Back in January the pair were two weeks away from launching their first Web start-up: a trading platform like eBay, where users would buy and sell used items like CDs and books. Nifty idea. But then another Netrepreneur with the same idea and a better sense of panache came along and persuaded a small town in Oregon called Halfway to rename itself after his Web site: Half.com. The media ate it up (can you blame us?); so did venture capitalists (can you blame them?). Even Kung and Smolinski were impressed. “Brilliant,” Smolinski says now. “They got a blitzkrieg of advertising.” Within weeks, ads for Half.com (as in, you pay half the Sam Goody price for that ‘N Sync CD) were everywhere. Before it went live, Kung and Smolinski’s venture was all but dead.

For baseball fans, the pair’s story might call to mind poor Steve Sax. A forgettable infielder for the L.A. Dodgers, Sax remains the answer to one of baseball’s great trivia questions: who was waiting in the on-deck circle when Kirk Gibson hit his dramatic home run in the 1988 World Series? In the dot-com gold rush, there are dozens of Steve Saxes, companies that never made it to the plate because another Web site went yard while they were taking practice swings. But Kung and Smolinski don’t want your pity. In non-Saxian fashion, the pair are already back in the game with Brilliant Idea No. 2–just three months after their first flop. But more on that later.

First: the Steve Sax experience. After earning Ivy League diplomas, Kung and Smolinski landed jobs that most of their fellow graduates would’ve killed to get: business analysts at the Rolls-Royce of consulting firms, McKinsey & Co. But less than a year later, Smolinski says, “we both had the start-up bug.” So they quit. The pair moved from McKinsey’s regal Washington, D.C., office to a charmless cubbyhole wedged between a Safeway and a Rite Aid in a McLean, Va., strip mall.

Within weeks the two had rustled up a few hundred thousand dollars to test their idea in a major market and prove it could work. They chose Boston–hip, young, lots of colleges. Along with four new hires, they filled a pair of Ryder trucks with promotional freebies, then drove 500 miles to a ratty two-bedroom “office” about a block from Boston Common. By mid-January Juicepit.com was almost as familiar to Bostonians as clam chowder. That’s when the phone rang: a friend telling them to check out that morning’s USA Today. “Just imagine the sight,” Smolinski says. Cranky from weeks of sleep deprivation, the team pulled up the paper online and read of the town in Oregon with a new name. “There’s six of us in this tiny apartment, literally surrounded by stacks of banners and stickers and 10,000 CDs, all of them saying juicepit.”

The mood in the room was intense, Kung says. Frustration. Silence. Months of adrenaline stored up and dashed in the span of… a USA Today article. Failure is a common reality for Web entrepreneurs, but Kung and Smolinski never thought they’d have to face it. But Half.com’s stunt had established it nationally. Three days of arguing later the group agreed to bury Juicepit.

After his moment of anticlimax, Steve Sax–who did have a decent career–was rarely heard from again. Kung and Smolinski, meanwhile, aren’t going quietly. “We liked being entrepreneurs,” Smolinski says.

Last month they launched their next Web play, Syndigo.com. The new site is a broadband content syndicator: a “B2B solution” that gathers video and audio content–like footage of an automobile test drive–and sells it to Web companies looking to boost their presentation. Syndigo may sound like a long way from Juicepit, but in reality, both are product marketplaces. Says Kung: “Now, instead of trading things, you’re trading content.” At this point, Syndigo’s got several private investors and a pile of potential customers, but no guarantees. “We’re fairly confident this is a winning idea,” Kung says. “Actually, you can strike out the ‘fairly’ part.”