Happy 10th Scanniversary

(okay, so it was acquired 7 years ago, but still...)

'Twas mid-December 1999. Myself and two of my best old friends were working at a digital marketing consultancy. We were working (and drinking) one evening with Robert Hamilton, who'd just had this fabulous idea - he'd tried to buy a book, but had no way (in the days before the mobile internet) to find out if it was cheaper, or in stock, at Amazon. What about this SMS thing? Snaffle It was born - a price comparison/stock checker using SMS that screen-scraped Amazon using a book's ISBN code...

The prototype was the cheapest Nokia handset we could find hanging out of the back of a webserver. To their credit, the consultancy let me run with spending money on 'incubating' this new baby, and we turned this proof-of-concept into a huge success by handing out cards on London's busy Xmas-shopper-filled Oxford Street (they, for their trouble, got bought out at 4.8x their investment).

The fact that this was ten years ago both scares and delights me (I'm not entirely sure what happened to the intervening decade). Amazingly, within a month (yes, a month), we had attracted investment from idealab, and Snaffle It became Scan Mobile. That set the scene for a $10MM round during the summer of 2000 (on a $42MM pre-money valuation, ahh, the heady days). We never had a foosball table, but we did have silly job titles (Snafflemeister? Snaffler-at-large?), and during the course of our 3 years of operation, peaked at 96 full-time equivalents, with offices in 4 countries. 

However, despite our mentor, chairman and investor Howard Morgan's mantra ('there are two good times to invest: too early, and way too early'), we were way way way way too early. There was barely such a thing as cross-carrier messaging, even in the UK. We had to print different numbers for different networks (and two of those networks don't exist anymore). No shortcodes. No premium messaging (=no business model). No direct connections to networks (=a room full of GSM modems). With an incubator behind us, we tried everything. We had 'On the Go', an 'Any Question Answered'-style service now provided to great success by 118118.com in the UK, and KGB in the US, back then ably handled by Rich King and Alex Clift. We captured customers to 'monetize them later'. We had full m-commerce. We had mobile ticketing. We had mobile marketing. We had price comparison. We sold some ringtones. We built some casual games. We lobbied mobile network operators exhaustively to try and put in place all the things mobile companies now take for granted. 

A busy 3 years, in which we worked hard, and played hard.

And what can Robert and I, and the other co-founders who leapt with me from the consultancy (David Whittaker and Claire Prince) take from this experience? Well Robert's now a Project Manager at Google Mobile, doing fabulous things, and working, as far as I can tell, harder than I've ever seen him work. David went on to manage butterfly farms in PNG and build orphanages in Zambia (honestly!), and Claire's now in retail management.

The primary thing I take from it all: Scan Mobile was the collegiate system for mobile expertise. I ran through my Facebook and Linked In connections to look at the names who have excelled and often outstripped us. We may have been young, and somewhat naive, but we got some things incredibly right indeed. We deliberately hired people who were fresh - attitude and character traits were paramount, since skills and experience can be learned with time. We deliberately promoted people when they were only 75% ready, and encouraged them to grow.

And grow they did. Rob Jonas and Sian Townsend (Google), Derek Kipps and Ankur Chavda (Microsoft), Martin Tannerfors (Samsung), Fiona Gaven (Vodafone), Yoel Marson (Yahoo!), Jon Mantell (CBS), Tamara Gruber (Crisp Wireless), Carl Uminski (Trutap), Gigi Dryer (Flirtomatic), David Deutsch (DMD Mobile), Rich King (Talk Talk), Alex Clift (Kalido), Bil Ahmed (Forrester), Jason duPreez (Thomson Reuters) and a further pool of smart smart talent I had the pleasure of working with (Zac Mace, Marc Matyas, Jonny Crowe, Pete Bevan, Fred Bonde, Carmel Landy, Amir Laher, Claire Bevan, Emma Barker-Goldie, Clara Goh Lee, Emily Pitt, Corinna Murphy, Bryon Colby, Sorabain de Lioncourt, Andy Duff, Tam Freestone-Bayes, Lee Taylor, Larry Knibb, Charmaine Ching, Sarah Thayne) who have done well in other fields. And that's before I get into the handful of very talented people we worked with after merging with Digital Rum, or the investors & their representatives (David Ishag, Brian Steel, Howard Morgan, Mark Herrmann, Andy Thompson, David Bohigian and Bill Gross & Marcia Goodstein). I've left some people off, the educated or well-informed reader will know whether that was deliberate or not!

That's also before I point to the successful services that are still going strong (I'm especially looking at you, Argos Check and Reserve - GBP18million in reservations per week), and the parts of the mobile ecosystem that would be very different had we not made the noise we did when we did.

So tonight I'm raising a glass in the honour of Scan alumni. We've a lot to be proud of, Robert.