Neither DeWolfe nor Anderson particularly liked authority, but in each other they found not only a friend, but somebody they also respected and with whom they could work well. After Xdrive, the company they had both been working for, ended up in bankruptcy in the dot-com bubble burst, DeWolfe and Anderson decided to go into business with each other.
“We started our first company nine moths later,” recalls Anderson. “So I went from not working or doing little side jobs here and there to helping to run a company and own part of it. I don’t think that a normal business guy would have given me this kind of chance.”
DeWolfe might not have been “normal,” but he nevertheless saw something in Anderson that sparked an instant connection. The duo decided to create an Internet marketing firm. Called Response Base, the company took off. It was so successful in fact, that it was sold within a year to eUniverse for several million dollars. Although they both continued to work for the company, Anderson had bigger plans.
Anderson began thinking about online social networking, and wondered if it was going to be the next big thing. “I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster,” he says, “and I thought, ‘They’re thinking way too small.’”
Anderson pitched the idea to DeWolfe and he was sold. It reminded him of one of his USC business papers, where he had proposed the creation of a community website called Sitegeist. He was given an A- for the idea by a professor who rarely gave out A’s of any kind. DeWolfe knew he was onto something.
In 2003, Anderson and DeWolfe launched their new site, first inviting just local bands and club owners to create profile pages and become their “friends.” Because of how it began, the two indie music lovers got to spend much of their time going to watch live music each week and talking to bands. “It was pretty much a great way to work,” recalls DeWolfe.
As it turns out, their marketing strategy was not only fun for them. It was also successful in terms of generating the publicity that they needed. “All these creative people became ambassadors for MySpace by using us as their de facto promotional platform,” says DeWolfe. “People like to talk about music, so the bands set up a natural environment to communicate.”
When a friend reminded DeWolfe that he had previously bought the domain name myspace.com (he had been toying with the idea of creating a web-hosting company), the pair had their new site name.
“Things did go remarkably easy for us,” recalls Anderson. “I can’t say we struggled for a long time; we only struggled for a month.” But that one month was a difficult time. With little traffic to their new site, Anderson began thinking, “This may not work out.” Then, one day, he says, “We this huge spike because of people telling each other. It just went crazy from there. We didn’t have this big, long struggle behind it. We put it up, and it got popular very quickly.”
So, what began as a community of creative people that Anderson and DeWolfe knew in Los Angeles quickly grew into a worldwide phenomenon simply by word of mouth. Today, MySpace is up and running in 14 different countries. That, says DeWolfe, was always their intention. “We wanted to make sure we had a huge U.S. community right from the beginning. And it was always in our first business plans to expand it internationally.”
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