Matt Mickiewicz and the business hiding in the message board

Matt Mickiewicz had a meeting at one o’clock. There was no reason for an advertising buyer to know that the meeting was social studies. During high school, he took business calls at a nearby Starbucks, sold space on his website, and returned to class. The timetable imposed a discipline that many entrepreneurs spend years trying to acquire: close the deal before the bell.

The callers wanted access to people learning how to build websites. Mickiewicz had gathered those people by sharing what he was learning himself. He was a teenager with a useful directory, an audience, and an unusually profitable lunch break. He later recalled individual advertising deals worth $5,000 or $10,000. The school cafeteria presumably offered less promising economics.

That early business became SitePoint. Its community helped produce 99designs and Flippa. Later came Hired, where Mickiewicz was a co-founder and founding CEO. Across those businesses runs a particular habit: paying attention when people struggle to arrange something among themselves. A forum thread, a design competition, a frustrating search for an engineer. Each could contain the beginnings of a company.

A useful hobby, with office hours

Born in Poland in 1983, Mickiewicz moved with his family to Germany before they settled in Vancouver in 1991. He arrived without English and remembers learning quickly. His mother worked in the service industry; his father worked in construction. He describes his younger self as shy and introverted, drawn to computers and the internet.

His first internet connection arrived around 1996. A year later he had made a website about Final Fantasy. By 1998, learning web development had become an absorbing pursuit, and he built Webmaster-Resources.com to collect useful material about HTML, search marketing, advertising networks, and the other things a novice webmaster needed. The directory made his own education useful to strangers.

The business partnership came next. Mickiewicz and Australian entrepreneur Mark Harbottle turned the site into SitePoint in 1999. Their collaboration would outlast the particular version of the internet that made it possible. Webmasters wanted explanations, tools, and somewhere to compare notes. A community gathered around those needs, with a business growing alongside it.

The dot-com crash supplied an abrupt lesson in customer concentration. Advertisers disappeared, and the company needed another way to earn money. It moved into publishing books about web technologies. The audience still wanted help even when advertising budgets evaporated. Changing the thing being sold allowed the relationship with that audience to continue.

For a young entrepreneur, this was an education with unusually direct marking. Revenue could arrive between classes; it could also disappear when customers failed. The community proved more durable than the advertising model. That distinction would matter when members began using SitePoint for purposes its founders had not originally designed.

The customers were already improvising

Designers in the SitePoint community began setting one another fictional projects and competing to make the best work. Then business owners saw an opportunity: attach a cash prize to a real brief. The playful competition acquired a customer. A website owner needed a logo; designers wanted projects; the forum could bring them together.

Mickiewicz and Harbottle gave that activity a separate home. 99designs launched as its own business in 2008. The decision involved more than moving a discussion onto a new website. SitePoint was associated with education for web professionals. A small-business owner shopping for design needed a name and an experience that made immediate sense.

The community also gave them a practical advantage. They already had designers, customers, and evidence that transactions could happen. They could build around observed demand rather than hope a new audience would materialize. The experiment had been running in public before it received its own company name.

The listening continued inside the new product. The team used UserVoice so members could suggest changes and vote on priorities. Ideas that reached the service included allowing more than one winner and requiring customers to pay upfront. A community could supply a business idea, then help improve the details once the business existed. Members had plenty to say about the arrangements governing their work.

There was still plenty of work after launch. Mickiewicz has described giving dozens of interviews, including to small publications, and treating customer service as an investment in referrals. In 2011, 99designs announced a $35 million investment led by Accel. The business had spent its early years bootstrapping before taking that round.

Something similar happened with websites themselves. SitePoint members were offering their sites for sale to one another. Initially, the business charged for a forum listing. But a message board was an awkward place to run an auction. Listings, bids, and negotiations deserved software built for the job.

Flippa became a separate business in June 2009. Here was another reason to watch a community closely: people trying to sell a website and people trying to buy one were already finding each other. Their improvised arrangements showed both the demand and the inconvenience. The founders could see where a dedicated product might help.

A recruiting bill, with six doughnuts

The next idea came from a difficulty inside a growing company. At 99designs, hiring engineers was slow and frustrating. Job boards produced unsuitable applications. Personal networks had limits. Recruiting agencies were expensive, and Mickiewicz remembers working with about 30 of them.

One detail lodged in his memory: an agency could send an invoice for $30,000 or $40,000 and accompany it with half a dozen doughnuts. He compared the gesture unfavorably with the champagne and gift basket a real-estate agent might provide. The doughnuts became a small, rather funny emblem of a process he thought could work better.

In April 2012, conversations with Allan Grant and Douglas Feirstein turned the complaint into a project. Grant could build the product. Feirstein bought the DeveloperAuction.com domain. Mickiewicz worked on wireframes, landing pages, copy, and emails. This time, there was no SitePoint forum to supply both sides of the marketplace.

“I build businesses to solve problems.”

Matt Mickiewicz

The original proposition was specific. Select engineers who were open to a move, bring interested companies to them, and put compensation information beside the interview request. Candidates could decide whether a conversation was worthwhile before committing time to it. Employers could meet people who were actually considering a new job.

By March 2013, DeveloperAuction had announced $2.7 million in funding. Its process selected 150 candidates each month for a two-week window in which companies requested interviews. A dedicated Talent Advocate helped each candidate navigate the process. The service also celebrated a successful placement with a signing bonus and champagne. The doughnuts had acquired competition.

The name had to catch up

DeveloperAuction was an arresting name with a built-in explanation problem. “Developer” narrowed the audience. “Auction” suggested that the highest salary automatically won. Mickiewicz found himself using sales calls to untangle that assumption, when the point was to help candidates weigh opportunities with useful information already in hand.

The Hired name left room for a broader business. Mickiewicz later said the domain cost a low six-figure sum, a substantial commitment for a company that had only raised its seed round. A short word saved a long explanation. It also described the outcome people wanted, rather than the machinery that delivered it.

Even with broader ambitions, he argued for a narrow opening market. Early Hired concentrated on engineers from a small group of technology companies and on venture-backed employers. A marketplace needs enough suitable people on each side for the introductions to work. Adding categories and geography too quickly can leave everyone waiting for someone relevant.

By 2016, Mickiewicz said Hired had used its own marketplace to hire more than 60 people. The business had become a customer of the process it sold. His advice about running companies was also becoming more concerned with what happened after recruitment: pay benchmarking, career paths, performance reviews, and the everyday arrangements that persuade employees to stay.

After the introductions

In a 2016 conversation about scaling, Mickiewicz recommended hiring an HR professional at roughly 40 to 50 employees. He described the cost of postponing that work as HR debt. For someone associated with new ways to find talent, it was a useful reminder that finding people only begins the relationship. A successful introduction creates obligations.

The companies continued beyond their early chapters. Cimpress acquired 99designs in October 2020, bringing it into the Vistaprint business. Hired became part of LHH Recruitment Solutions in June 2024. Those developments belong to the companies’ later histories; Mickiewicz’s role in their beginnings remains the thread connecting them to the teenager selling advertising between lessons.

His public profile now includes investing and advising other founders. In a later Everything Marketplaces conversation, he discussed capital efficiency, marketplace quality, expansion, and the effect of AI on these businesses. The questions have changed with the technology, but many of the operating problems remain familiar: whom to admit, how to match them, and when to grow.

There is a quieter life around the company names, too. He has collected wine and traveled, visiting nine countries in 2011. His business career has involved its own repeated departures, although he has resisted the idea that many interests require many simultaneous projects. Asked how he stayed focused, his answer was brief: “One at a time.”

It is a fitting instruction from someone whose companies repeatedly began with a small, legible activity. People exchange designs. People sell websites. People want a better job. Mickiewicz paid attention to the arrangements they made and the trouble they encountered. Then he helped give the transaction a place of its own. Occasionally, he also improved the refreshments.