect book and the perfect page. Yes, perfect.

No matter the page size, you will always end up with a 9×9 grid, with the textblock 1/9th from the top and inside, and 2/9ths from the outside and bottom.

It all goes back to the Golden Ratio:

The page ratio is best at 2:3…His reasoning was that it sits within the Fibonacci Sequence, as well as the Golden Ratio, and establishes that the textblock will be harmonious and proportional to the page — it’s how the height of it equals the width of the page.

Here’s an example layout:

More details/examples at The Secret Law of Page Harmony.

Related: Tschichold and the golden section [Wikipedia]

Re: the iPhone 4 antenna hubbub, Apple held firm in the face of constant coverage from tech blogs, a class-action lawsuit, and vocal customer complaints. So it’s interesting that the company finally blinked in response to an old school media outlet: Consumer Reports.

In large measure, the article in Consumer Reports was devastating precisely because the magazine (and its Web site) are not part of the hot-headed digital press. Although Gizmodo and other techie blogs had reached the same conclusions earlier, Consumer Reports made a noise that was heard beyond the Valley because it has a widely respected protocol of testing and old-world credibility. Mr. Jobs acknowledged as much, saying: “We were stunned and upset and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, and the reason we didn’t say more is because we didn’t know enough.”

Consumer Reports got taken seriously because it’s so different than other media outlets. It’s been around since 1936. It’s part of a nonprofit organization. It has a mission (“to work for a fair, just, and safe marketplace for all consumers and to empower consumers to protect themselves”). It doesn’t allow advertising or accept free samples. It doesn’t go for a snarky tone. It does tons of extensive lab testing. It doesn’t focus just on glamourous products (for every iPhone it tests, there are tons more mops, air conditioners, and other “boring” products it examines). It doesn’t rely on page-view-pimping bloggy business as its bread and butter. Instead, it sells thoroughness and trustworthiness.

And that’s why when CR raised its red flag, it was taken seriously.

Consumer Reports’ approach is working too. It’s one of the top-ten-circulation magazines in the country. And its various outlets have a combined paid circulation of 7.2 million, up 33 percent since 2004.

Reminds me a bit of how Cook’s Illustrated thrives while other food publications are going down the drain. Everyone’s wringing their hands about the fate of media outlets, but these two publications show how a strong philosophy and a willingness to buck trends can lead to success.

Tangent: The CR site has a neat archive of vintage photographs showing its tests of consumer products over the decades.