Back in 2005 at the very beginning of the myspace era, my friend Karl and I started a local surf report website called Area561.
The site was pretty popular but we wanted to increase the exposure further. Funds were limited back then so we had to get creative.
We were doing typical grassroots marketing things like passing out stickers, selling t-shirts, and sponsoring local events, but I’ve always been on the lookout for FORCE MULTIPLIERS.
I knew that Jupiter Inlet cam was getting thousands of unique visitors each day and kept seeing the seaweed piling up swell after swell and then one day it finally clicked.
A big swell was due to arrive overnight and everybody would be checking the cam the next day to see the surf.
The night before, I went down to the Inlet and mapped out how to position the web address in the frame and spelled out Area561.com in the seaweed as seen in the screenshot bottom left.
On May 16th, 2006, I became the first person to ever run an advertisement on the Jupiter Inlet cam.
Today, it’s common to see people using the Jupiter Inlet cam to leave all kinds of messages and it’s still an underrated move because of the absurd amount of free exposure you can get in just one day.
The moral of the story is to try not to confuse incremental progress with breakthroughs.
One slam dunk move can easily overshadow a bunch of little increments.
Sometimes the slam dunks do come from the accumulation of all the little incremental moves but nevertheless:
