About

In 1997 I was having lunch at a pizza place in Seattle with my accountant when he picked up The Stranger and turned to the "I Saw U" ads. He was happily married, so I asked him why he read them. He wasn't looking for anyone, he said. He just loved the stories: each one a small window into a stranger's life, and great entertainment.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. The columns really were a Seattle institution, and if the idea worked in Seattle, why not everywhere? That same day I registered isawyou.com and isawu.com, amazed that both domains were still available.

Turning a newspaper column into a website in the late 1990s meant working around the technology of the day: no smartphones with GPS, no maps in anyone's pocket, and an internet most people reached from a desk. Still, the internet was thrilling, and the idea of using it to send messages to strangers was too good to let go. For months, ideas churned through my head as I imagined a future built on technology that hadn't been invented yet.

I filed the trademark, which took some arguing with the US Patent and Trademark Office before it was approved. I wrote a business plan for family and angel investors. And I settled on the idea at the heart of iSawYou today: zones. A zone is a page for a place where people notice each other, from a café to a train station, where they can leave messages. Zones group messages by place rather than subject, so each one becomes a message board for its location. The site went online in 1999, but the zones had to wait.

By the spring of 2000 things were moving fast. One venture firm passed us to a bigger one, and that one to a bigger one still. They all said the idea had huge potential, and some of them wanted to replace me with a "trophy CEO". I'd read that a 12-year-old Steve Jobs once phoned Bill Hewlett out of the blue and came away with a summer job at HP, and Steve knew better than anyone what it's like to be pushed out of your own company. So on May 10, 2000, I wrote him a letter asking for advice.

Weeks went by, and I'd given up hope when he called early one morning. We talked for about ten minutes. As I remember it, he'd never heard of missed connections and didn't think the idea would work: who'd be looking for a random message about them? I told him the ads were already popular from Seattle to London, but he wasn't convinced. The great irony of my story is that, a few years later, his iPhone made the whole idea possible. I still cherish that call.

Not long afterwards, my team and I pitched to eight or ten investors, some flown up from Silicon Valley for the meeting. Halfway through, their pagers began to go off, again and again. Only afterwards did I learn why: the stock market was crashing while I spoke. The dot-com bubble burst in that room, and any hope of more money went with it.

The company carried on for a while in zombie mode, unfunded but still alive. A London marketing firm even came to us on behalf of a big drinks brand with a plan for an iSawYou vodka cooler: holding one at a bar would mean you'd be looking later for a message about you. It never happened, and in the end the company folded.

I kept the name. I taught myself to program, brought the site back a couple of years later as a hobby, and have rebuilt it every few years since. A studio once planned an iSawYou reality series, until it lost its funding after 2008. Then came the hardest years of my life: a life-threatening illness, several years of treatment and a long, slow recovery. By around 2013 I was cured and, in a way, back from the dead. Through all of it, iSawYou stayed online.

It has never had funding or a marketing budget, only good search rankings and hopeful people who keep coming back. Along the way, iSawYou was mentioned by the Puget Sound Business Journal, CNN and Harvard Magazine, featured in The Guardian, and copied by students at MIT and Harvard. Between half and two-thirds of our visitors have always been in the UK, which is why this new version starts in London.

What you see here is the iSawYou I wanted to build in 1999: our own curated collection of cities and zones for the places you go, alerts for the places you choose, and ways to connect and chat that bring people together. In 2000 even Steve Jobs couldn't picture it. Today the phone in your pocket makes it simple. Thanks, Steve.

Phones make missed connections possible, but they also keep our eyes looking down. How many chances do we miss because we're not looking at the people around us? Look up! There are people around you, and maybe one of them thinks you're cute. Every new sighting still gives me a small thrill. I hope one of them is about you.

Varen Swaab, founder