James Baker - WDDG

During FlashForward 2000 in New York, we sat down with James Baker, the guy behind the successful company WDDG.

by Jens C. Brynildsen (19. January 2001) FM: You are the guy behind WDDG, how did you get started?
JB: I got into it when Gabo was doing it, and I did WDDG as a personal site just to screw around with. I did the battleship thing, and a long animated movie in flash, and I just kept doing flash and screwing around with it and I had a good paying job as a programmer with Price Waterhouse.

And then eventually I started getting 1000-2000 hits a day on my site, and then clients started coming to me. At first they were like “we can pay you 200 bucks”. Then suddenly companys like Kraft came and said 'can you do this for us, and we will give you all this money'.
I went like wooooow... ok! I'll do that!

Actually I started doing 'too hot' which is the Cinnamon Altoids thing, while I was working at Price. I stayed working at Price and did 'too hot' at night, on my little laptop in the weekends.

After that, the NFL called... and then Dreamworks Records called, and that's when I told my parents - 'maybe I just am just going to leave. I'm going to do this all day'.

And from there I brought in a couple of my old friends, one guy from collage his name is Justin to help with the business, and a guy named Jameson who was a programmer with me at Price Waterhouse and he started doing the actual technical. And we have just been growing since then. There were just the three of us in January and now we have eleven.

FM: I heard you've got twelve?
JB: It might be twelve now. (lol)

FM: Do you manage the company?
JB: I am creative director and I manage the company from outlook - what projects we should be doing, and what we should be doing, but the day to day stuff I have other people to do. I don't buy the computers any more and I don't hire the secretary, I get to just sit around and make games.

FM: I guess working for Price Waterhouse made you know what you didn't want to do?
JB: I enjoyed it, it wasn't that bad, but I have always wanted to have a company that makes cool shit, and when I was at Price Waterhouse people would ask me questions like “why are you here?”, they saw all the stuff I was doing and said ”why don't you just do that?”

I answered ”I don't know, I kind of like koding” and so the they asked me what do you want to do? I said :”I just want a company that makes cool shit”.

I thought I would leave Price Waterhouse last year [ed:1999] around August and go to Razerfish, Rear or Organic and do Flash for them, and kind of go from there into the Internet world, make a lot of contacts, and then within a couple of years maybe start my own company. But I just kind of skipped that whole thing and ended up with a company that makes cool shit. It's very cool.

FM: The Flash challenge has been around for quite some time, do you think you are going to make any money of it?
JB: No… I have just enjoyed running it, and I have had other partners in my company helping out with it. Also I have never really had anybody come to me with any good ideas on how to make money of it that I liked. People have suggested banners, but I don't know if I would like banners on it, and how much will we make from that?
– Maybe $ 2000 a year? Its not that big a deal.

But if somebody came to me and said we want to give you a million dollars to put banners on it I would say like :” woooow – yeaaa – sure ok, we will put banners on it. But I think its good as a Flash resource for people.

FM: How did you get the idea for it?
JB: Originally the idea is two years old, I was going to yahoo a lot and tried to find Flash but I couldn't find it and the only way I could find Flash was in the actual Macromedia newsgroups.

And people would post like 'my top five URL´s' and we would post like 'the top ten are these'. They'd be completely different things, like - some people are good and some people are bad, and the only way you could find Flash sites at that point was going to the newsgroups and saying ”hey, what's cool”, and it would say go to Gabocorp, eye4you and matinee,

So the site originally started as a kind of Yahoo type link list with short reviews.
I only wanted to put up the best ones because I wasn't looking for a bunch of crap. I was looking for a good list over all the best sites. And I didn't like the 'shocked site of the day' because it looked 'too corporate'. Sort of like they were being paid off all the time, and you knew there were all these other cool sites out there that would never get the 'shocked site of the day'.

I found a script to do a top ten list and I thought top ten would be cool, so I put that in there. Then Generator came out... I put Generator on there, and I did a part in Flash, but the script behind it was really bad. It was a really easily hacked Perl script.

FM: Why didn't you do it yourself? You're a programmer?
JB: I did. I found a script and modified it so it worked. I am not a Perl-guy at all, and after a while I kind of lost interest in it and it went down. Then when Flash 4 came it was like 'wooooow'. I could bring all these variables into Flash and do all this stuff in Flash now, and I didn't kneed Generator. I hated Generator because it was so slow.

So, I said, I am going to redo the whole thing in Flash 4. At that point, I had learned stuff like ASP, SQL server, Oracle, Com, DeCom, Visual Basic and all that. I took what I had learned at work, doing e-commerce stuff, and decided to 'make something cool'. I made the Flash challenge and that existed for about a year or - maybe for 8 months as it was. Recently, I updated the whole look, it needed a little tweaking – some things where to slow.

FM: There are six things you can do there?
JB: You can comment on any site, you can comment on any review, you can comment on nominations, you can nominate sites and so on. The cool thing about it is that we don't have to touch it any more, the nominations go in and if 20 people like it they will be able to move it up from the nominations to actual challenge. And if ten people don't like it, it will be kicked out.

What I have found out about The Challenge, is that since we have moved to the new version where you log in and it has a lot of security on it is that - people are really honest about giving ratings

FM: You are a programmer, do you have any official background for that?
JB: My background is MIS. I have a degree in Computer programming for Business.
I went trough business school, and I just happened to do design for comic books,
I was just very interested in design while I was per seeing the business programming as a job, design always was my hobby, you know doing graphics' and so.

I used to just draw a lot, and then the web came and I said 'I can draw on the web, and I can do design on the web, I have got Photoshop and Illustrator and Yeah. I'll do all that stuff'.

As this inteview was made a while ago, the sites mentioned, are not the most recent work by James and the WDDG. Check out their site for more recent stuff like the one above this text...

 

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (February 28th 2004)

 

 

Loads of Flash-books >> << Blaze PDF released

Related stories

FOTB 2008 Conference reports

Flash On The Beach 2008 - Day 1

Heads up - there is a different conference in town

Last chance for Flash On The Beach tickets

Singularity becomes -head-

Making a Connection at Casual Connect