Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, before “social media” was even a phrase anyone used, I built BalloonHQ.com. I was both the developer and the community leader of a vibrant, global balloon artist community. There were no Facebooks or Instagrams yet, just email lists, forums, and a treasure trove of over 100,000 photos shared by passionate balloon artists worldwide. This was a true community, thriving on connection and creativity.
Seth Godin, the marketing guru, writer, and speaker, talks a lot about how every group of passionate people forms its own community. He believes there’s a community like this for everyone. At one of his talks I happened to attend, he mentioned me. Not by name, and without knowing I was in the room. He was referring to the network of balloon artists who follow “this guy” leading giant balloon twisting adventures around the world. That moment was surreal. We’d never met, but he was familiar with my community that gathered to collaborate and dream bigger.
But here’s the catch: I built the software that drove our community website all myself. Every line of code, every feature was custom. There was no off-the-shelf software that did what I needed, so I cobbled it together as fast as I could, focusing more on community and art than clean coding or scalable architecture. The code got messy, patches piled on patches, security holes needed bandaging, and the tech aged like a vintage balloon, beautiful but fragile.
Meanwhile, my career as an artist was taking off. Appearances on Today, Good Morning America, and even Martha Stewart pulled me away from the screen and into the spotlight. Fixing the site fell to the wayside. Then Facebook, Instagram, TikTok—they arrived like tidal waves. Traffic evaporated. The site I had built with heart and sweat faded into the background.
Eventually, I had to sell BalloonHQ.com in order to give it a chance to survive under new leadership. The new owner didn’t share my passion for the community or vision, and the site quietly slipped into something entirely different from what it once was.
It’s a classic downfall story: being too far ahead, too small, and too focused on the art rather than the tech beast that required constant feeding. But that community? That spark of connection? That part still burns bright, proof that real art and real people can pioneer worlds, even if the platform doesn’t last forever.
❤️ must have been super inspiring to be part of such a community back in the days.. I love to hear about what you created there 🙂
Some of the other things I’ve written about, like the giant octopus and the soccer players came directly out of BalloonHQ. Coming soon: the first Balloon Manor. All of those happened because I met people online in the days before everything could be found on the internet. You couldn’t find everything, but you could find balloon artists hungry to meet other balloon artists. There were so few of us worldwide that without a tool like the internet, we never would have found each other.