A quick recap:

But what was it actually like, starting a company back then?

In the early 2000s, the so-called dotcom bubble had just burst, and it was genuinely hard to convince people that technological progress and “digitalisation is the future” were worth believing in. On top of that, the euro had only been around for a year, having been introduced on 1 January 2002. That may be part of why it took us almost a year to get an overdraft facility (!) from a bank for our venture – an “agency for integrated communication” – let alone any actual financing (in the end, our building society savings plans had to take the hit...).

Back then, the Nokia 6210 and the Blackberry were the first smartphones, messenger services were basic, and there wasn't a single business-relevant social media channel yet (though MySpace and LinkedIn had just gone live). The rule was “keep it short” – not just for phone calls, but for texts too, where you got just 160 characters, and sending them was genuinely expensive – especially if you were already operating internationally (our first D2 mobile phone bills were eye-watering).

Producing and exchanging media was also still pretty time-consuming and expensive.

Sure, there were already reasonably powerful PowerMacs, Adobe had just launched the first Creative Suite, and the internet, DSL and email were all up and running. But sending or receiving large amounts of data (for print or video production, say) was always just as much of a challenge, and was usually handled via CD-ROM or Zip disks, carried by local courier services (the forerunners of Gorillas & co.) or overnight express couriers for longer distances. Incidentally, 2003 was also the year Agile development first got hyped – a method we'd probably been living almost automatically from day one when building websites and apps (because we had to ;-)), long before anyone gave it that name.

Our first clients were two real heavyweights: Shell Solar (yes – no joke!) and Balfour Beatty. Both were international corporations wanting to digitalise their marketing and communication (because that made it measurable), and both were already working on genuinely exciting subjects like “sustainable energy” and “mobile infrastructure”.

Curious how flame's look has changed over 20 years? Find out in the next blog post.