Who Wants to Be a Facebook Millionaire?

J-Squared's twentysomething founders have turned down some heady numbers. But the widget makers face some tough investment-funding choices

by Kerry Miller

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Since its debut in June, J-Squareds Sticky Notes application has been installed more than 3.5 million times, with 211,000 Facebookers actively using the widget each day.

A new application called Glitterbox, which lets you send sparkly messages and graphics to your friends, was installed more than 500,000 times in a matter of weeks.

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Unlike most recent college grads, Joe Aigboboh does not have a Facebook account. But Aigboboh, 22, and his business partner, Jesse Tevelow, 24, are now among the world's reigning experts on the Facebook platform—thanks to the popularity of one Facebook application, called Sticky Notes, that took Aigboboh less than a week to write.

They set up shop here, in the freshly painted basement of a dilapidated West Philly row house, a few weeks ago. Almost daily they get calls from Facebook-frenzied companies scrambling to stake their claim on the platform, offering them paid consulting gigs, development projects, full-time jobs. But now that their four-month-old company, J-Squared Media, is pulling in $45,000 a month in advertising revenues from Facebook, they've decided to focus on building their own applications instead.

Facebook Feeding Frenzy

Last month a privately held media company made a formal acquisition offer worth more than $3 million; following in the footsteps of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, J-Squared turned it down. One reason? As with the deal (BusinessWeek.com, 9/26/07) that Condé Nast made for the social-news site Reddit last year, working for the acquiring company would have been a term of the proposed agreement. And for the J-Squared founders, becoming two more anonymous product managers didn't hold much appeal—not if they could do something bigger.

Tevelow and Aigboboh know how this sounds. "My mom thinks I'm crazy," Tevelow says. "She can't believe there are million-dollar deals coming in and we're saying no." Their friends, when they talk to them, are similarly bewildered. But mostly, they haven't had time to talk.

Since Facebook opened its service to outside developers in May, some 70,000 people have requested the tools to develop Facebook applications. So far, most of these "apps" are simple ones like Sticky Notes, which allow Facebookers to write messages to their friends on what looks like a Post-it note. But of the 5,000 different widgets (BusinessWeek.com, 7/23/07) now available for Facebook users to add to their personal pages, only about 100 have been installed half a million times or more.

Since its debut in June, Sticky Notes has been installed more than 3.5 million times, with 211,000 Facebookers actively using the widget each day. The large user base Sticky Notes amassed in the early days has helped propel J-Squared's new application, Glitterbox—which "lets you send sparkly messages and graphics to your friends"—to more than 500,000 installs in a matter of weeks.

Over a late lunch (sandwiches), Aigboboh and his partner admit their success thus far is partly a virtue of luck and timing. But the popularity of Sticky Notes, which remains within the top 1% of applications on Facebook, also shows that they understand what Facebook users want—something that so far, companies many times their size so far have struggled to do. And unlike many other independent Facebook developers, they have figured out how to profit from their endeavors.