Happy Birthday, Hop Studios!
posted at 8:37 pm
on Jul. 1, 2004
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Next time I’m late remembering your birthday, realize that it’s really not personal. In fact, Hop Studios itself had its 5th birthday on May 19th, and I plumb forgot until today.
Five years (and 1.5 months) ago in 1999, I bought the domain “hopstudios.com.” I’d owned another domain before that: hop.com, which I bought on Oct 17, 1995, and sold in 1999. It’s a quirky story, really.
I remember clearly, it was just after a sunny April day, in the middle of a crisp April night. I know this, because I was in Paris on a dial-up connection, and the rates were much cheaper after 10 p.m. I wasn’t working at the time, so during the day, I ate crepes and drank espresso. At night, I did all my online stuff.
That night, I got an email from a fellow named Frederic Haubrich. He said he was creating a site that had to do with children’s education, and he wanted to buy hop.com from me. He said he worked for a company called Gtwy Learning.
Little did he know, that Susie and I had been living in Paris off of savings for about 8 months, and we were anxious for any additional income to help us extend our stay.
I was sad to lose my address, though, because “[email protected]” was the shortest email address of just about anyone I knew (the only exception was .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). And I’d had it since I’d graduated from USC, several years earlier.
I figured I’d aim high—he was working in San Francisco, after all, and in 1999, just after I sold hop.com, “business.com” sold for $7 million. So I asked for $5,000.
Was it too little? I retrospect, maybe. But at the time, it was $1,333 per letter for a domain I’d bought for $40 total.
We negotiated a bit, agreed, I bought a replacement domain—hopstudios.com—and he wired us the money.
Only later did I find out who I’d sold the domain to:
Hooked On Phonics.
Yeah, I should have figured it out—done more research. Nevertheless, “Hop Studios” has turned out to be a better company name than “Hop dot com.”
And I enjoyed my extra two months’ worth of crepes.
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My Clips: Web Notes (Driving) published by Los Angeles Times
