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After the dot com bust, Blue Mountain Cards is still standing

Have you heard of Blue Mountain Cards? It all started back when ecards became big in the 1990's. It seemed like everyone thought somehow giving away ecards was going to be a business model. Business models based on advertising revenue were quite frequent back then. This has no changed with people wanting to know where the real revenue is coming from. 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. This is the space that is eating the lunch from the old paper greeting card space that's been around forever and a day. It seems like the classic case of doing something through technology that was previously manual. But you should look deeper. An ecard is not the same thing as a paper card. You buy a paper card at a store and physically write on it. An ecard comes from a company like Blue Mountain Cards and is completely electronic. In this way, it's 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? I'm not entirely sure, but I think that Blue Mountain Cards had a serious lead going into the game. They had a good plan. It seems like the executives at Blue Mountain Cards new they were onto something big, but that it wouldn't last. So the company was sold while things were still really really hot in the dot com sector. What a move that was.. I'll bet many people wish they had that type of timing.

How is that in 2008 Blue Mountain Cards is still a going concern? One view is that the original builders of the business picked an once-in-a-lifetime period to exit the business and made an unprecedented amount of money.. However, these were experience people who were also making a serious move in a serious industry. This is not a small business. Regardless of their underlying financials, this business made a name for itself in a multi billion dollar business space. I am betting that this is why they are still around today. It's a textbook case of building a brand in a new market. 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.