Bonjour, ready for #3... Let’s rewind to 2006.
Web 2.0 was the hot new buzzword.
TechCrunch had just hit an all-time high of 90,000 RSS readers (lol).
Facebook was still in dorm rooms, Twitter didn’t exist, and Skype was the most “social” app out there. Basically, the internet felt like a ghost town with a CSS stylesheet. I was working on a startup called Fleck.
Great team. Wild idea. Terrible timing. The pitch?
Fleck let you leave notes on top of any website, like digital Post-its for your friends.
It was inspired by Tim Berners-Lee’s OG vision of a read/write web—where everyone could edit everything.
But with our twist: a browser overlay where you could share comments on sites your friends visited.
(No Facebook graph. No APIs. Just vibes and… Skype.) We were convinced it would change the world. Naturally. But first: we needed users.
And we had no budget.
And almost nobody was online yet, lol. So what do you do? You launch at a TechCrunch party, obviously. Sponsorship? $25K–$100K.
Us? €0.00 in the bank. So we did what any resourceful, broke Europeans would do:
We went rogue. Before flying to the US, we stopped by Otto (yes, the catalog store) and bought four plain white suits for €49 each.
My Turkish tailor down the street fitted them to the bone for €15 a pop.
We also picked up a few permanent markers in assorted colors. The plan:
Crash the TechCrunch party in those white suits and ask people to sign up for the Fleck beta by writing their email addresses directly on us. Simple. Bold. Kinda dumb. Perfect. What happened next? Absolute mayhem.
Turns out Americans love weird Dutch guys in matching white suits.
People started signing their emails everywhere.
At one point, I looked over and saw my (unnamed) colleague—whose name rhymes with Boris—getting a phone number Sharpied onto his zipper. By the end of the night, our suits were a chaotic patchwork of beta signups, doodles, and possibly a few pick-up lines. But here’s the kicker. The next day, blogs and press covered the TechCrunch party.
Not a single mention of the big-money sponsors.
Instead? All Fleck. “Dutch guys in white suits stole the show.”
“Fleck launches at TechCrunch party.”
“Fleck this, Fleck that.” We’d somehow hijacked the entire narrative.
In 2006, when there was basically one tech story per day, we were the story. Result:
40,000 beta signups.
Multiple server crashes (because lol, cloud computing wasn’t a thing yet).
And our scrappy white suits had become startup lore.
We had no budget.
No reach.
Just a dumb idea, some markers, and an appetite for chaos. But in the Web 2.0 desert, even a small splash made waves. Fleck turned out to be way ahead of its time. Or maybe just… a bad idea.
But that night, we were legends in polyester.
CC Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Arjen Schat, Robert Gaal - never forget boys.
Happy Sunday, cheers, Patrick P.S. If you know founders that are looking for funding (angel/pre-seed/seed/series A), forward them this email. I've initiated a community event dubbed Open Office Hours where founders directly can book up to three 12-minute meetings with investors. Tutti VC NL is present. I'm thinking of wearing a white suit t-shirt :) Gonna be fun.
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