(1/X) StonkX

"...the only X I know is Xzibit or RBX...Xtraordinary..."

10 years ago, if you asked me to tell you something about myself, I would have said I had a ‘great’ memory. Today, I’d say that old age and kids and lack of sleep has changed my ‘great’ into a ‘good’. So with that in mind, consider what I’m about to tell you in the context of something that happened almost exactly 10 years ago. Because…I think it’s interesting. And I think it’s kind of funny. And I think if someone out there had a similar experience, I’d love to hear about it. So…I’m going to tell you about the early days of StockX. From my perspective. But also mainly the days BEFORE StockX. StonkX. The X.

I’d imagine that for most of us, any time you consider yourself a part of a community, you find that everyone sort of looks towards others as the leaders of said community. And, given that Instagram has given great weight to the perceived leaders of these communities, I think it’s cool when I learn about the back story on how these perceived leaders became the leaders of these communities. So I eat those stories right up.

When I started ‘The Sneaker Savant’, Instagram was an afterthought. I really thought I was going to get famous on eBay. I thought that my grading system was going to wow customers and before long I’d have sellers using my service in the interest of furthering their business. I thought…’well, I guess I can be like Beckett. And how did Beckett come about? They built their name within the marketplace. Maybe I should do the same.’

A few months after I started working on The Sneaker Savant grading algorithm, I realized that it would benefit me greatly to find someone who had done the work of ‘data gatherer’ in the interest of documenting the most popular shoes I would likely (hopefully) be grading and authenticating. And in doing so, my only real resource was NikeTalk. And…I don’t know…NikeTalk wasn’t really that great of a resource as such. It was more of like a bunch of dudes just talking shit and showing pictures of sneakers and hot women and sharing music on a message board. The sneaker forums were fine, but the ‘General’ Forum was where it was at. But for actual sneaker info…back in the day, you didn’t really ‘google’ anything, because that wasn’t really how it worked…You just searched Niketalk.

So, yeah. Niketalk. And looking for data. I came across one post where this dude was asking some interesting questions, but no one really wanted to pay him much mind:

(For some community context - the second to last post, from ‘Methodical Management’, was like the WORST type of message you could get. That dude was like the undertaker. He had, what we’d call, a ‘ban-hammer’ - meaning he’d drop the hammer and ban anyone for any type of perceived slight. And being banned from NikeTalk was a huge pain in the ass because you couldn’t just create another account - they had like a 30 day waiting period before you could even see posts…so…any time we saw that kind of messaged, we’d all just assume the subject was dead and we’d move on.)

But…it was kind of an interesting topic, IMO. Regardless of etiquette, I clicked on that mcsd31 profile and saw a similar batch of topics and posts…even though dude wasn’t yet known on NT, he did have a few interesting topics…at least along the same lines of what I was thinking.

So…there was something to this. I wasn’t alone in these thoughts. Come to find out, I was late to these thoughts. Like…WAY late.