EchoBay.com & The Pez Candy Dispenser

Just like You Tube so another great internet success story didn’t start with a comprehensive business plan or any clear direction in mind. Just an obsessive founder with a ‘tinkering’ mentality and a fascination for technology. In particular a new platform – the internet.

So Echobay.com home of the most famous online auction site on the planet? Well not quite.

When Pierre Omidyar wanted a name for his web consulting and freelance technology business he thought Echo Bay Technology Group ’sounded cool’. Unfortunately a Canadian mining company already owned the domain name and so was born.

Not the home of online auctions. Just the home for yet another tech consulting firm.

Already a seasoned techie with experience across a range of IT businesses Pierre became fascinated by a developing techonology and wondered whether ‘the internet’ would help level the playing field between buyers and sellers, between insiders and joe public.

Pierre had begun to wonder whether it was possible to create a ‘perfect marketplace’ that gave everyone access to the same information & let buyers fight it out & produce a real market price for the transaction.

Pierre knew nothing about auctions and auction theory. Just frustration at seeing insiders make big gains on stock deals before the small investor got a look him, made him wonder.

Urban myth has it that Pierre wrote the code that would become Ebay to help his fiancee Pam Wesley, who was having difficulty finding other collectors of PEZ dispensers to trade with since she & Pierre had moved from Boston to The Valley.

The truth is slightly different but still as quaint just maybe not quite so romantic.

With Pierre’s interest in the internet and perfect marketplaces growing, it was time to test the notion. Adding a page to his ebay.com consultancy web site the results would soon be in.

With its block text on a dull grey background this was true pionerring internet – the listings reflected the standard of the day, Usenet newsgroups (the online home of techies in the mid 1990s).

Pierre had no idea what to sell or what people would want to buy but computers being his obsession the first items seemed obvious – computer parts.

As for marketing. A few mentions on Usenet groups was the limit producing a startling result – a traffic free day. It was Labor week-end and the moderator of the all important new site newsgroup had taken time-off.

But soon the trickle started.

An early sale on eBay was Omidyar’s broken laser pointer for $13.83.

Why would anyone buy a ‘broken’ laser pointer? Pierre contacted the buyer to confirm he knew it was broken. The e-mail response was “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

A collector’s heaven had been born. And a new form of trading, accessible by all. The perfect marketplace.

Before we draw any conclusions and bring in comparisons with T2G let’s look at one more example – the biggest internet story of them all?