My friend David Arthur has been gone for a little over 11 years now, but not a summer goes by when I don't think of him. Dave, or Bongman as he was known on the radio, was one of my very favourite people. Bongman got me into Led Zeppelin when I was a youngster working in a music store and we stayed friends.
When I went back to University, Dave was one of the forces that kept me focused on class. His Dad had been an anthropologist and had played a major role in the University of Regina's anthropology department. I didn't know Dave's whole story then, but his zeal for hearing about what I was learning about and his ability to talk about foundational journal articles like old friends really helped me focus on finishing my degree.
The best part about Dave though was how excited he would get about ideas. Whenever I came up with something new, we would find each other somewhere downtown and have one of our talks. Dave would have loved the idea behind StorePhotos and would have related it to his interest in infinity - he would have suggested an infinity sign for menus, to show how you can keep adding indefinitely. He would have suggested "a space in time saves nine" as a slogan.
Regina gets really cold in the winter so while close, ours was a friendship primarily forged over the warm months. Until I started working at the Spy Store.
I worked days selling surveillance cameras during the winter and it fit perfectly into my university schedule. It was a brutally cold winter and I had a really simple rule - people who panhandled could come in and warm up as long as long as they were relaxed. And so the spy store became a refuge for the unhoused and semihoused and we all became friends. But Dave and my buddy Gary were my two favourites - we got along the best and were kindreds in a lot of ways.
Life changed dramatically one brutally cold January day when Gary came in to warm up. He told me about a street paper he sold when he lived in Edmonton called Our Voice. You have to realize something about Gary to understand this story - but for a few circumstances that lead him to panhandle, the man would have been one of the world's most potent salespeople. He sold me on the idea and I called my friend Stacey.
Where to begin with Stacey? You know those people who are intensely committed but also intensely adventurous? The kinds of people with a really strong path that fits them but who will still jump into something really wacky? That's Stacey. She's one of my favourite writers and one of the most challenging friends I have. That day, I went from never having heard of a street paper to having cofounded one with a very good friend.
And then, the hell began. I had good intentions but zero publishing experience. I had so little publishing experience that I gravitated towards Microsoft Publisher when it was time to do the first layout. Stacey is a shockingly gifted editor and she kept bringing in all this amazing content...and I promptly laid it out in such a way it looked like a bunch of ants got together, had sex and exploded.
(I call the style neo-antfatalist. I am thus far the only practitioner.)
We ended up meeting the greatest printer around and Eagle Printing sure taught me a lot. But with my immediate layout needs met, my side of the content became a major problem. You see, I had been taking pictures for a long time and had developed a hobby of walking around downtown Regina with my camera. So I had a lot of stuff that fit the theme perfectly but it was spread out amongst two cameras, three hard drives and my LiveJournal account.
It wasn't too hard to go through these in theory, but when it came right down to a ticking clock counting down to the last moment I could get on a bus and get the paper to the printer on time for our soft launch, I screwed up. Two of 16 photos were wrong. But in theory, my grit really captured the feeling the content tried to inspire.
I'm not quite sure why Stacey put up with me. Imagine being this ultra gifted writer and editor attached at the hip to a moron who used Publisher and managed to screw up 12.5% of his content. If you can imagine that, you know what she lived through. Me no smart. She smart very.
We didn't really know what we were doing but Stacey had sourced some amazing content and we got it out. We had decided that since we didn't know what we were doing, we would do a soft launch without any media releases, fanfare or launch parties. To keep it small and underground, we'd only give Dave and Gary copies for the first edition. When we gave them their first batch on a Thursday night in Regina's Central Park, I thought they would sell about 40. They had a total of 50, so I thought we had overdone it.
I thought wrong. Very very wrong. Our soft launch was a dramatic failure and turned into a media spectacle. I'll never forget sitting at home, hiding from a phone that didn't stop ringing and a message machine full of queries like "Hi, this message is for Greg Husiluk and Stacey Lowlaker, this is Coolio McGiftedJournalist from a publication you've heard of and I'm wondering if I could get some comments before deadline".
Great soft launch. The next day we had to restock Dave and Gary and then we restocked them again and again. We went through 500 copies really quickly and ended up with about three copies between us and our families. But as we restocked them, we at least got to see why our soft launch failed to be soft.
It turns out that in unleashing Dave and Gary upon Regina, we unleashed a genius and a natural salesperson upon an ecosystem that wasn't prepared for them. They were friends, influenced each other a lot and all of a sudden, they had something for people to talk about. And they were really gifted panhandlers, which meant that they were used to making several hundred totally cold contacts an hour.
So you take a city with 200,000, a small tight knit media community and two extremely gifted salespeople who likely made a total of 20,000 customer contacts the first week we had the paper and you end up hiding from a phone that won't stop ringing.
The RSM changed me in a lot of ways. We had another problem with a layout person and so I turned into our full time layout person. I learned InDesign and started writing articles where I would interview kids who were travelling through Regina. That created a totally new set of problems, including that I needed a way to store credits, permissions and all that sort of stuff. I trained a lot of vendors, met a lot of great people and developed a new appreciation for people who panhandle and run street businesses. They're tremendously ambitious and I found that they're a lot more like startup founders than most of the people I went to business school with. And I even started trying to figure out the solution that would eventually (accidentally) become StorePhotos.
But to Stacey, David, Gary, Neil and B - this started at you and your influence has absolutely shaped who I am. I'm grateful to each of you.