was that it would become a requirement that, if you were in the travel industry
or offering a travel section of your site, you have access to our content. And we
would license it out and/or get a share of the revenue generated on the page
views from that. Lycos Travel, Yahoo Travel, AOL Travel, Expedia, Travelocity—
all the players would have to have it. No one would try to build it themselves,
because we’d always be able to stay ahead, since we were entirely focused on it.
That would be our business model, and that’s the model that got us some funding
to begin with.
After a year and a half, we had closed one licensing deal, with Lycos, where
they were featuring our content on their travel portal, and we were getting a
revenue share on what they made selling advertising on the pages that we produced
for them. Everyone else basically wanted to be paid to feature our content,
and we wanted to get paid to have our content featured. So there was a
pretty big disconnect. Then it turned out that with the Lycos deal (even though
Lycos was a major web property at the time), the joke was the quarterly
revenue check wouldn’t buy the weekly free lunch that we offered to our
employees. We had a rather fundamental problem in half of the business. It was
a typical dot-com business problem: built the product, people liked it, and the
feedback was universally positive, and we got the expansion questions that we
were happy to get, like “When are you going to cover Paris?”—but we just were
not making a dime.
By the middle of 2001, we were getting frustrated. Then September 11
came along, and anything we might have had in the pipeline—not that I
remember it being a particularly interesting pipeline—was stalled, dead. It was
a hugely traumatic time for everyone, especially for the travel industry.
We were also trying to raise a third round of funding, and we were basically
looking at going out of business in 6 to 9 months. It was a little hard to go back
to the existing investors and say, “Hey, pony up more money. We’ve got a great
product. We have no revenue, and we’ve been trying to sell the stuff for a while.
We have no takers. The one company that did license it is generating a couple
hundred dollars a quarter for us. But really, toss in a couple more million,
because it’s a great idea.” It was a tough pitch to make. We made it, and we
actually did raise a small third round—more, I think, from the perspective of
“Look, this is a good product. We’ll figure this out.”
We were 11 people before September 11, and we slimmed down to 8, so