I had a similar “forced entry” experience with Professor Karl H. Pribram at Stanford. He was the head of the neuropsych dept there, I did not belong but did belong. It as late in the summer of 1979 when I showed up at his office door wherein life as I knew it changed significantly for me thereafter.

30 years is how long I have waited and worked on, and tested, and waited… one idea. One complex invention. Many pieces pulled apart and flexed and tested in applicable marketspaces but the “readiness’ was just not there yet… until this last year…

Paradigm shifts (ref: Thomas Kuhn and Drs. Miller, Galanter & Pribram – Stanford Behavioral Institute) are real and can be motivated to shift to some degree. I wish the market were as easy to “move” as Dr. Thorne.

Congrats to you and all your successes… and the positive social consequences of these successes and over time.

So many shades of perseverance and Purpose.

Lovely story.

Thanks for all those emails. And hope to meet you soon when I start pitching in the bay area in the next few months.

PS: Posted using an alternate email, so don’t try to guess

When we started Aeroprise in 2001, conventional wisdom was that enterprise wireless was overcrowded and overfunded and as the insiders called it – “game over.” There were too many well-funded companies present for a new entrant to make any impact. I had a spreadsheet that even with limited research tracked about 68 potential competitors.

Of course, 4 yrs later (when we were still bootstrapped but with 60+ paying enterprise customers) only 9 of these companies in the list of 68 were left (interesting all those companies have grown between 2006 and today). So much for overcrowded and overfunded. Ultimately the best offerings that customers cannot do without survive, but not before entrepreneurs decide to (insanely) persist in the face of harsh resistance (sometimes even conventional wisdom).

Also, I didn’t mean to take away from the note about Jack Thorne. I hadn’t heard of him, but the mention makes me reflect on some of my own professors and the impact they’ve had.

The site “launch” with just a posting to Usenet groups. The hook was to tell people that they can get their own chat room on their own website, and they could even customize it by putting their own logo on it. So the service was mostly white-labeled. I started by hosting 5 chat rooms on my own website, but then allowed people to open up their own rooms. They could do that either by just typing in a name in the UI, or they could embed the new room into their own website using an HTML embed code (it wasn’t called an embed code back then).

The initial growth was all organic. In hindsight, I would say that it was mostly getting lucky and being very early — so there weren’t a whole lot of competitors out there. And for the ones that were out there, I was competing on two things: quality (features and reliability) and simplicity. Once I realized that it would be cool to actually have more rooms and more users, I started to think about it a little more strategically. I entered my “applet” in various Java Applet contests. It landed up winning some awards and so now I could add badges on the site, and also got links back from the contest websites. I also created little animated GIF buttons that people could add to their web page to say that their site was powered by SneakerChat.

Then I realized that by having a white-labeled product, I was limiting my viral growth. So I added a banner ad at the bottom of the chat client. Every page which was using the free chat room, would now be displaying a 468×60 ad banner, which would have an ad saying “Get your own chat room” or something like that. When some of the users complained about the ad, I started offering a paid version. But, I was running low on server resources and didn’t have the money to buy any hardware. So I started offering a paid version of the software, that people could install on their own server. I didn’t really understand the value of “traffic” back then (I probably still don’t!). I was, and still am, a techie/software guy. I didn’t think I could make any money doing ads or by having a lot of people. But I knew I could make money by selling software. What the experience with SneakerChat taught me is that I could actually make money by providing software as a service — back then it was called “on demand,” then it was called “application service provider,” today we call is SaaS.

Your question made me go look up if any of the old site was still on the Wab Back Machine. Here is the archived version of the SneakerChat.com site. You’re welcome to poke around and see for yourself what it looked like. Of course the server isn’t running any more so that chat itself won’t work. Also, bear in mind this was in 1998, it was just me, myself and I — all three of us. I was doing everything, the code, the site, the graphics, the marketing, the customer service — everything from soup to nuts.

To close the loop on this story, I sold the “traffic” and the user base from SneakerChat for about $100,000. I got about 60% of that up front as cash and that’s what became the bootstrap capital for the company. I retained the software, since that’s what I wanted to build — a software company.