Oh the humanity! Oh the business!

posted by Jeff | Sunday, March 16, 2008, 8:36 PM | comments: 1

I've been sick now for more than a week. The last three days haven't been terrible, but I haven't felt particularly human. Actually, today I did, but that was offset by this intense fatigue. All I've wanted to do is sleep all day. I did manage to keep it down to two hours of napping.

As my head starts to come back online, I realize there are a lot of important things to think about. About a month from now, as long as I'm not a jackass, the business will be debt free for the first time ever. I'll try to retell the story here in part for Diana's benefit, and in part for my own. I've had this company face now for years, and it never quite had a clear reason to exist.

After college, and after starting the cable TV gig in Medina (this was 1997), I was already intent on using the Internet as another form of media to use and understand. What made it more interesting was that anyone could do it with a relatively low cost barrier to entry. Having exited from radio, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to build these Web sites for radio stations? So in thinking of popular music and such, I came up with POP World, and registered popworld.com on July 11, 1997, for $150 or whatever domain names cost back then.

Ironically, I propositioned Cedar Point about building a site for them too, only because it seemed like a sexy thing to do. Keep in mind, Web sites in 1997 were hideous, and what little I knew how to do was just as bad.

I stuck to video and my day job for the most part. In 1998 though, after finally owning my own (film) SLR camera, I wanted to put some of the photos I was shooting online somewhere, especially those from Cedar Point. That's when Guide to The Point was born. Graphically, it wasn't pretty, but it wasn't horrible either. Print influence and video graphic design (the one place where I felt like I did know what I was doing) really helped give it a distinct look. What sucked is that it was all static HTML. It was a pain in the ass to maintain.

Regardless, it was the first time that I actually generated revenue. I might even still have my first check stub from Burst Media for like twenty bucks. Believe it or not, it didn't take much traffic to generate that kind of money back then!

It was still not a business as much as it was a label. It wasn't until 2000 that I did two things intended to expand the income. The first was to sell the forum application to the public that I had originally written for GTTP. That was important enough to form the LLC that still exists today. The second was the creation of CoasterBuzz, which was essentially GTTP meant for a broader audience.

What I did not anticipate that year was that some British firm with deep pockets would come knocking, wanting to buy popworld.com. They offered me $1,000 the first time, and by the time we had a deal, I made $100,000. Sometimes I wonder if I should've gone higher. When I started Yahoo'ing (I don't think Google was a verb just yet) the name of the company wanting to buy, I found that they were working on music promotion deals with Spice Girls and Pepsi, so I was willing to stick it out and get whatever I could. And I did.

(Side note... I think what they have, a Brit pop music portal that's currently not even up, will eventually fail, and I'd love nothing more than to buy the name back some day... starting offer, $1,000.)

That $100k went toward a lot of things. Stephanie and I paid for our wedding, honeymoon, credit card debt, the one car (which she's still driving, by the way, go Toyota), and whatever was left was the down payment for my house.

The very next year was shitty in so many ways. While we closed on the house in the spring, the fall of 2001 was, well, who was it good for? 9/11 was somewhat connected to me being laid-off, but then I also had a perfect storm of shit when DoubleClick (then representing sites for ads) dropped me, I just signed up for a T-1 to serve the sites for a year at more than a grand a month, I built a server and bought licenses for stuff... it was not a good scene. The prior year's financial score was being offset by a total meltdown.

I was unemployed six long months when I started a shitty job that never went anywhere, but it did give me time to really start to learn .NET, and rewrite the forum to the version that has been around almost since then. Demand for the forum app trailed off, as many free alternatives surfaced, so that part of the business had gone away.

That put me pretty squarely in the content business. During the meltdown I started CoasterBuzz Club, offering an alternative way to fund the site (and that damn T-1), which to this day still makes a lot of sense. People don't mind putting out a little money annually for something they enjoy, and honestly I see more value in retaining those users than those who "pay" by seeing the ads.

But still... that's what the business has been. It has been mostly by accident. It has never been, "I will do this and make money this way." That's not even a business, it's still more of a hobby (one that takes a lot of time to maintain). So as I reach this point where I am without fiscal liabilities, the question is, what now?

There are two things I've observed about online work. The first is that client work sucks. I hate it. I've watched other people do it and they hate it. Too often you end up being someone else's bitch doing something that you know isn't the right thing. For that reason, I prefer that anything that I "sell" be something self-serviceable and not huge. I have some ideas (which are not the same as business plans, of course).

The second thing is that I really like the content world. I especially like content that users compile and maintain. Remember, CoasterBuzz has been generating content from the user end since the beginning in 2000, long before anyone knew what Digg was. I never automated it, because I'm frankly not sold on the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing, but it was the people who built the content. I still like that world, even if the scope of the world I serve has narrowed a bit.

Of course, I still have this day job thing which is comfortable, pays extremely well, and I honestly benefit from greatly because I become a better code monkey from having it. I still haven't figured out how to make those things co-exist.

No matter what comes out of this year, there are many exciting prospects.


Comments

Gonch

March 17, 2008, 2:30 AM #

"What sucked is that it was all static HTML. It was a pain in the ass to maintain."

That's a wall I'm just beginning to hit.


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