Way back in October 2002, whilst investigating other ideas for texting, I stumbled on an idea from a company based in London, Pocket Generation, running an innovative night out with text messages.

The concept was fun: A person signs up and gets a text message to meet 3 other people in a random bar and gets a codeword to identify their group. After an hour, another message goes out for the groups to go to a different bar and join another group, to become 8. Later, a message is sent to go someplace else and join up with another group. For the finale, the different groups (now 16 people each) get VIP invites to a secret after show party to finish up the night!

I headed down to Shoreditch to try it out for myself, and had a fun night out... it’s more fun and friends, than dating as you don’t really know what will happen next or who is in the group. It’s safe as well, with the groups getting pretty big and you never got stuck with the same people for too long.

A few days later, after discussing with the company in charge, we agreed to launch a pilot in Newcastle. I got 32 people together and set up the whole show, telling people to bring tubes of smarties to identify each other, and give them something to eat along the way. All in all, the response was great and set the path to promote it more heavily for the start of the following year.

It was at this time that the company name “Text-A” didn’t really gel with the current business activities, so myself and Cal Morton, who sharing the same office as me, started going through different domain names to come up with an alternative. After many hours, Cal casually mentioned TextYou, I checked and it was available, so we became TextYou – much to his regret later on!

After rolling out as much promotion for the event in February, including posters, (free) radio publicity, newspaper articles and getting my car branded up with TextYou written down the sides in great big letters, 16 people signed up for £10 each. Sadly that night was also the night of a big snowstorm and led to a wash out.

After analyzing the concept for a few more days, I decided to embark on a slightly refined version of something else I had seen from the company in London. I was trying to take the business to a higher level and felt that all the promoting work going in, for an event once a month, was too risky if the weather turned, or not enough people signed up.