What helped Blue Mountain Cards survive the dot com bubble
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by: al.sones
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Word Count: 434
Have you heard of Blue Mountain Cards? It all started back when ecards became big in the 1990s. Im not sure exactly how they built a business model on the idea of giving away a free ecard, but they did. Business models based on advertising revenue were quite frequent back then. This is a difference with todays focus on real revenue. However, there are some painful similarities in web 2.0 to this idea of building big applications that will make money only from advertising.
Ecards are a difficult business space for me to understand. The business model is essentially one where you are killing another business model, the paper greeting cards space. In some ways its a normal case study of technology advancement over a paper based product. But I dont think its that simple. An ecard is not the same thing as a paper card. Paper cards come from a store and require you to mail them. An ecard comes from a company like Blue Mountain Cards and is completely electronic. In this way, its a real product transition. So in essence, the technology is really impacted the very product. This is not unique, just look at tvs, video games or any other electronic based market.
So what exactly did blue mountain cards do that was so special? First, Blue Mountain Cards had a big lead going into the game. They planned well.. The top management at Blue Mountain Cards seemed to know that the ride would not last forever. So Blue Mountain Cards management decided to sell the company while everything was still red-hot. What a move that was.. Ill bet many people wish they had that type of timing.
How is that in 2008 Blue Mountain Cards is still a going concern? You could argue that the management team at Blue Mountain Cards were the luckiest people on earth to have gotten such a valuation at such a time when that was seen as appropriate. However, these were experience people who were also making a serious move in a serious industry. This is not a small business. Flawed business model or not, Blue Mountain Cards made a big dent in a market worth billions. I am betting that this is why they are still around today. They built a brand and have a name worth something. The part this is far from any text book case study is how they exited at the height of the crazy valuations. We should all be so lucky in our careers.
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