What was this thing going to be

That summer of 2002 was the darkest days of the dot-bust. If there was ever a time to start a new digital agency, August 2002 was not it. The overhyping of the digital channel had burned a lot of clients. Our own previous employer was cutting offices in a bid to lower costs and ride out the storm.

Geoff and I started to talk about what kind of company we might like to create. There were a few things we immediately agreed on.

At Modem, Geoff and I were often brought in to pitch to a client, but as soon as the work started, we needed to move on and pitch the next thing. Our days were spent managing the work, rather than doing it. We wanted a place that would be more of a boutique than a big, full service digital agency.

We’d create a company where we could work closely with clients.

We wanted to specialize in “user experience.”

In 2002, the concept of user experience being its own discipline was unique. With the exception of Adaptive Path and 37Signals (pre Basecamp), there were few companies focussing on UX design. We were interested in solving complex UI and UX problems. We didn’t want to do banner ads or Flash sites. We wanted to work on highly functional systems that were pragmatic and solved real problems for real users. This was pretty revolutionary for the time.

We saw a few things happening in 2002 that we thought required a new type of company.

The dot-com bust had provided a clean dividing line between the first generation of the Internet (1995-2001), and what we felt was a new chapter.

We saw technology commodifying. If you wanted to build a Web site in 1996, most corporate IT groups didn’t have the process, resources or capabilities to do it. Companies hired large consultancies and agencies to do this.

By 2002, things had changed. Web technology had become operationalized inside corporate IT. They were no longer looking for large end to end help, but rather specialized help on the thing they still couldn’t do, front end design.

We saw the value shifting from the back end to the front end. We wanted to create a company that could meet this new demand with a speciality service.

Eventually, the term Web 2.0 would come to define this new time period.

We wanted to offer an alternative to large agencies

We wanted to strip away the bureaucracy and what we saw as an inefficiency in the industry. We wanted a company where there was as little friction as possible between the client and the people doing the work. We had witnessed that most agencies put a series of gatekeepers between the people doing the work and the client. Account managers and project managers were used to "manage the client" while designers and developers were left in the office to "be creative".

There was a misconception that creative people couldn't speak to clients, that we were somehow incapable of communicating. This led to cultures where politics and broken telephone were common. We hated this.

From day one we wanted clients to work closely with the people doing the work. We encouraged clients to speak directly to the person actually designing, not someone managing that person. We had no account managers and no project managers.

Early on I told this to a president of a large ad agency and he looked confused. It took him a while to even consider this to be possible. It was as if what I had suggested was impossible.

The lack of a large hierarchy meant there were clients we couldn't work with. Some clients need reciprocal hierarchies just to get things done. While other firms pursued large AOR relationships that would require large numbers just to manage all the work, we looked for a division inside a company who didn't want to work this way. We looked for assignments rather than retainers. We looked for people inside companies who wanted to work differently.

It would be three years until we hired our first project manager and 10 years until we hired our first account person.

Another thing Geoff and I knew we wanted to do was move away from regimented and predictive project management philosophies like PMP. We had experienced the wastefulness of spending 3 months creating a requirements document that everyone would interpret differently. We wanted to get to design as quickly as possible.

While we didn’t know it at the time, we were coming to the same conclusions that the lean and agile movements would popularize over the next few years.

Coming to a name

If you were a digital agency in 2002, you had a name ending in “iant” or “ient”. Company naming at the time was very obtuse. We tried coming up with some nonsensical name we could imprint on but every one of them sounded so fake. We hated it.

We decided that given the type of company we wanted to create, it made sense to put our names on the door. We liked the idea that if a client wanted to hire us, they were literally hiring us, Geoff and Jon. At the time, digital agencies were not named after the founders, that was something law firms and Mad Men era ad agencies did. It felt right to name the company after us.

We both agreed, Geoff’s name just looked and sounded better first. Neither of us remember how the “+” came to be.

Getting off the ground

The first thing we did was try to land some clients. Modem had been working with Maritime Life in Halifax, and Geoff had personally been on the project for several months. The office closing left Maritime Life mid-project without an agency. We offered them this deal—give us the budget they had agreed to pay Modem for creative, and we would do the work. This represented a discount since we could exclude account management and project management fees. Maritime Life agreed.

This gave us 2 months of work and a nice profit.

The second call we made was to G.M. O’Connell, the founder and CEO of Modem Media. G.M. had been a mentor to us and we wanted to float this idea of a “company” by him. He immediately said, “I’ll give you work.”

We started in September of 2002 with two clients, Maritime Life and Modem Media.