"In the early days nobody knew what the numbers 24-7 meant," Chris says.

Andrew adds with a cringe, "...People thought it was our street address, and then there was the time when we sponsored the Brisbane Jazz Festival and they read our name out as Brisbane-two-hundred-and-forty-seven-dot-com."

Since those days the business has grown at a steady, sustainable rate as the brothers added staff in sales and programming, and moved the office from the typical dot com shed into offices.  After making the case to friends, family and fools the brothers got the initial capital to rebuild the site to handle multiple cities in Australia and bought domain names to all the main cities.

"We had seen the SydneyTribe corporation buy over 130 domain names like MoscowTribe.com, only to go to the dotcom graveyard without using half of them, so we stuck with 19 in Australia to start with," Chris says.

"The dot-com crash was probably one of the best things that happened for us, as at the time we were looking for money - and if we had got it, I think we'd have just spent it and dissapointed investors looking for that quick buck.  The one main thing that we've had no control over was the speed of internet take-up, let-alone broadband penetration - it really has been the story of the hare and the turtle, and being ready for the growth," Andrew says.

With the relatively quick success of going national the guys raised private capital for this next wave of growth, on to mobile phones, upgrading the technical architecture and changing the branding to my247.

"It gave us the freedom to start working on the business as opposed to being in it," Chris explains. "Instead of chasing the next sale we were able to put our long-term business plan into effect and now we are starting to see the rewards. Growth has been exponential and the business has really started hitting the accelerator stage again - this time just on another level."

Andrew adds "With the popularity of social networking apps we're seeing another gold-rush, and the years built refining our systems - making them scalable - is really beginning to pay-off. We've just added over three hundred thousand more venues, in over nineteen countries - without putting on anymore staff, and we plan to keep it that way."

The original model hasn't changed much, generating revenue from venues, advertisers, content sales and end-users. "In 2007 we really started to see a return from online advertising - the move to MediaSmart along with advertisers seeing the potential of investing online resulted in over 400% growth. The advert creatives are looking great and are becoming more interactive and advertisers are seeing that they work."

In 2008, the guys are venturing into the International markets.  Andrew says "Australia has been a perfect market for us to prove that the model works." His current concern is not a bad one to have.  "The only thing we're worried about is how to cope with adding more and more servers for the demand..." - not a bad position to be in at all.

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