Back in the mid 1990’s ( The dawn of Internet time), I started a website called http://www.bobsguide.com. Since then it has been extended, rewritten a few times, and is unrecognisable today. I am long since retired, but I thought it would be useful to chart its development and the reasons we made some decisions and not others..
When I started my web development business in 1995 the Internet was brand new and I needed a web site to demonstrate what my new company could do. People just didn’t know what a website was back then. My inspiration was my experience in the oil industry. The wall behind our petroleum engineer was a bookshelf full of product catalogues and ring binders full of brochures. If he needed a product he would consult this library. It is an obvious application for the web.
I had a box full of banking treasury software brochures from a consultancy project I had just finished. So I created a very basic website listing treasury software suppliers and products. The site invited other suppliers to send details and when we had spare time we updated the site. Over time the updates became more frequent, and the spare time shrank, so I have to confess we got a little behind.
A website designer contacted me, He could see a great potential for the site but it needed a more professional look. From my point of view it needed a better update procedure as well. He proposed a joint project and MyGuides Ltd was born. The plan was to start with the finance industry and use the same technology for other industries1.
The new redesigned site allowed vendors to add and update their product data from their own administration page. The business model was based on the yellow pages. A basic entry was free. Pay for a premium entry and you get an enhanced entry with your logo and more space to summarise the product. You also got pushed to the top of the listing.
Then people started sending us press releases. We put them on the site and started a weekly newsletter, which was just a cut-and-paste job from the releases. Within months we were sending the newsletter out daily to tens of thousands of subscribers.
We were very lucky to find a really good person to run the operation. She was an effective sales person and someone who also understood the need for great customer service. She assembled a team of sales and support people over time and the operation moved to an office down the hall from my original business. Fortunately we were in a large facilities managed building, so we could grow the office as we expanded.
The site grew, as did the range of services we could offer. It very quickly moved beyond the treasury to the whole financial technology industry. We took a stand at trade shows, often for free in exchange for advertising the show. Although we were based in London, our market was international.
We had a business.
Part 1: The casual start.
Parr 2: Why just a directory?
Part 3: A missed opportunity?
- Never happened. ↩︎
Bob Browning's blog 
Leave a comment