The Rise and Fall of 14erWorld

For nearly a decade, 14erWorld was my entire life. It started out as the dream life.

The Beginning

I quit my job as a software developer and was now spending all my time hiking and taking pictures of 14ers, working in the darkroom, and developing a web site.

14erWorld started out as a market to sell my photography. When I started, the Internet was new and the idea of marketing on a website fascinated me.  I purchased an Internet domain, taught myself Microsoft FrontPage and used it to publish my first website selling 14er photography.

I was the eternal optimist. I purchased a lock box at the local post office to receive mail orders. I waited a week to open the box. Can you believe I was expecting it to be full? Actually on the way to the post office I wondered if I should have gotten a bigger box.

I opened the box and it was empty! And it was empty the next week, and the next week, and the next, and so on. How could this be? The Internet was supposed to reach millions of people?

I soon realized that I had a lot to learn. First off I needed to grow visitors to the site and to figure out a way to get people to keep coming back. That’s when I started posting a “Picture-of-the-Day”, “Trivia-of-the-day”, and Colorado mountaineering news briefs. I created new content every day with the hope that people would come back on a daily basis.

I racked my brain. I studied ways to improve my visibility in search engines. I tried mailings. I bought advertising.  Nothing seemed to work until I came up with the idea to start a forum. At this time there were no other 14er forums on the Internet.

FrontPage offered some very crude forum software that proved extremely successful in growing visitors to the site.

Unfortunately it also had its drawbacks. It was full of bugs and crashed frequently. And since it was free and open to the public, it attracted spammers and people that had nothing to offer and nothing better to do than to cause trouble.

I was growing web site traffic nicely, but spending too much time on something that wasn’t producing enough photography sales.

I would spend hours every morning preparing the home page with links to the forum trip reports, manually updating Climbers Corner records, making text versions of the forum trip reports for the archives, and surfing the web looking for Colorado mountaineering news.

I announced that I was going to shut the site down.

 

From a Free to Pay

This was all taking place a little after the turn of the century.

Now it’s important to mention that this was a time when digital cameras were rapidly improving, and digital image quality was quickly catching up with film. My medium format Mamiya camera equipment was slowly becoming obsolete and professional quality cameras were now in the hands of amateurs who figured that they could take pictures just as good as mine.

To a certain extent this was true. The hardest part of getting a great 14er shot is hiking to the spot with the views. The members of 14erWorld were already doing that!

My dream of selling photography was turning into a nightmare.  

My announcement to close down the site caused a panic, and my members were literally begging me to keep it going. It was then that I realized the web site had value all its own, aside from a place to market my photography.

That’s when I made the switch from a free site to a pay site.

At first I tried accepting donations. This started out with a huge bang! I distinctly remember riding to the Grays Peak trailhead with my friend John and hearing the “cha-ching” of the PayPal donations pouring into my iPhone. I felt like I hit the jackpot at a casino.

I made over $3,000 that day. And the hits kept on coming, but unfortunately dwindled down to zero within a week.

For the first time as the web site administrator I realized I was locked in to keeping it going, or else somehow reimburse people for their generosity. And without any new donations coming in, I was now technically working without an income.

Now came an episode in the history of 14erWorld that I wish I could undo. In my effort to increase donations I started regular monthly fundraising which began to look like begging. It made me look greedy.

I eventually decided on charging an annual fee, and applied everyone’s donations towards annual subscriptions. As an example, if someone donated $100, they got 5 years of subscription time.

Not everyone liked that and I had to give some refunds, and although I solved my problem by creating a steady income, I was committing more. Now I was implying that I would be around for 5 more years. I was also creating an administrative accounting task.

Each month I found myself sending out renewal notices, prosessing PayPal payments, sending email payment notifications, etc.

In retrospect turning it into a pay site was a huge mistake. People wanted everything on the Internet to be free just like TV, only without commercials. My image was going down the toilet and I had made lots of enemies at this point.

But I couldn’t think of an alterative way to monetize the site. I didn't have the options we have today.

 

Cardboard Rodney

Cardboard Rodney with friends

I was driving one afternoon on I70 and a car passed me on my side. As it did I glanced over as saw a life size photo of Rodney Dangerfield’s face pasted to the passenger window of the car.

I cracked up! He is a funny and funny-looking guy.

Sometime later I was listening to a report on the car radio. It was about Ellen DeGeneres hurting herself and not being able to finish her tour. But they said the tour would continue and she was creating a “Cardboard Ellen” to replace her.

That’s when the idea of Cardboard Rodney was born. It was a very silly idea, but I got such a kick out it. Can’t mountaineers have a sense of humor too?

Now people either loved the idea, or hated it. There was no middle ground. The ‘serious” hikers though it was stupid and wanted no association with this gumby activity. The not-so-serious people “got it” and enjoyed the fun.

My plan was to mail Cardboard Rodney from person to person if they were willing to take him up a fourteener, and on his last 14er (Pikes Peak) we would have a big celebration. I actually contacted the real Rodney Dangerfield and he sent me a good head-shot to use along with permission to use his image for my promotion. He got a kick out of the idea. I invited him to come to the finale, but declined. His health was failing.

I created Cardboard Rodney by taking a self-portrait dressed in my hiking outfit, enlarged to life-size. Then I overlaid my face with the head-shot Rodney sent me. I had the whole image mounted on ½ inch foam board, then cut and hinged the foam board so that it folded up to approximately 24” x 10” x 4” and fit tightly into a shoulder sack.

I created a sign-up sheet and procedural instructions and mailed Cardboard Rodney off to climb the 14ers during the summer of 2004.

In total Cardboard Rodney got up over 25 14ers that summer.

Rodney Dangerfield passed away that fall at the age of 82. All enthusiasm to continue the Cardboard Rodney project died with him. RIP Rodneys.

 

Competition

Meanwhile a tiny 14er website was about to flourish into a huge giant and become my major competition. At first the new site was a bit of a joke with nothing but personal pictures of flowers, mountains, and alpine wildlife. I remember thinking it was nothing more than and a monument to the site’s owner.

Soon I realized that the other site was curiously looking more and more like mine. I thought to myself “Imitation is the best compliment”. But soon after that the tide turned and I clearly remember the morning that my friend Greg called me saying “Watch out Steve, now he’s got a forum just like yours”.

And I had good reason to watch out! The other site was free, and 14erWorld cost $19.95/year. How do you compete with someone who can afford to give away a similar product free?

The only answer was to offer a better product.

And for the longest time 14erWorld WAS a better product. It had a catalog of thousands of wonderful trip reports and a membership roster that included some of the finest mountaineers in Colorado. I prided myself in saying “It’s the quality of our membership that separates us from the rest”.

This new site was unstoppable. I had always avoided the option of publishing routes and route descriptions on my site out of respect and as a courtesy to Gerry Roach, whom I considered the last word on Colorado 14er routes. I always considered the new routes described in his books as HIS routes. He studied the USGS quads, drove to the THs, and climbed the 14er while testing out his new route ideas. In my opinion, any re-publishing of descriptions of HIS routes (even though the wording might be original) was unethical. I empathized with Gerry. I felt that the other site had crossed the line.

But 14erWorld was still the better product with its TR catalog and hard-core membership.
The other site was attracting an enormous number of beginner climbers with little or no experience. As we all know “empty barrels make the most noise” and as a result, originally their forum was more of a beginners forum with a lot of testosterone.

14erWorld’s forum dialog was a more professional and mature. But most of all 14erWorld had HUGE potential!

 

To be continued...