Nineteen Years

We’re still here, but the coffee shop is gone.

By Eric Elkins

Nineteen years ago last month, I started WideFoc.us on the patio of Ink Coffee in the Riverfront neighborhood near downtown Denver. Every day, after taking my daughter to first grade, I’d stroll over to the coffeeshop with my old laptop, order a blended Black and White, and start building. Ink is gone now, but I'm still working on a patio as I write this.

I had a lot more hair in 2007, didn't need glasses, and lived in a cute, two-bedroom apartment along the Platte River with my little girl.

The iPhone was two months old and the App Store didn't exist yet, so we did social media on a desktop computer, like animals. 

MySpace was the biggest platform in the world, while Facebook had been open to the general public for, like, eleven months, and it was still pretty much a college thing. Twitter was a year old and sweet — we’d tweet what we had for lunch that day and get gently ribbed for it. LinkedIn was where you parked your resume.

A ton of platforms have come and gone since August of 2007. Google+ got eight years. Vine had maybe four. Meerkat(!) lasted about 18 months. Every one of them launched after WideFoc.us did, and every one of them is gone. Most of them didn't last as long as a car loan.

(Anybody remember Ning networks? Just me?)

As much as things change, some things seem to come right back around. Last month, MySpace announced a comeback. Digg relaunched in January and was laying people off by March — the bots got to them. Every couple of years something shows up that's going to change everything, and I've heard that pitch like 11 or 12 times now. Some of it was even true. (But I’m still not giving up my em-dashes.)

Nineteen years, and I’m proud of what we’ve built. 

WideFoc.us has clients who've been on our roster longer than TikTok, and a client who's been with us since before Instagram. We’re a team of pros who are killing it every day, using paid and organic, full-funnel social media to make real gains for our clients’ bottom line. We’ve focused our culture on building close, authentic, long-term relationships with the people who’ve hired us — that’s what really has kept WideFoc.us in business all this time.

Me? I'm doing the same job but on a much nicer patio, and I’m making my own cappuccinos each morning.

But save the date — because next year at 20, we're really going to celebrate.

Eric Elkins is the founder and chief strategist at WideFoc.us Social Media. He loves touting his food and travel adventures on Instagram and sharing Denver’s delights at denverlicious.com.