To start, we all love web publishing. All of us having been doing this for a while, and find no less thrill today in launching a new site than we did years ago. If anything the medium has gotten significantly more exciting and powerful as users literally build the site along side you.

We have all worked in small entrepreneurial companies before they grew, were acquired, or died. We are strong believers that this medium still favors a small team with a powerful idea.

Our company is built on the belief that “small is the next big”. One inarguable fact is that a small team of exceptional people can beat an army of good people. It is a very American principle. On that premise, our team working out of a small office in Sausalito is building a platform to launch lots great sites. How will we do? We will have to let users be the ultimate judge.

As much magic and innovation that have come out of the small publisher category, few have become great businesses for those publishers. One of our missions will be to change that, to help develop the tools and models that empower and pay this merry band of content producers.

You might wonder about the name — a bunch of people like it and a bunch of people hate it. When we started a year ago, four of us signed a bottle of Bourbon. When we set up our account on BaseCamp, we used as a working name “Whiskey Four”. Not to bore you with the details, but the vagaries of the naming process shot down about twenty other names that we tried. We finally went back to Whiskey.

The name and the logo have some personal history for me. My family, the Bonnies, is from Kentucky and had a distillery named “Bonnie Brothers” which we unfortunately shut down thanks to prohibition. The logo we are using is literally a copy of the old “Bonnie Brothers” label with “Whiskey” replacing “Bonnie”.

From small batch whiskey to small batch publishing.

Thanks for visiting,

Shelby and the rest of the team.

systems: whiskey