How, and why, I invented OnlyFans. In 2004

Summary

One of the things I liked most about moving to Latvia was access to faster, cheaper internet than I could get in my previous home in Los Angeles. It allowed me, on January 10, 2007, to view the high-resolution 480p stream of Steve Jobs' keynote from the Moscone Center. I had avoided roundups of the event like a sports fan, staying away from Daring Fireball until I could watch things “live”. I wanted to be wowed. Jobs’ presentation started with an on-mic, throat clearing cough, something a perfectionist wouldn’t stumble into, making me think it was his way of calling the room, and world, to attention. We knew what was coming, rumours about an Apple phone had simmered for years, and it only took two minutes and twenty-eight seconds for Steve to make the now famous reveal. “So… three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. An iPod. A phone… Are you getting it?” We got it. The best phones of that era, like the Sony Ericsson then in my pocket, already had cameras, and a few high end models could record video. iPhone, with its enormous screen and magical interface, made even the latest new mobiles look archaic. Surely it was going to do everything any of them could and more. My startup, SugarBank, could pivot. Throw everything into building for iPhone and abandon the nightmare of wrangling Macromedia Flash, the only universal way to get complicated functionality into web browsers back then. I watched on, waiting for him to introduce the media capabilities we needed. Video recording via that gorgeous screen, GPS for image tagging, and a media editing suite like iLife people could use to edit recordings, but that part of the presentation never came. I didn’t know then that the device on stage was barely functional. That the announcement itself was only taking place to pre-empt the FCC, about to make iPhone public via mandatory regulatory fi...