Robleh Jama

This is the Sneakerplay story. A story of how we built a global and vibrant community, a profitable business, and eventually made our exit in the middle of “the” recession. Our community made it on to the New York Times and countless other mainstream and online media outlets. We secured sponsorships from heavy weight brands including Nike, Adidas, EA Sports and more. I’ll go into details in hope that the lessons we learned will help you on your journey of making things happen!

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Early 2006 - We thought wouldn’t it be cool to have a simple site where you could ‘battle’ sneakers? The idea came from a conversation I had with my good friend and co-founder Mohamed Hashi. The idea morphed into a social network for all things sneakers, urban fashion, and street culture. A playground for likeminded folks with the ‘battle’ being one of the unique features.

At this same time, sneaker culture was evolving and going mainstream (Everything you need to know about sneakers). Social networking was also evolving. Myspace was acquired by News Corp and Facebook was still focused on college kids–and the idea of niche social networks was starting to gain momentum. We didn’t know it, but we were positioned pretty well. In other words, the timing was right for a community like Sneakerplay. There was nothing like it on in online sneaker/street culture space which was dominated by blogs and old-school message boards (which both were and are still popular).

Mohamed and I were both in college at the time and had nothing to lose. We were tired of being spectators and decided to become active participants in all the coolness that was the ’social web.’ All we needed was an talented developer to join the team and Mohamed knew just the right person for the role: Rob Chia - his good high school friend and designer/developer extraordinaire.

JUST DOING IT

We pretended like we knew what we were doing and set off to build a social network from scratch. How hard could it be? Our exciting foray into the world of online community-building and entrepreneurship was just beginning, but first we needed a name.

Mohamed and I met for a brainstorming session and started throwing out concepts. We scrapped our initial idea of “sneakerbeefs” as it was admittedly a bit ‘ghetto’ and ended up philosophizing about how we wanted our community to be different. We envisioned a positive and playful space kind of like a playground. I blurted out “sneakerplayground” and Mohamed replied “sneakerplay?” That was it! We knew we had a winner! Next step was to grab the dot com (the .net & the .org).

JUST SHIP THE MVP

We spent the next couple of months building out a really basic version of our social networking platform. What would now probably be called a ‘minimum viable product’ (or MVP). The launch features included a simple non-customizable profile page, a public gallery for photo sharing, a mail feature for one-to-one communication, and the forums for one-to-many communication.

We also included the Battles, one of our unique features. The whole idea behind it was to create a competitive and game-like experience where members could face off (initially for sneakers but it grew to be for all sorts of things from cars, to apparel, and even pets).

Our goal was to use the battles as a way to encourage friendly competition and make them a sort of ice breaker for meeting new people on Sneakerplay. We soon learned that competition isn’t always friendly. The moment we launched our Rankings leader board things went crazy. Some members started taking things a little too seriously to the point where they would create 10+ dummy accounts just so they could vote for themselves. Lesson learned here was you don’t always have to give tangible goods, prizes, or cash as incentives for desired actions. Reputation alone can drive a great deal of activity, some good and some bad [more on this later.]

The private invite-only beta was live by June of 2006. We sent out a few invites to close friends and waited patiently for about a week for the floodgates to open. Our naiveté told us “build it and they will come”.

We quickly learned that’s not how things work in the real world. It was more “like build it, spread the word as far and wide as you can, tell your friends, give people something to talk about and then maybe they will come.” Luckily, I had gotten to know a few prominent bloggers from my early blogging days and had kept them in the loop as to what w were building.

I reached out to Josh Spear from joshspear.com, a cool hunting site, letting him know our service was ready and offered him an exclusive. Josh gladly wrote about Sneakerplay and things just snowballed from there. That initial post gave us the leverage we needed to get word out through some of the top sneaker & street fashion/cutlure blogs. From Hypebeast, SlamXhype, Highsnobiety, to Sneakerfiend and Nicekicks. These initiatives were followed by write-ups in social media blogs like Mashable, Wired blogs and later Techcrunch.

Just a few days later our ‘waiting list’ was in the thousands and we slowly began lifting the veil, letting in a handful of people at a time. This is when things started to change. It was the beginning of the community. Our platform was now bringing people together, bridging cultures, and creating friendships all around the social objects of sneakers and street wear. SIDE NOTE - Object-oriented sociality is a good way to thinking about social networks, as people usually connect around social objects. For example for Flickr their social object is photos, Delicious is bookmarks, Steepster for tea lovers, and Dogster for dog owners.

That’s it for now. Watch for future posts on how we laid the foundations as community builders, turned a profit by working with some of the most respected brands, and rode the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship. I will also provide more details about the exit process, working with investment bankers and the art of selling out–err getting acquired.