Soapblox Shows the Need for Movement Infrastructure VC

I've been meaning to write about this for a week, but work commitments beckoned. Nonetheless, it is still worth noting that something stunning almost happened last week: a huge piece of lefty online infrastructure nearly collapsed, when Soapblox sustained hacker attacks and was nearly shuttered by the developer who ran it part-time. Seeing the danger, the progressive community online has rallied to Soapblox's aid, vowing to raise the money necessary to defend it from further attack.

What is Soapblox? It's a self-service tool to build a community blog with user diaries and a recommendation engine out of the box, and runs most of the influential progressive state blogs in the country, in addition to influential national blogs like Open Left and Swing State Project. It's also another thing that they have and we don't -- though it's a little known fact that Soapblox is actually open to conservatives (see Red Mass Group).

I don't think it's any secret that the conservative blogging scene at the state level is woefully inferior to its lefty counterpart. Technology is only part of it; the bigger issue is a lack of willing bloggers with the political sophistication to drive unique and compelling content (this is an issue I'll have an announcement on in the coming days). This isn't to say that there aren't great conservative state blogs: Minnesota Democrats Exposed (run by Michael Brodkorb, a former communications director at the state party), Sound Politics (raised up in the crucible of the WA-GOV theft of 2004), Right Michigan (run by former campaign staffer Nick De Leeuw), and the aforementioned Red Mass Group (run by Rob Eno, a former research director for GOP campaigns in the Bay State). While I could mainly pinpoint this handful of excellent righty state blogs, virtually every state has a thriving progressive hub that the political class in that state looks to and which drive left-of-center storylines with the statehouse media.

This is really unfortunate, because we know works on state and local blogs: great content, usually driven by former campaign operatives who know exactly where the bodies are buried, combined with a great community, which Soapblox enables by automating the process of standing up user diaries. Counterintuitively, diaries and comments are even more important on a local blog despite its smaller scale because most of the participants actually know each other, leading to vibrant backchannel discussions and a watercooler effect. Occasionally, this incestuous environment leads to things getting super-vicious as when threats of outing shuttered the anonymous Caucus Cooler and Krusty Konservative blogs covering the Iowa caucuses in 2007.

However essential Soapblox may be to fostering the local liberal blogosphere, how they did it shows the danger to conservatives who may be looking to stand up and/or fund similar technology projects in the wake of Obama opening our eyes to this years too late.

Put simply, Soapblox got too big and too successful to be a part-time project without a clear revenue model. Roughly a hundred blogs paying $15 a month (and half of them being delinquent on their payments) means developer Paul Preston cleared maybe $1,000 a month on this vital piece of lefty infrastructure, when even a third of the advertising revenue from Soapblox sites -- in exchange for free hosting -- would probably have been a much better model.

At the end of the day, though, Soapblox is a project on the left that deserved serious funding. It wouldn't have taken much -- maybe $200,000 annually to fund a full-time developer and serious hardware and security infrastructure. This is probably the price of three analysts at a random single issue DC nonprofit, and totally worth it given the powerful movement-wide benefits of good technology.

To us in the blogosphere, the benefits to such a project may be clear. But to the donor community, discussions like these are far, far down in the weeds. Which is as it should be. Donors don't need to worry about which blogging platforms will suit the needs of the conservative blogosphere -- whether it's a Soapblox-like custom solution or a mod of Wordpress MU (which is working nicely for RedState).

What we need, and what currently doesn't exist, is something that can translate the goals and strategies of conservative funders into specific and fruitful technology projects. As Erick Erickson notes, there's a lot of snakeoil being sold out there and a lot of people being had or about to be had. It's easy to convince a donor to give you $5 million for software that may be a solution in search of a problem, and that hasn't been peer-reviewed by practioners in the space.

Successful use of technology is not a question of more money -- I am actually confident that more than enough money is out there but it isn't being invested well, and technology is a lot less expensive because it automates things that used to require lots and lots of bodies. It's a question of smartly investing those dollars in promising enterprises, like a venture capitalist would.

Though riskier than blue chip investing, VCs do not put all their eggs in one basket. They carefully select dozens of companies to invest in from a potential pool of hundreds -- and take an active management role in those firms. Most of their investments will fail, but it is the hope of the 1 in 10 that might make a $100 million plus exit -- or the occasional hope of funding the next Google or Facebook -- that keeps them afloat, even through a tough economy like this one. Not every investment is expected to become The Next Big Thing. There is redudancy built into the system, and once due diligence is done, a tolerance for failure that is a requirement for any system to learn and grow.

Potential investors in conservative technology should not be in a position to have to identify the MoveOn of the right, and sink millions into it in the hopes it succeeds. They'd have about as much luck as your average gambler at the Craps table in Vegas. Instead, what we need is a clear-eyed VC or mutual fund approach to investing: invest in lots of little things at a super early stage with the help of a board of practioners in the field, see which ones catch on, then feed the winners and starve the losers.

A conservative movement VC organization would operate as follows: Donors put money in. And a board of practioners invests the money after a rigorous application process. You start with small technology grants of $20,000 to $100,000 to build proofs of concept -- the Series A round. Then you pick the winners and give them Series B funding of $100,000 to $500,000. And so on.

This is how the Democracy Alliance operated -- though its application process was way too dysfunctional, and it's how many foundations operate. But I don't think there's anything here that does quite the equivalent for technology, and there needs to be.