San Diego’s MindTouch Uses Open Source to Develop Software—and Strategy

Aaron Fulkerson begins his story about San Diego-based MindTouch in the middle. He says MindTouch today is a Web-based business collaboration and integration platform, with 20 million users and hundreds of thousands of active installations. The company’s software is meant to help engineering groups, business teams, and others collaborate on projects by sharing documents, information, images, and other information.

“Nobody, except maybe Microsoft [Sharepoint], has the installed base that we have,” boasts Fulkerson, the CEO and a MindTouch co-founder. “And we’ve done it entirely through shoestring guerilla social marketing with T-shirts and spending $5,000-a-month on Google ad words.”

Aaron Fulkerson
Aaron Fulkerson

Fulkerson attributes the viral growth rate at MindTouch at least partly to an early decision he made with co-founder and chief technology officer Steve Bjorg to build their business around an open source wiki program. “One of the very important strategies we settled on at the beginning was to make it open source,” Fulkerson says. “We wanted to create an application that was easy-to-use, and in a Web-based environment that enables you to stop losing information and makes it easier to share that information with your colleagues.”

In recent weeks, the company’s collaboration software has ranked from No. 27 to No. 135 on the list of most-popular open source applications at SourceForge.net, the Web-based source code repository for software developers. “Even being consistently ranked in the top 200 open source applications on SourceForge and hitting the top 20 from time to time is a very good thing indeed, seeing that we have over 200,000 projects hosted,” SourceForge director of community Ross Turk writes in an e-mail.

Before launching MindTouch, Fulkerson and Bjorg worked together at Microsoft under then-CTO Craig Mundie in the software goliath’s advanced strategies and

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.