Moonfruit Lounge - Moonfruit history

Moonfruit History IV - Mar to Jun 2000

Joe — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:33:00 +0000

What do you do when you've launched a new product in the dizzy dotcom days? The answer is simple - Advertise! If you remember the conventional wisdom of dotcom times, it was 1. Build something, 2. Raise money, 3. Advertise the hell out of it, 4. Grab as many customers as possible, 5. Sell or float the company, 6. Retire and write a smug book about your experiences. We were entering stage 3 and starting to ramp up the spend. Little did we know we'd never get to write the book...

Dotcom advertising was about trying to get your brand recognised within a crowded market place of other dotcom brands. Moonfruit was small by comparison to some, and had the difficult job of getting heard. The likes of boo.com were spending £60m on global campaigns (and we all know what happened to them...), while we had around £2m in this phase.

Now don't get me wrong, £2m was a lot of cash - and what I'd give for a £2m marketing campaign now - but in the crazy dotcom days everyone wanted campaigns, so everything cost a lot of money. And marketing directors, ad agencies, online agencies, etc., were all in their early days of dotcom experience so everything was a bit experimental and had to be very 'creative', particularly to make an impact in the crowded space. Talent was in short supply, so things cost a lot, and some people got some very weird results.

Moonfruit's campaign was all about sharing your passions online - getting people to realise that they could find like minded people by communicating their own passions and hobbies on the internet, and Moonfruit's website building tools were there as the way to do this.

So our campaign was to focus around people's passions. And to make sure it got some attention, some of there were a little unusual...For example, we had a moustache society, an amateur wrestling (US style) group, and the infamous 'bum-painters' - who basically put paint on their bottoms and used them as brushes to print on canvas.

These were all print adverts running in various magazines and billboards in the UK, and backed up with online campaigns and websites. I've managed to find and rebuild the bum-painting website for your viewing pleasure! Check it out at http://cheekypainters.moonfruit.com/

Then there were the TV ads. These also focused around people's passions and the call to action of building a website to share them with the world. The passions were a little less weird - train collectors, breakdancers and football sticker trading - but each ad tried to add something different to make them a bit more funny or memorable.

Apparently the original ads were meant to be 30 seconds, but were eventually cut at 20 seconds for budgetary reasons. I've put a site together with the final versions, so let us know what you think. They kind of work, but could probably have done with that extra 10 seconds to pull things together. While your watching, just think that these ads ran during the Euro 2000 football championship on UK TV...

http://moonfruitads.moonfruit.com/

So those were the ads! They certainly worked and we started to get high volumes of traffic to the site - at one stage being in the top 12 visited sites in the UK - but turning that interest into business success is a different story. To be continued...

Moonfruit history - chapter III - Jan 2000

Joe — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 16:42:00 +0000

So, there we were, trying to close our £5m investment round, running out of money fast, and just having launched the first version of Moonfruit (not even called SiteMaker at that point).

www.moonfruit.com launched on January 20 2000 in a splash of media coverage. The first version of the product had many similarities to how it is today, but some of the metaphors and interfaces were pretty conceptual. You entered the Moonfruit virtual world where you were directed by customer service avatars to the Site Leaders Lounge (to build a site), or to the Destination Board (to browse for sites already built).

I've built a site which gives you a bit of a walk-through of the first version of Moonfruit, showing the site building process, and site edit tools, etc. You'll see some familiar stuff, and some other things that may seem a bit crazier with today's 20:20 hindsight. But this was the beginning. Have a look at;

http://version1.moonfruit.com

But what was going on behind the scenes at this time? Well the team was pretty much divided between being stressed about the product launch, and stressed about raising the cash. The operations team had no idea what volumes of customers to expect, and or how the product would be received. The press were starting to write stories and reviews of Moonfruit, and we were waiting to see what people thought.

Oh, and the money was still running out, and we still didn't have an investor.

But thankfully all that changed on 5 Feb 2000 when we secured £5m of investment from Europ@web which was a Paris based venture capital fund, who had also invested in QXL, Ebay, LibertySurf and Cisco. The cash meant we could continue our rapid expansion, and invest more in marketing, which that was the all important dotcom ingredient for success (or so conventional wisdom had it).

Here's the original article from our launch day.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,238417,00.html

Moonfruit history lesson - chapter II - 2000

Joe — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:22:00 +0000

How do you raise £1m? Good question. The answer to which was not to raise £1m, but instead to raise £5m, as we were told at the time by another internet entrepreneur. Apparently this was much easier. A good .com business plan needed ambition, and ambition required cash, so in a way if your plan lacked ambition you wouldn't get the cash, so £5m it was.

(Aside - I feel the need at this point to explain my view on .com-enomics, as I'm conscious I don't want this account to seem either frivolous or disrespectful. Certainly with hindsight, you could say it seemed a little strange that these unproven business plans could attract so much cash, but at the time it was a very different matter.

I believe that people fell into one of three categories at the time:

i) I believe this is a new era of economics and dotcoms would revolutionise the way things work; ii) I'm not sure I believe the economics myself, but the market is placing very high value on it; iii) This .com stuff is a load of nonsense.

Personally, I felt a little between (i) and (ii), a bit like an agnostic; I would have liked to believe (i) was true, but a little too sceptical to fully throw myself behind it. But that's why I wouldn't have been able to raise that kind of money in that climate. The people that threw themselves behind (i), made a bold claim and were prepared to back it, were real pioneers of the time. And succeed or fail, they had a commitment to the .com era and helped make it what it is today.

As an investor, you could justify being involved if you believed either (i) or (ii). Clearly if you believed (i) you'd go for it, but even if it was (ii), and you were very sceptical/cynical, you could make an investment with the expectation of selling it in the high stakes .com boom and exiting well even if you didn't believe it yourself. While there were companies buying each other for $100m, or going public for $1bn, it was possible. Taking their lead, conventional wisdom said that if you built a service, grabbed as many customers as you could (usually at low or free prices), you could be valued very highly, even before you'd made any money yourself.

I'm not sure what our investors believed. Probably a mixture of (i) and (ii), and all .com plans certainly involved making money. It was just the business model itself that was unproven (if you added up all the .com advertising revenues on all the .com plans, I'm sure it would have come to more than the GDP of the world...). But they, like the entrepreneurs, were prepared to put their money where their mouth was, and helped shape the most dramatic change in business climate since the industrial revolution. - end).

So armed with conventional wisdom, our free product launched in January 2000, and we set about grabbing as many customers as we could.

Moonfruit history - chapter I - 1999/2000

Joe — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:19:00 +0000

What the hell is a Moonfruit anyway? Good question. Apparently it is a kind of Jurassic fauna (you know a flower from around the same time as the dinosaurs), but we didn't find that out until sometime in late 2000 when we were at the BBC 2 Internet awards, sitting next to the guys from 'Walking with Dinosaurs' and picking up our award for 'Best online design'.

In fact, when Moonfruit was founded in August 1999 by Wendy Tan, it wasn't even Moonfruit at all. It was Passionfruit. What the hell is a...wait a sec, it's a passionfruit. Yes that's right. The original vision behind Passionfruit was to allow people to 'share their passions online' and bring website building to the masses. In sharing their passions, we hoped to achieve a vibrant online community of site builders who would support each other and grow like a community. Online passions, vibrant organic growth = Passionfruit.

Makes a bit more sense now.

However, it wasn't going to be that easy. Not only was passionfruit.com not available (it was owned by a women's rights newspaper in mid-West USA), but people thought it sounded a bit 'porny', which wasn't really what we were hoping for. After a few botched attempts to buy passionfruit.com (would you have sold it for $25,000? Apparently they wouldn't have), it was clear we'd have to find something else.

Thepassionfruit.com, passionfroot.com, fireblaze.com? Hmm, not really. It was only then, inspired by a Moon shaped Ikea lamp, that Eirik Pettersen (CTO) came up with the Moonfruit name, and Moonfruit was born. Not without a few arguments among the founding team, but it survived. (A survey of people on the streets of London thought it sounded cool, even though they didn't know what it was, 'was it a bar?).

So there we were, we had our beloved Moonfruit.com, though nothing to put on it. So armed with cash from the founders (a team that included David Stephens, Tim Parlett and Judith Clegg), Wendy and Eirik set to work looking for funding, and getting the prototype for the online toolkit built. Enter Sixzeds, a boutique web development company based in Soho specialising in Flash development, and its founders Tony Short and Joe White (me).

Sixzeds set about firming up the ideas for the online toolkit, and getting going on the build of the prototype itself, while the Moonfruiters (as they were known) went after the all important seed capital to get us to launch.

This was late 1999 and people in the UK were awash with .com business plans. Everyone had one or two ideas, some were hopelessly bad, others more promising, but if you could put together a decent presentation and a smart (but trendy) suit, people would listen. A bit behind the US, the investors in UK and Europe were also keen not to miss out, so deals were there to be done.

Moonfruit was first offered cash by an established businessman, who'd made his millions in industrial tech applications, but wanted 50% of the company for his £500k stake. This was encouraging, but not what we thought was possible in those heady days. After some more shopping around, we were offered the same £500k for 15% of the equity by a international strategy consultancy, who would also support us raising further funds and building our business case. This was good, and we were ready to go.

The £500k would take us to launch, and allow us to start building the team that would support it. In a few short months, Moonfruit grew to 25 people and January saw the launch of the first moonfruit.com and the online website building toolkit.