Thought I’d post something a little different today – a brief history of Planet Corp and SNG Planet. We have been around since 2007 through it was 08 until the current format started to take shape… the story does start slightly before that though, in December 2005…

In December of 05 I was in the 10^th year of a successful career at a well known blue chip, when I looked around me and saw my peers rotting away. Sure they were financially comfortable (we were all very well looked after on that front!). They were resigned to do the same roles with a few promotions for the next 25 years… and that kind of scared me, well ok, it scared me a lot. 

So, I quit. 

Just like that, their mouths were still open as I left the building and even promises of more cash and bigger roles could not lure me back! 

2006 was spent traveling the world with my now Fiancé Erika. At this point I had much more time to play poker… had played SNGs etc before that, though when you give 12 hours a day to the corporation poker can never be a big focus! Actually had success in a few tournaments and read a lot of strategy books that year, and caught the poker bug. Oh, I had a blog – the Plan3tGong Poker Blog… terrible name, but then again it was never supposed to be commercial, and I had done some writing in the 1990’s (on paper – shocking!) under the name ‘Mark from the Planet Gong’. 

So, end of ’06 came and we returned to Erika’s home country Hungary and settled in Budapest, where I had been on my last project (I had set up an outsourced service centre here). I played a lot more, though realized that the full-time grinders-life was not for me… While looking into ways of putting adverts into my blog I came across a (now dead) forum where poker affiliates were discussing business… my mind whirled! 

At this point I created a horror, an abomination, an embarrassment. 

A site so bad that I’m not even going to tell you the name. My intention was good, though my execution was horrific – it was a ‘sign-up through me and I’ll give you an iPod’ type of idea, it never got traffic, never got signups…. The only positive is that it was a big lesson learned, thank goodness I never carried out my idea of spending several thousand pounds on magazine advertisements!! 

Anyway, thanks to some of the fine members of the aforementioned forum (most of whom now hang out at a new affiliate forum at www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com ) I started to write for other people, for money. Prices have gone up recently, which is a shame (since I’m now a buyer not a seller!) though I was writing 25 articles a week at one point and slowly built a reputation good enough to start writing for many well known sites… won’t mention their names, no need now.

 So, Spring 2007. 

Erika and I are having a coffee in one of the many Starbucks-clone chain type places… and I get a napkin and draw the planet Earth, with arrows coming out of it all around. At the end of each arrow is ‘SNG’ , ‘MTT’, ‘Tools’, etc etc etc – the idea was to be called ‘Sitandgo Planet’ with the Planet as the central navigation. 

I booked the domain and we got to work, me on the content and Erika on the design. By May 2007 we had the first site… not many visitors, not many sign-ups – but we had a start. 

At this point I asked the poker affiliate community for a peer review… and the results were not what I had naively / optimistically expected… 

(this is way longer than I expected – will continue with part #2 tomorrow!) 

Gl at the tables, Mark