Ramblings of an Internet Dinosaur (and I hate old school marketing!)

I started building web sites back in 1998 in notepad. It was a quick addiction: I went to Acadia University as a ‘mature’ (haha yeah right) student with plans to get a business degree. They passed me a laptop and gave me access to the internet. That was all it took to ensure my failure.

There was a meeting where I was encouraged to save the year and in return, I would be allowed to double up the following year: I could get my BBA with Computer Science. Truly the opportunity of a lifetime! But my immaturity, even at 26 years old, would ensure I only visited my classes occasionally and kept me locked in chat rooms for up to 36 hours at a time. This whole internet thing was just amazing! We ran Windows 98 Beta, since one of the guys in our dorm was a beta tester, which meant we spent night after night reformatting our hard drives and trying to get our machines working again. Who has time for class?

I admit, I still regret dropping out. I could have buckled down and gotten two degrees at once, which was not something that was available to everyone. The administration must have been falsely informed that I had a brain or something. By the end of the first year though, all I wanted was to run away from my failure and my student debt and do something on the internet.

I had met a woman online who ran some seriously busy websites, and ended up going to New Jersey on a Greyhound bus to team up with her and build websites.

I know this has nothing to do with marketing, but the title of this post does mention rambling, and I enjoy doing that. Also, a little background may give some credence to the things I am likely going to say later. I started working on the net back when dial-up was the only way to access the net, ‘High Speed’ was 56 kb/sec, and I have seen many progressions and changes that I would never have been able to imagine at the time. Luckily, other minds were able to, and we now have this high speed beast that is over twenty years old and which we still don’t understand completely or appreciate enough.

Back to the point, if there is one. Yeah, okay – New Jersey and Perl!

 My girlfriend ran some very high traffic sites and I would sit beside her, building my simple websites in notepad, listening to her say “I wish this did this.” or “If only this could be like this.” So I began digging into the CGI scripts she was using, eventually learning how to tweak them and make them work better. Make them do the things she wanted them to do. That was my introduction to code and I fell deeply, deeply in love with Perl. Soon I was buying books and embarrassing myself at Perl Mongers meetings in Philadelphia, this burning hunger to learn Perl, to learn how to write code, consuming me.

I soon dreamed about code. I learned, I wrote, and I loved every second of it.

My partner was the creative one and we soon realized we had become an awesome team – she was front-end, making things look awesome, and I was back-end, making things do awesome. We worked side by side day after day, chasing this dream of making our fortune on the net, but with no concrete plan or exactly knowing just how. We believed if we kept working, it would happen. So we worked. I wrote code in my sleep. I wrote code on napkins at restaurants. I wrote code on the train. And always with 100% encouragement from everyone around me. 

Before long I was making a little money writing custom programs for businesses and eventually started writing my own products. My first was the horribly named “Veinotte’s Heavy Duty – High Traffic Banner Advertising System”. It came into being when the banner ads script my girlfriend was using kept crashing with her increasing website traffic. So I tweaked the script, made it more stable, and eventually scrapped it entirely and began working on my own. I added features and used her sites as my testing ground, and the moment she suggested a new feature, I included it. Soon the code became a beast to maintain, but I was proud of my accomplishment. Once the program evolved into “Ad Eagle” and then later “Ad Eagle Suite” it consisted of some ninety thousand lines of code and proved itself by serving millions of ads per day on some very high traffic websites. The best thing about it was that nearly everyone with a website thought that people would pay them to run ads on their site. That made for a very, very large market. The internet advertising bubble was still growing and my sales would soon grow with it. I didn’t foresee (as none of us seemed to at the time) the bursting of this bubble, and by the time I was back in Labrador in early 2000 with a freshly incorporated business and Ad Eagle Suite sales taking off like I would never have imagined, I thought I had the cat by the tail. I had it made. I just had to keep ahead of the competition (in the early days I had three real competitors on the planet), keep upgrading my software, and the money would keep rolling in!

 It was the days of “If you build it, they will come” on the net. In ’98 I had created a Louis L’Amour website and that quickly became the highest traffic L’Amour site on the web. Then an Ozzy site, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Anne Rice and some others. Most were the highest traffic sites on the net of their kind, and if not at the top, very close. If I built it, they came – the internet was this new, amazing thing that allowed anyone to gain traffic. It was small really, compared to what it is today, but seemed massive. Of course I added banner ads to these sites (managed by Ad Eagle Suite) and soon I was bringing in several hundred dollars a month just from Google Ads. The ad revenue alone more than covered my costs, and made me some nice profit, in the beginning. 

I didn’t spend much on advertising. All I needed was to be listed on the main CGI / Perl script resource indexes, and eventually paid for banner advertising on the best of them. Ironically, one of these sites was where the scripts had come from that I originally hacked and started learning Perl from ( Hi Matt! ). Most of my Ad Eagle Suite sales however, always came from word of mouth and generic traffic. My sites showed up well in Google and that fact alone made me a lot of money. Pricing ranged from $495 USD for a single site license to $2,800 USD for an unlimited license, and at the time I was getting about 50% on the exchange to Canadian dollars, and there were usually sales every day of the week. When a customer told me they wished the program had a certain feature, I told them to give me a few days and it would have. I gave them whatever they wanted if it was reasonable and improved the product. I added multi administrator functionality, affiliate program features, even a hosted version so I served the ads for them and they didn’t have to install any software on their servers. Whatever the customer suggested would make the program better, I added. In return, my customers told their friends and colleagues about it, and sales continued to climb. I wrote code for 24 and 36 hours straight, loving it, dreaming about it when I did sleep. I would put off eating until I got this one more feature in place. Get head aches from becoming dehydrated, not wanting to stop what I was doing to go get something to drink. I was obsessed. But it worked. 

 I had also developed a website referral program, once I saw what was available and thought I could do better. It was just an image you placed on your website, saying something like “Pass It On” or “Click Here to Pass It On!” and your site visitors could send the page they were visiting to their friends via email. There were a few out there but I was determined to make “Pass It On” better, and in a lot of ways I think I did. It was a free service, with a catch: I served my banner ads in the emails and follow-up pages, managed by Ad Eagle Suite of course! If you wanted to have the ads removed, or even run your own instead of mine, you had to upgrade to a paid version, either hosted on my servers or installed on yours. This became an awesome advertising tool for Ad Eagle Suite, especially once the program began sending tens of thousands of emails a day. The internet was a different place then, an easy place to make money, to make things happen. At its peak I believe Pass It On was sending an average of 100,000 emails per day. Not too shabby. So Ad Eagle Suite was running ads in Pass It On, Advertising Ad Eagle Suite!

I also began an advertising package where outside advertisers could buy ad space in Pass It On. I found it hard to give up that space though, as it was valuable to me. Even ads that promoted my other sites ended up generating Google Ads revenue for me on the traffic it brought to those sites. But people were willing to pay quite a lot to have their ads in front of tens of thousands of people a day. I am not much good at dat dere arithmetic, but I didn’t have to calculate much to know the outside ads were worth much more. 

Sending this many emails and serving this many ads every day required dedicated servers of course. I ended up paying more than I should have for a couple of dedicated machines, initially in Montreal, which I configured and managed myself. There was no end to what I had to learn to accomplish this, but I was in heaven when I was running my own stuff, learning more than I would have ever expected I would, out of necessity. It never crossed my mind to hire someone else to do this stuff – I just learned what I needed to learn at the time to make things happen. Even DNS I thought, was an opportunity to learn, so I began running my own DNS servers as well as the mail servers. 

My accountant at the time asked me why I hadn’t tried to get a loan from the government. His thinking (and he was right) was that, at that time, the Newfoundland & Labrador government was throwing money at new tech companies, especially those doing just about anything on the internet. He convinced me to write to ACOA ( the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency ) and explain my plans to them. It wasn’t long before I was in discussions with them but the scope of the help they were prepared to offer me was beyond my ability to comprehend. They talked about mass marketing, television ads, and things that had just never crossed my mind and that I was not prepared to venture into. I eventually received around $68,000 in a provisionally repayable loan, backing away from their grandiose visions of mass marketing, high employee hiring and large numbers. I was simply scared off by their approach. In the end, on top of the loan, they paid to have a business expert develop my business plan and put the next few years of my future on paper. My accountant was not happy with me, thinking I should have gone for seven digit numbers, but I was still in shock that I was actually making serious money writing code. I was used to minimum wage jobs and living paycheck to paycheck at the very best. Orders in the thousands of dollars was still an unbelievable occurrence that I had yet to wrap my head around.  

Then The Bubble Bursts

I hadn’t drank in a couple of years. My relationship with alcohol had always been a volatile one. However, once I had been back in Labrador for a while I started drifting back into some of my old ways.

First it was just a couple of occasions when I went out and had a few. Then it became more of a routine. I would work insane hours for two or three weeks, barely sleeping, barely eating, just writing code. Then I would crash and head out for ‘a few’ drinks. The few would end up being a couple of days, after which I would be sick for a day or two and be barely able to answer emails, let alone write code. I would swear off the partying, especially after some journeys that took me to places where cocaine flowed like candy and I would wake counting what I spent, unable to believe that spending that much money in a couple of days was actually possible.

Refocus. Write code for a couple of weeks… crash. Party. Repeat.

Suddenly I didn’t have three or four competitors anymore – I had dozens, and I knew my software was falling behind. Sales started to decline. I lost focus for longer periods of time than I could afford, and tried to hang on as the partying tried to replace coding. I knew what I had to do to fix things, I just didn’t seem to have the will to stay on course.

Sometime in 2001 the unthinkable happened – the internet advertising bubble burst. People started to wise up and realize that putting your ad in front of a million people didn’t matter in the least, if those people were not interested in your product or service. Website owners suddenly couldn’t sell their ad space easily unless they could prove their ability to offer a targeted audience. Less websites selling ads meant less Ad Eagle Suite sales, less ad revenue from Pass It On and left me scrambling for the next ‘thing’.

So… this post never actually got finished, and I had it password protected. I just took the password off of it and maybe I will actually finish it.

So we will say — To Be Continued. Maybe. ;-P