A trip down memory lane

By Erik Hekman on 30 November 2010

Last week the faculty of communication and journalism organized a staff trip to see the movie ‘the social network’ in Pathé Rembrandt Utrecht. The movie focuses on the creation of Facebook, a popular social network site (for those who lived in a cave the last seven years).
At first I was reluctant to go to the movie at all assuming it was a mere movie about sex, drugs and rock and roll with a Silicone Valley touch. I was wrong… It was techno-music. The faculty asked me to participate in a panel discussion about social media and social networks afterwards so I had to go. Forming a panel could and should be a movie on itself but eventually a panel was formed. With little expectation I entered the movie theater.

I must admit… it was actually a nice movie. I’m not qualified to criticize a movie, surely there are far better reviewers on IMDB or Yelp, but I liked the flow of the movie and the intertwining storylines. Watching the actor who played Mark write website code in such a way incomprehensible for real developers (even plain annoying) reminded me of a scene in Jurassic Park where the little girl mumbles: it’s a UNIX system, I know this.

The creation of Facebook in a student dorm room reminded me of myself and Eric when we were 20-somethings. Together we were always thinking of new concepts to build and have fun along the way (okay and if it would earn us some money to buy beer it would be nice. We were students after all). Our golden idea was a marketing concept Stick-It (founded in 2001, or was it 2002?). On Stick-It.nl, consumers could order free stickers with their own personal photo. The stickers were sponsored by a brand e.g. Coca Cola and consumers could go to the website to create their stickers, fill in valuable data about themselves (for Coca Cola), and receive a sheet of sponsored personalized stickers in return by post. Those stickers would be used in agenda’s or laptops or exchanged. We were certain this would work and build the service. Free personalized stickers, with a little ad, what’s not to like! We reserved 350 free sticker sheets to see if consumers would be attracted to the idea. In a mere three days we were out of stock. We didn’t advertise, we mainly used email to promote the website. People forwarded the mail like crazy. We were euphoric and believed this actually could work!

On the business side however, we were clearly not skilled (come on, we’re software developers!) and after a year of contact businesses we still didn’t have a paying customer. In retrospect the glitch was mainly the business model, which we didn’t think through properly. Even if we could attract an advertiser it would have to pay around 1 Euro per consumer giving us a whopping profit of 20 Euro cents. So if Coca Cola would order 10.000 we would earn 2000 Euro. This sounds like a reasonable amount but we still had to do a lot work on the website and back end, buy printers, moderate the content, put the stickers in envelopes et cetera. So we just had fun with it. Somewhere I still have some screenshots of the website.

Apart from the trip down memory lane for me, the movie clearly inspired some of the students who also showed up. Right after the movie students approached me to discuss their ideas and shared their enthusiasm. The latter one is key, you should work on projects because they inspire you, make you smile. I still have warm feelings when remembering Stick-It and the good times we had. Sadly enough these emotions will not do well for a Hollywood blockbuster.

tagged with: stick-it, social network sites, facebook, business models

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