Scott Meves

It started in the early 90s, before most people had any reason to care about the internet. Universities were the only ones with high-speed connections; at home, a 9600 baud modem was considered fast. I was a kid writing bash scripts, building "choose your own adventure" stories in BASIC, and spending hours tinkering with anything that would let me make something interactive. The breakthrough moment came when I realized that Mosaic — and eventually Netscape — would open local HTML files right from the hard drive. You didn't need a server. You didn't need anyone's permission. You could build web pages even if you had nowhere to host them. That was enough to get hooked.

At the University of Michigan, I studied Economics and Political Science — partly because I was already knee-deep in computer science and figured majoring in it would take the fun out of it. But those disciplines gave me frameworks for thinking about markets, incentives, and why people do what they do. I went deep: published in the Michigan Journal of Economics, won the John E. Parker Memorial Prize for labor economics, and the Walter Rodney Essay Award in Afroamerican, Caribbean, and African studies. The academic work sharpened how I thought about systems — and the nights and weekends were where I started applying it.

That's where Eatblue.com started in 2002. This was before smartphones, but after everyone had high-speed internet — remember Napster? We were ordering late-night food from the dorms and realized someone should scan every restaurant menu and put them online. And not just that — we scrubbed the phone numbers off the menus and replaced them with our own, so we knew exactly how much business we were generating. That eventually became a toll-free IVR phone system — a server literally running in a friend's dad's basement. Students called, spoke a restaurant name, and got routed directly. We won the university's Dare to Dream Entrepreneurship Grant in recognition of what we'd built.

We featured daily deals before Groupon made it a category. One of our most popular was a sake bombs special at a local restaurant — the promotion drove so much volume that the owners eventually opened a standalone location called Sake Bombs Depot. That was the first time I saw a product create demand that outgrew its container.

Then came college nightlife promotions, and my first real lesson in marketing psychology. Like Malcolm Gladwell's connectors and mavens, we found the influencers on campus and empowered them with their own VIP lists. I built a little app where our promoters could add people to their private list; the bar owner could close the list, alphabetize it, and print it out for the door. The VIP line was around the block. We took venues that struggled to draw a college crowd and made them the place to be. Scarcity, exclusivity, social proof — the mechanics that would eventually become Quikly were born in those lines.

After that, Stereo Interactive & Design — where I learned how to build products for other people's problems, not just my own. As Technology Director, the range was the education: custom t-shirt shops, nightlife platforms, special projects for GM and NYU. Every client had a different constraint, a different audience, a different definition of "done." Along the way I also helped get NewMusicalTheatre.com off the ground — a digital sheet music platform connecting writers directly with performers.

Every project shared a through-line: see something that could work better, and build it.