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How exactly did Blue Mountain Cards survive the dot com crash

What is Blue Mountain Cards? It all started back when ecards became big in the 1990's. I'm not sure exactly how they built a business model on the idea of giving away a free ecard, but they did. Business models based on advertising revenue were quite frequent back then. This has no changed with people wanting to know where the real revenue is coming from. However, there are some painful similarities in web 2.0 to this idea of building big applications that will make money only from advertising.

Ecards are a difficult business space for me to understand. This is the space that is eating the lunch from the old paper greeting card space that's been around forever and a day. It seems like the classic case of doing something through technology that was previously manual. But I don't think it's that simple. An ecard is not the same thing as a paper card. Paper cards come from a store and require you to mail them. An ecard comes from a company like Blue Mountain Cards and is completely electronic. The products here are just not the same. So in essence, the technology is really impacted the very product. This is not unique, just look at tvs, video games or any other electronic based market.

How exactly did blue mountain cards dig out of this hole? I'm not entirely sure, but I think that Blue Mountain Cards had a serious lead going into the game. They planned well.. It seems like the executives at Blue Mountain Cards new they were onto something big, but that it wouldn't last. So the company was sold while things were still really really hot in the dot com sector. An amazingly well-timed move. Looking back, there are many things I wish I had done differently.

So now it's 2008 and what is a business model like Blue Mountain Cards still doing around? You could argue that the management team at Blue Mountain Cards were the luckiest people on earth to have gotten such a valuation at such a time when that was seen as appropriate. I often wonder if management teams like that are really lucky or create luck due to their experience. This is not a small business. Flawed business model or not, Blue Mountain Cards made a big dent in a market worth billions. I am betting that this is why they are still around today. They built a brand and have a name worth something. The part this is far from any text book case study is how they exited at the height of the crazy valuations. I guess that's where a little luck goes a long way.