We would have failed. Miserably.

As I emailed our in-house designer (the amazingly talented Elena of Design Disease) the fifth design for iBegin Source (since incarnation), it hit how much we had evolved since our launch. I had the original idea for iBegin in October 2005 (while showering of course). The entire idea behind iBegin Source hit me in October 2006. And the plans for harnessing that data for something bigger hit me in October 2007 (odd recurring theme eh!)

I was talking to my lead programmer, and he was very angry at the old startup he had worked at. They had burned through something like $6 million, and had recently launched something he had worked on. Except they had botched it. Badly. And he was railing how if they had spent the proper time it would have come out right.

I just shook my head and smiled.

When we had originally launched iBegin, I think about a dozen VCs came to us in the first 3 months or so. They all liked the idea of local social search, and wanted to expand on it. Quickly. Yelp was gaining steam, and with Judy’s Book and InsiderPages all growing too, they were convinced that untold amounts of money was to be made.

Thankfully, I had a philosophy, and I stuck with it.

And it became clear relatively quickly that the sales channel and the review channel did not mesh very well. A vice-versa catch-22 – if a business had good reviews, why bother advertising? If a business had bad reviews, why bother advertising?

By not funding and deciding to take my time, I was able to re-assess without having fire being breathed down my neck. Heck I even went on a one week vacation to clear my head.

And so iBegin Source came out. But we knew it wouldn’t make a big profit for a long time. We knew that it would take time to lay the groundwork to establish with potential customers. With potential partners. Not months, but years. And we had the luxury of not needing to meet annual forecasts as dictated by someone else. No need to bring immediate profit.

And boy am I thankful. Yes we have had our share of headaches. And yes sometimes its been nice to think “this would be so much easier with a couple million behind us.” But the reality is at the end of the day, the millions would not have made a difference. We would have been well on our way towards oblivion like the other review-based sites.

And we have much more up our sleeves. Our little ‘innovation’ house should be launching in the next 48 hours – nothing ground breaking, but interesting enough to maybe spark a few brain cells. And our long term plan is executing beautifully – even slightly faster than I had anticipated.

I love it when people cover companies that organically grew into something very notable. I hope to join those ranks in the next three years.