What's with the name Prophecy? A short history of Prophecy.co.za

This is a question we get often. What’s with the name? How did you start the shop? I’m here to answer those questions today - hold on to your seats for a thrilling ride through history!

The year was 1999. The internet was a young, untamed, web 0.1 place where nobody knew how to act. There were no lol’s, rofl’s or tl;dr’s. Basically, you were online the same person you were offline. Those were the days. Of course, I wasn’t around until 2002, but I did get the history of Prophecy as it was passed down from father to son (or then Admin to Admin in this case). Prophecy was started by Veng, CU and Priest, with involvement from NAG magazine (If you know more about the founding, please contribute in the comments!). I don’t know the exact reason for the name Prophecy, but my understanding is that it being short, memorable, and the URL being available did not hurt. Furthermore, the name Prophecy linked in well with NAG Magazine, which stands for “New Age Gaming”. If you have early copies of NAG you will notice that Prophecy was mentioned at the bottom of every review!

Much of what happened those first two or so years, I don’t know about. I joined the community somewhere in 2002, and started selling computer hardware during my spare time for some extra cash. I was working full time for a corporate company. I took orders on the forums, drove through to Midrand during my extended lunch breaks and did deliveries in the Randburg area after hours. I did around 5 - 10 orders a week, often existing out of 1 or 2 products per order. During this same time, Paul was running his own business on the same forums, focusing mostly on the service part of the market. He did installations and repairs with the new product orders taking a lower priority for him. He was competition, and he was going to go down! It was war.

Somewhere in 2003 or so, I was looking around for investment opportunities and contacted a few guys to find out what type of businesses they were running, and if they had any opportunities for investments. I also contacted Paul, as his maturity online impressed me. I pictured him as a 35 year old male, running his own business from home and doing a pretty good job of it. I found out only a while later that he was 19 (nineteen! what’s up with that??), and we started chatting via PM on the forums, and became online friends.

Later, in around 2004, we created an alliance, where we would advertise together, and Paul would collect my stock while he collects his, and I’ll still make deliveries at night. Late in 2004, we were contacted by the then owners of the forums, and they asked if we would be interested in running an online store for them, to help cover the costs of the hosting and to try and get Prophecy to pay for itself. We set up the meeting with them, but their terms weren’t acceptable to us, so we declined. In the mean time, Paul and I were in the process of starting a company selling high end boutique computers - think Alienware or Falcon Northwest. QBIT Solutions was the name we chose, which is reflected today in the fact that we are QBit Solutions trading as The Prophecy Shop.

In early 2005 we where contacted again by the owners of the forums, and after some negotiation we came to an agreement that both parties where happy with. We spent six months building the site, adding products to the database, registering with suppliers, and planning the business, before we launched in August 2005. At the same time I took over the position of Admin on the forums, however with Veng still providing a huge level of assistance.

I started working for the shop full time in April 2006, after not being able to hold out for much longer, doing two full time jobs (7 - 4 for my regular programming job and then 5 till 1/2am working on the shop). We’ve experienced consistent growth since then, growing both our turnover and client base every year. Along the way we’ve bought out the original founders of the forums, and now QBIT Solutions is the sole owner of the forums, shop and domain.

It’s been a rough ride, and we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I think overall, the experience was a thrilling one, for both myself and Paul. We continue to go from strength to strength and look forward to a number of years of growth and excellent service. We have exciting things planned for both the shop and the forums, and hope you will join us in the journey ahead.

Please take the time to share your memories about the “good old days” in the comments!