Happy Birthday, Hop Studios!

posted at 7:37 pm
on Jul. 1, 2004

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Next time I’m late remembering your birthday, realize that it’s really not personal.  In fact, Hop Studios itself had its 5th birthday on May 19th, and I plumb forgot until today.

Five years (and 1.5 months) ago in 1999, I bought the domain “hopstudios.com.” I’d owned another domain before that: hop.com, which I bought on Oct 17, 1995, and sold in 1999. It’s a quirky story, really.

I remember clearly, it was just after a sunny April day, in the middle of a crisp April night.  I know this, because I was in Paris on a dial-up connection, and the rates were much cheaper after 10 p.m.  I wasn’t working at the time, so during the day, I ate crepes and drank espresso. At night, I did all my online stuff.

That night, I got an email from a fellow named Frederic Haubrich.  He said he was creating a site that had to do with children’s education, and he wanted to buy hop.com from me. He said he worked for a company called Gtwy Learning.

Little did he know, that Susie and I had been living in Paris off of savings for about 8 months, and we were anxious for any additional income to help us extend our stay.

I was sad to lose my address, though, because “nep@hop.com” was the shortest email address of just about anyone I knew (the only exception was ). And I’d had it since I’d graduated from USC, several years earlier.

I figured I’d aim high—he was working in San Francisco, after all, and in 1999, just after I sold hop.com, “business.com” sold for $7 million. So I asked for $5,000.

Was it too little? I retrospect, maybe.  But at the time, it was $1,333 per letter for a domain I’d bought for $40 total.

We negotiated a bit, agreed, I bought a replacement domain—hopstudios.com—and he wired us the money.

Only later did I find out who I’d sold the domain to:

Hooked On Phonics.

Yeah, I should have figured it out—done more research.  Nevertheless, “Hop Studios” has turned out to be a better company name than “Hop dot com.”

And I enjoyed my extra two months’ worth of crepes.

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