Sold Jippy.com
When we sold V3.com to Fortunecity in 1999 we had to sign all the papers in London. As we were boarding the plane my business partner Hans-Poul started complaining about address books. We both had our separate address books and both had a different phone number and address for a mutual friend. During that short flight we dreamed up a system in which the whole world would share just one address book and if one person would move he or she would only have to change their own record and all the other records would be updated right away.
Sounds familiar?
We figured people wouldn’t trust any service on the web with all that data so we devised a strategy: we would first offer a birthday calendar and once that would be successful we would say ‘Hey, you can also use this ‘always-up-to-date’ service to manage your contact data’.
Plaxo proved that our fears were ungrounded but we didn’t know that at that time.
So that is how we started Jippy.com in 2000. I worked on Jippy for about a year but then decided I didn’t think it would work. I left the company to start HubHop which went very well.
But that is a different story.
Since then Jippy has silently grown to 1 million+ members. Not all users are active but still not bad. You could say that Jippy was a Social Network before that word even existed.
But despite the growth and some opportunities I still didn’t see it happen. Birthday data is built into a lot of applications and web services (Including Hyves and Plaxo) and a separate service based only on birthdays just doesn’t seem that appealing to me.
So a few months ago I spoke with one of the other shareholders and offered him to buy my shares. A few months passed but yesterday I finally signed the papers and officially sold my shares.
I wish the current owners of Jippy.com lots of luck and hope they prove me wrong.
PS. The illustration here is the original design I made on May 30, 2000. Pretty ugly isn’t it?
And of course, now we are all interested in the amount you sold it for…
Congratulations on the sale. I’m interested to see what will happen with it since like you said other, more popular, websites offer similiar services.
keep your eye on jippy, interesting things about to happen.
boris, indeed, social network avant-la-lettre. Remember mypage.com (instant homepages) back in ’99? I think they call that myspace these days ;-)
If only those idiots at Fortunecity’s board would have listened to us….
hansvvz
Hi Hans-Poul: actually we called it easypage.com and not mypage.com. But I had forgotten it completely! I’m looking for an old screen shot now in my archive. Here is the logo I designed at the time. Very web1.0…
yeah, right. mypage.com we bought from the guys at pine internet in den haag.