294 Views

Seventeen Years, 294 Views

There's a video on YouTube called This Is SpartX.com. Uploaded April 2009. As of this week it has 294 views. Seventeen years on the public internet and 294 people have watched it. I'm probably 40 of them.

Let me tell you what you're looking at.

A Real Company, a Box of Cards

In college the business school did something I've never seen another school do. They funded a real company and let students run it. Ours was EdgeSports, a non-motorized sports magazine. Skiing, mountain biking, that world. We created the content, figured out distribution, and I sold the ads myself, driving to local ski resorts and mountain bike parks and asking for money. Some said yes.

Then a box arrived. Our first business cards. I remember holding one and thinking, what if this was virtual?

A Networked Card for the Professional You

I had joined Facebook on July 23, 2005, back when it was still thefacebook.com and you needed a .edu address to get in. I was also writing for the student paper as a business writer and had just done a piece on MySpace, which is what everyone else was on at the time. So I was living inside two networks while holding a paper business card, and the collision was the idea. What those gated Facebook years looked like from the inside is a story of its own, told in Three Septembers.

The business plan I wrote for class was called myprofessionalliaison.com. A card you could exchange across the internet that carried more than a phone number. Your education, your resume, your work, hyperlinked. A networked card for the professional you.

The grand version was bigger. You'd exchange cards phone to phone, in person, digitally. But this was 2006. There was no iPhone. There were no apps. There were Palm Treos and BlackBerrys and they could not do what we needed them to do. We never got that far.

SpartX, X for Exchange

Here's what we did instead. After graduation we raised money and renamed the company SpartX.com, leaning on the X for exchange. The slogan was your net worth is your network.

That photo is the company right after graduation. I was 22.

The revenue model still makes me smile. Users could print physical SpartX cards with their link on them. The digital card, monetized by turning it back into the paper card that inspired it. We didn't have the phones to go digital to digital, so we bridged digital to physical, because paper worked everywhere.

Xplore, Jobs, and a Vistaprint Ad

Later we built a search product on the site called Xplore. Jobs and events. Type what you want and where you want it. Employers posted listings and government agencies started using it to place people in jobs. In 2010 the company was acquired. Four years from the chess table.

That ad is Vistaprint, selling 250 free physical business cards, on the site that existed to make business cards digital. The old world was buying ad space on the thing replacing it, and neither of us knew yet who would win.

Every Idea Has a Date Before Which It Cannot Work

What I know now, twenty years later.

Walk through any conference today and watch people tap phones to share their info. Digital cards, QR codes, your links attached. That's our pitch. Not similar to it. The exact product, working exactly as imagined, and it works because the iPhone exists. The iPhone shipped the year after that chess table photo, three years before we sold. We were building the right thing on hardware that couldn't carry it.

Every idea has a date before which it cannot work. Not should not. Cannot. No amount of effort or talent or money moves that date, because the date belongs to the enabling technology, not to you. The only decisions you actually get are whether to build a version the current tools can carry, and whether you can survive until the date arrives. We built the version 2006 could carry, printed cards and a jobs board, and sold in 2010. The date arrived after we were gone and other people got to build the grand version.

I don't regret it. A 22-year-old with a chess table doesn't get to wait out Apple's roadmap. But I check the date on every idea now, mine and everyone's who pitches me. What has to exist for this to work, and does it exist yet?

The video is still up. 294 views. Go be one of them.