You were about to ask “What did you do?” So I made you a checklist.
Build a professional social network for the advertising industry from scratch, with no funding, no team, and no playbook, because the playbook hadn’t been written yet.
This was 2004. LinkedIn was barely a year old and nobody in advertising was using it. The industry ran on who you knew, who you drank with, and whose book you’d seen at the last portfolio review. But here was the real problem: you work at an agency. You quit or get fired. Your friends leave too, scattered to other shops in other cities. Where are they? How do you find them? There was no centralized way for ad professionals to keep track of each other, let alone connect, share work, find jobs, or build a reputation beyond their local market. The industry was full of people who were brilliant at building communities for brands but had never thought to build one for themselves.
The idea came from watching a social network die. I was an early member of Ryze.com, probably the first social network I ever used, a platform that started with remarkably high-caliber people. I connected with executives at the Ralph Lauren level, thinkers like Howard Bloom. But as the network grew, entropy set in. Life coaches joined. MLMs followed. Then life coaches for life coaches. The good people bailed. That pattern taught me something fundamental: open networks decay. The quality of a community is determined by who you keep out as much as who you let in. Ad people needed their own space, with a culture so specific that the wrong people would self-select out before they ever signed up. The name “Adholes” wasn’t a joke. It was a membership test. If the name made you uncomfortable, this wasn’t your community. If it made you laugh, you were already home.
I also met the tech founder on Ryze. He’d built software for spinning up custom social networks and was looking for someone with the vision and the community instincts to make one work. He’d seen other niche networks struggle to get traction and warned me: “It takes a long time. You might only have 50 members in the first few months.”
I sent Adholes to a few friends. We had 50 members the first day. 150 by Friday. In three weeks we were at 500 and featured in The Wall Street Journal as the new digital water cooler for time-pressed professionals.
Build the industry’s first dedicated professional network with a tone and culture that mainstream platforms could never replicate. Monetize through sponsorships, job listings, and brand partnerships rather than subscription fees. Extend the digital community into the physical world with meetups in major markets. And do it all before anyone else realizes this category exists.
What I didn’t plan for, but stumbled into, was inventing what I called “blogworking.” The platform had a community blog where members could publish posts and network through the comments. People weren’t just connecting. They were building reputations by writing, reacting, and debating in public. This was 2004. LinkedIn didn’t figure out that content-driven networking was the real engagement model until roughly twenty years later.
Platform Development.
Partnered with a tech founder to build a custom social network featuring user profiles, forums, a shared blog platform, job listings, and gamified engagement mechanics including badges and referral systems. The platform was designed to feel like the ad industry sounds: sharp, fast, and a little reckless. Open registration with post-join curation kept the quality high without the kind of velvet-rope gatekeeping that would have strangled organic growth.
Explosive Organic Growth.
50 members on day one. 150 by end of the first week. 500 within three weeks, at which point The Wall Street Journal featured AdHoles as a pioneering professional network. Grew to 10,000+ vetted members over four years with zero paid acquisition. Growth was driven by referral mechanics, the blogworking dynamic, and the kind of word-of-mouth that happens when ad people find something they actually want to tell other ad people about.
Blogworking: Accidentally Inventing Content-Driven Networking.
The community blog became the platform’s gravitational center. Members published original posts, debated in the comments, and built professional reputations through the quality of their thinking, not just their job titles. This was networking through ideas, not business cards. I called it “blogworking” in 2004. LinkedIn made it their core engagement strategy around 2020.
Global Event Series.
Organized meetups, panels, creative workshops, and portfolio reviews in 20+ cities worldwide. These were real industry events: speakers, creative discussions, and the kind of honest shop talk that only happens when everyone in the room does the same job. The events turned screen names into handshakes and gave the platform a physical presence that pure-digital competitors couldn’t match.
Revenue Model.
Built multiple revenue streams without charging members a dollar. Industry sponsors included AgencyCompile, CMYK Magazine, DesignTaxi, the CLEO Awards, and The Art Directors Club. Job board listings provided recurring revenue. Agency sponsorships underwrote the global event series. And the platform’s high domain authority and engaged niche audience created additional monetization through premium link placements.
Spin-Off Experiments.
The same platform technology powered several parallel experiments, including Punknet.com, a punk rock social network that became so popular with teenagers it would cascade-crash the shared server from EST to PST as kids got off school. It had to be shut down because it was taking AdHoles offline. A hockey-focused network attracted interest from the NHL as a potential acquisition, though the deal didn’t materialize.
AdHoles was built on J2E, a programming language that was powerful at the time but became increasingly expensive to host and difficult to staff as developers migrated to newer frameworks. LinkedIn eventually absorbed the professional networking category through scale, not through a better product or a more authentic community. Adholes didn’t lose because it wasn’t good enough. It lost the way a lot of early platforms did: the technology aged out and a generalist with unlimited resources took the category mainstream. The community it built, and the careers it connected, outlasted the platform itself.
