The 'B' Word

Picking up our story from yesterday, in which we re-introduced a series on the history and making of Splitcoast.

Part four of the original series, "The 'B' Word", never appeared, and some of you speculated what the 'B' stood for. Well, it's been almost three years now and I've completely forgotten.

Just kidding! The 'B' stood for "business". I've always been a capitalist, since - back to my sisters and I growing up again - we had kool-aid stands, or I sold golf balls from the bushes back to the golfers who deposited them there. So I'm exactly the opposite of anti-business, but the notion of Splitcoast as a "business" always made me nervous. The primary role of a business is to serve a customer and earn a profit. Well, we started this on something close to a whim and any idea of making money would have been somewhat laughable. But it also seemed to be at odds, at least a little bit, with what my goals were.

Now I'm gonna stray off-course again.

Cult of Mac
Computer stuff has always fascinated me, at least since my first real exposure (college campus, 1985, if you must know) to a computer that seemed to be designed for real people. It's as corny as can be, but seeing that cute little computer in our school's student government office was a near-religious experience that I never forgot. My kind of cult for sure. I could create something permanent (a written page, a picture, an idea, a software program), save it, and share it with someone else. This was pre-internet really, but computers represented for me one big, blue sky of limitless possibility for self-expression and new kinds of connections with people beyond the limits of what I might do or say right this minute.

Around that time I discovered something else I hadn't even known I loved. I was always a people watcher and wow, they had a fancy word (Sociology) for that! Didn't know what I'd ever do with it in the work world, but I'd found my college major and that was that.

Come play in my sand box
Years down the road from school, the idea of bringing stampers around the country together was, for me, a social experiment. Nobody else on the web was really doing it, even though Stampin' Up! had many thousands of reps (demonstrators) around the country. Tracy's growing SU! downline was the inspiration for Splitcoast the site - their only real group communications at the time were the occasional email or exhausting-to-prepare newsletter.

Giving stampers a virtual place to gather was a no-brainer, but I didn't want to sully that social experiment with the notion of making it about money. To me, that would've been a turn-off. If people liked it, any financial concerns would take care of themselves. Instead, I wanted people. Lots of people. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of stampers yearning to breathe free.

Get serious
We got the people. More than we bargained for! A happy problem certainly. At some point, growing up couldn't be avoided any longer - the community got larger and larger and more and more time was committed here, by more and more people. Challenges and problems got more complicated, and mistakes more costly. I felt guilty asking for increased accountability from our team members, with no compensation. There were people now who gave us their money, and they deserved immediate help when they had a question or concern. We had to start the process of maturing beyond the lark that we handled in our spare time, to a real, eeg, "Business".

Well, we tried that for a little while, decided it was completely boring, and went back to just doing whatever we felt like. OK, I'm kidding again (only kinda). We *have* become a real corporation, we *do* not only own QuickBooks but actually use it on occasion, and have discovered that attorneys and accountants, while not evil people, do tend to send you evil little bills (sometimes big bills) with clockwork-like frequency.

We love advertising, don't we?
A big step in our stumble through adolescence involved the growth of our advertising programs. By June/July of 2005 I'd finally given up my day job as a software developer and began doing Splitcoast full-time. It was already requiring a full-time commitment, but now it needed to produce full-time money or our girls were going to be surviving on Easy Mac and store-brand ice cream instead of the good stuff.

We were getting a steady number of papercrafting companies contacting us, interested in how they might get the word out about their products. We'd begun to offer banner ad space, but we knew almost nothing about how to sell or carry out any kind of online advertising programs. And clients have certain expectations, as you might imagine, especially when they pay real money and have their own businesses at stake. It needed some focus and it needed somebody dedicated to it, and along came Sara. Adam and I were good buddies from the job I'd just left and Sara his newly betrothed. She struck me as smart and capable, and lucky for us I was right.

And we love our advertisers too
Fast forward to now. Our advertising team expanded to include Lori Craig, and many paper crafting companies have joined the community through our Member Companies program. Splitcoast contributes, at least in a small way through all of you, in helping some other damn fine people grow their own stamp and papercrafting companies. Lizzie Anne Designs, Scor-Pal, Stamping Bella, Gina K, My Favorite Things, Papertrey Ink, Crafty Secrets, Verve Stamps, Odd Bird Planet, Flourishes, Hanna Stamps!, Unity Stamp Company, Little Monkeys, and many others.

Getting around to it
Join us tomorrow for the last installment of the story. The end of the story, but not the end of course. A hard year and a new beginning.

See the Splitcoast home page this week for a series of articles culminating in some important news. Good news, don't worry. Start with Tuesday's installment, then be sure and come back Wednesday and Thursday too.

Posted by: daven on Jul 15, 08 | 7:36 am

The 'B' Word

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The 'B' Word

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