25 years of 333 history

333 was founded on April 4, 1998. At the beginning of April 2023, 25 years later, I met up with Enric Marco and Miquel Collell to celebrate the success of their project. We went to the same restaurant where we met with the late José Barceló 25 years ago. That meeting was my starting point at 333, a project that José, Enric, and Miquel already had underway and which was about to be launched.

José, Enric, and Miquel were the creators of 333, true visionaries who saw the potential of the internet at a time when it was an incipient technology in our country (Spain), to which less than 5% of the population had access. Honestly, at that time, not even in my wildest dreams did I imagine that 333 could become the reference it is today. How could we create a company that depended on access to the internet, which very few people had, and even fewer had on farms, that was based on a modem device that emitted an unforgettable screeching sound and that was also expensive?

When I started, I found the website already had body and form. Miquel had recently returned from a stay in the United States with a version of 333 in his suitcase. Upon his arrival, he presented the innovative idea to his partners, who quickly got involved in the project and gave him their full support. Their industry knowledge and recognition, together with their enthusiasm, made the path very easy.

After some finishing touches and searching for a web host, we were ready to start the execution of a project that, in time, would become a great collective work to share knowledge about pigs.

When we started, our main objective was to offer a good service of providing technical information to the industry. To do so, we set out to publish short and concise summaries of a selection of technical articles that we considered interesting and useful. Internet speed was so slow that we hardly used images and when we did they were so small that we would need a magnifying glass today to see them. Nowadays, however, our main challenge is transmiting information in infographics and/or videos that are as short as possible, not for lack of bandwidth but to avoid losing the attention of our users.

From the very beginning we had excellent collaborators, swine specialists from different countries, with whom we organized a panel of experts to whom users could submit questions online. Today this service may seem quite normal, but in 1998 it was clearly ahead of its time. This service would lead to a section that we ran for many years, "expert opinions".

Today we have almost forgotten what it is, but in the early days of 333, we received some articles by fax. At that time, following our philosophy of "getting to the point", we asked for articles with a 250-word limit, a length that we soon extended to prevent exerting excessive effort in summarizing.

Shortly after starting, we added another service that was key in the history of 333, which some of us still call "breaking news", a daily service with current news about pigs, following the same editorial philosophy that we apply to technical information: publishing concise, objective, rigorous, and contrasted information continues to be a maxim for the 333 team. At that time, we laid the first stone of what today is the 333 community, which consists of more than 125,000 people.

Inspired by the work of a very good collaborator in the United States, we started mailing out the news. People started signing up to the list to receive the news by the dozens and in a few days by the hundreds, and it became unmanageable manually, so we quickly set out to carry out one of our first automation processes.

Another key area that we have strived to expand over time, and more so as globalization has progressed, is economics. The economic information and forecasts provided by experienced contributors, together with the hog and commodities price system, plus production and trade statistics, are what make up our unique global panorama of the swine market on the internet.

333 has been growing with many other services such as diagnostic tools, a cost simulator, a medication calculator, side-by-side comparisons, classified ads, and more. The maximum expression of these services was the opening of an online farm supply store in 2006, which marked the beginning of a new line of business.

Over these 25 years, 333 has also experienced a progressive expansion to various countries and now has editions in 10 languages, so we have grown accostumed to keeping an eye on the time zone for calls and meetings with colleagues from other editions.

333 is a collective work that has been growing thanks to the contributions of a multitude of collaborators, whether users, authors, sponsors, or advisors, to a point where it is recognized by many as a global reference for practical and reliable information on swine. All these actors have a role in the development of 333, however, none of this would have been possible without the great dedication of the entire team of people who have been working daily throughout these 25 years to shape the website to give it its current form. Undoubtedly, human capital is the best asset of our company.

I would like to take this last line to express my gratitude to all those who, in one way or another, have contributed to 333 over these past 25 years.