THE tale of Mischief New Media, which the MTVi Group bought last week, is extraordinary if only in light of the fact that it seems like a relic of the Internet’s golden age when a guy could start a Web company in his garage and make millions.
This era isn’t so long ago, but it seems long gone. Probably due to the fast-paced phenomena of Internet years. The time when so-called geeks followed their American dream with only the support from friends and family, not incubators and venture capitalists.
Rather than a garage, Mischief Music founder Jason Hirschhorn spent five years holed up in his apartment on the Upper East Side.
From his living room, Hirschhorn linked to hundreds of thousands of Web stories, created thousands of Web pages and drew millions of page views for his MusicStation.com, a network of four entertainment sites.
He was the company’s sole employee — founder, funder, CEO, programmer, designer and secretary.
“After a while, I decided if I was going to live, I needed a partner,” Hirschhorn says.
Now he has one title, a sweet one: vice president of product development for SonicNet.com — and his own office.
Two of his sites, MusicNewwire.com and ShowBizWire.com, link to news and feature stories.
RockOnTV lists music sightings on TV for Web-surfin’ music junkies and couch potatoes, and tracks major appearances (i.e., foul-mouthed Madonna on “Late Night with David Letterman”) and obscure cameos (when Davy Jones takes Marcia Brady to the prom).
Hirschhorn, 28, launched CD Club Web Server, an i-guide to BMG’s and Columbia House’s record clubs, in 1993 — years before the companies had their own sites. He then made a deal with the two companies in exchange for driving traffic to their clubs. This helped fuel his efforts in the other areas — and pay the rent.
Hirschhorn, who was a club promoter at age 15, began fooling around with America Online in 1993. While at NYU’s Stern School of Business, he worked as an intern (via the Internet) at Warner Bros. Records, then designed the label’s first Web site.
That stint led to other design work, but when companies began taking that in-house, he started his own businesses.
He launched with the CD Club Web Server in 1996 and spent the next four years running that and the other three, living on little sleep.
He would “have died” if he went to work on Wall Street. Instead, “I got to build stuff for millions of people see,” he says.
Along with the Web traffic, the payoff came as well. Nicholas Butterworth, the chief of MTVi — which includes SonicNet.com, MTV.com and VH1.com — rang and promised MTVi could enhance MusicStation.com. Butterworth wooed him well.
“He sent everyone to my little apartment, my empire,” Hirschhorn says. But no one cared he worked from home.
“The product was great and consumers and suitors all respected that,” he says.
“I held meetings in my house, and to be honest, even the really big players got a kick out of that. They would walk in expecting to see a staff of 20, and the look on their faces was often priceless.”
Hirschhorn went with MTVi, which is slated to go public, partially because he respected Butterworth’s balance of business savvy and creativity.
He also values the worldwide impact of the MTV brand, which will be useful when he expands.
But that’s not all that drove Hirschhorn to dance with MTVi.
“I knew I had to go with MTVi when it was necessary to install [more] computers, so I could work while resting and watching ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Behind The Music,'” he recalls.
He points out another plus as well: “It’s nice to not have to type from your bed.”
Please send e-mail tomhuhn@nypost.com