What I Learned Launching A Market First

Before there was youtube, instagram, facebook, or even myspace, there was seemeskateboard.com. Never heard of it? Probably not, but it was one of the first websites to host user generated videos online, it was also my first brand and company. This year marks 20 years since its launch and quick yet fun demise. I’m taking a moment to honor it by looking back at the lessons learned from it.

1999 seems like forever ago. I was fresh out of the Marines, working at a Laguna Beach agency by day, learning print production and film stripping by night. The internet had that new car smell, you still received AOL and Earthlink CDs by the trashcan full, and that screeching dial-up noise announced your arrival into the internet. 

At the same time my friend Josh and I were both skateboarding as a means of transport and sport. There was a skate park in Huntington Beach, the first Vans skatepark/store had opened in Orange, and they were breaking ground on a handful of new skateparks around Southern California. There were sold out Skateboarding classes for $30-50/hr per student being given by shirtless skaters barely older than their students. Skate culture was dying, but the business of skateboarding was booming. 

We quickly saw the potential to build a global skateboarding community by bringing the best skaters around the world to your desktop. We bought our first domain, hacked together a website, convinced some relatives to pitch in, and had a few thousand .com stickers printed. We traveled to skateparks with our Camcorders and Hi8 tapes ready to shoot the best guys at each park with the promise of an online audience. It didn’t take long before people knew who we were asking for stickers, handing us their own demo tapes, meanwhile our tapes were piling up and nothing was getting uploaded. Not knowing how to digitize physical tapes, and everything else involved in 1999 to get video on the web became a full-time job of learning how to do it. Remember this is before youtube so we couldn’t easily search for answers.

We rented equipment to digitize film and compress each video clip into file formats specific to the various media players. Realizing that for every 30 second clip we’d need roughly 3-4 days of processing time we decided to stop shooting and focus on marketing. We stickered every Southern California sign post, handed stickers out at shops, asked skate shops to sponsor our riders, and requested gear from brands to hand out at the parks to be featured in our videos. It’s hard to explain something as new as the internet to sponsors then on top of that explain web video, search traffic, and branded content all while asking them for money and gear.

Josh and I didn’t know exactly what we were building, but we knew we’d hit a nerve by the looks on the skaters faces when they saw themselves online for the first time. They were writing their ridiculously complicated URLs on their boards to share with friends and fans. Skate shops were feeling the buzz and were contacting us, on the back-end we were drowning. The cost of equipment, the time to process, and time to build something new was no longer fun. It was becoming a job, and we weren’t making any money. We folded when we arrived at our product market fit, being young and inexperienced we took our losses and got back to skating for fun. But for that one year, we were delivering some of the web’s first ever user-generated content, trying to monetize it for the skaters, and learning how to build a global community through content online.

What I learned from launching my first website:

? There are no plans for innovation. 

When you’re the “first to market’’ with anything, you’re going to get a lot of things wrong, but you’re also going to get a lot of things right. 

? Do your homework first. 

Know more about your space than anyone else, know more about your competitors than they do, and understand your audience. Avoid using Personas as targets, there are enough real people in the world to interact with and inform your decisions.

? Spot trends early.

I learned early on that everything bad happens in threes, so do trends. In 1999 skateboarding was evolving into a mainstream business seeing these three things announced its arrival: X Games, neighborhood skate parks, Skate Master Tate, skate moms (like soccer moms, but moms that would take their kids to the skate park to watch the skateboarding lessons).

? If you’re going to build anything, build a community. 

Uniting people over a common passion quickly opens the door to future sales. 

? Learn something new everyday.

Even though the site closed, I gained knowledge I use to this day. I provide my trend forecasting service to brands focusing on the future of retail, packaging, and consumer engagement. I write content and provide video and photography for digital and print publications monthly. Last but not least, I learned to build an audience you must give before you take.

Here’s looking to the future, let’s build something together.