They just added to the growing junk pile of useless websites. Almost everyone who invested in their site didn't survive the carnage. It broke my heart when the crash came in 2000. You had to put up the right content, have the right idea, set up a marketing budget and work, work, work, until people saw your site. People needed to understand that while creating a website was work, the real toil was in getting the world interested in it. Why clean toilets when you have a net worth of seven figures? There was a famous story about how the people at Deutsch Bank, which handled the IPO for Amazon, told so many co-workers to buy the stock that half the janitorial staff took early retirement two years after Amazon started trading. Millions of people were becoming overnight millionaires through the internet. To know how to get traffic, you had to be savvy and call up Yahoo! and ask them how I get my site in front of more eyeballs. There was little to no analytics back them. Google Analytics wasn't released until 2005. We didn’t figure it out until it was too late.Ĥ. Its primary purpose is for you to tell the world who you are, what you do, and how anyone can find you if they're interested. Ultimately, the internet, at least the 1.0 version, is one big marketing tool. People believed that any idea would gain 100 million followers and a $5 billion exit.ģ. The world we take for granted today, where everything is behind a screen, didn't exist back then. Nobody was willing to market their idea with the same vigor that they developed it.Ģ. But everyone thought the idea would do all the work. In theory, the idea could be worth millions, if not billions. They took brick-and-mortar industries and gave them their first taste of digital transformation. They thought their idea would sell itself. I made scores of sites for hundreds of startups, venture capital-funded entrepreneurs, nine-to-fivers trying to find their lottery ticket, and even giddy homemakers trying to buy a McMansion.ġ. I learned some of the most powerful lessons in high tech that resonate even more today. But just like San Francisco would be littered with holes come 1855, by 2001, the internet would be flooded with useless websites. By 1999, had a super bowl commercial, and was worth $1 billion.Įverybody wanted to create a website. A year later, he gets $8 million in funding, and two years later, his company does an IPO.Įvery day, someone was making millions on another. A few early entrants struck it rich, like Jeff Bezos, who launched Amazon from his garage and made $20,000 a month in his first 30 days online. Most projects were about making new websites. The late 90s were like a 20th century gold rush. Some of the projects were the ones I love, a new database, an application to manage inventory levels and expenses, or a new ERP platform. So many people were using this new invention called the internet, my phone starting ringing off the hook. If there is a feeding frenzy for a particular product, I have a duty to my family, my employees, and myself to serve my market. I love the deep end of sophisticated software, but I am also the head of a company. In the mid-1990s, I was developing websites. My heart and soul is custom software development. Today, I design databases, ERP solutions, and applications for inventory controls while transforming legacy software into web apps fit for the cloud.
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