Natsu13
Newbie
 Offline
Activity: 87
Merit: 0
|
 |
June 06, 2018, 05:13:05 AM |
|
Wireless Cowboys: Chapter 2
Are You On The Internet?
The letter showed up in my post office box, sent via first class mail from a place called DMAC — short for Direct Marketing Action Company. It was four pages long, filled with an almost breathless writing style that laid out the amazing money making possibilities for a video production business. It told of a guy from Arkansas who had become a millionaire with almost no experience in video production and explained his easy to follow formula for how to do the same. And the cost was only $195 for the package on how to do it.
Although something seemed just a little bit off about the whole thing, I was intrigued by the ideas that the letter brought up. Making how-to videos seemed like a really good idea. You make the video once and sell it many times over. It was an idea that had the potential to scale up. Most of the other business plans for video production involved doing specialty work like promotional videos for businesses, television commercials or even wedding videos. Doing specialty work was a way to make a living, doing how-to videos sounded like a way to make a fortune. I was in, and sent a check to DMAC for the information package.
A few days later, the package arrived. It was a series of three informational “books” — they were more like long magazine articles, a couple of videotapes and a one-year subscription to the “Video Marketing Newsletter”, all of which was written by a guy who was writing from his desk in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It covered a lot of material, and only a small percentage of it had to do with video production. His basic claim to fame was that he had done an instructional video on how to build your own satellite descrambler box. Apparently, he knew some people that were willing to show him how to do it, so he videotaped them and made a crude video that covered all of the steps needed to build a descrambler. This was before Dish Network and DirectTV, and the home satellite systems of the time consisted of a giant dish with a complicated set of receivers and descramblers that picked up the same signals that the networks used to deliver programming to their network affiliates and cable systems all over the country. Certain networks used a primitive scrambling unit to prevent home users from picking up movie channels like HBO or raw network feeds. The cost for a descrambler was high and required a high subscription price, so there was some demand for a way to bypass the scrambling.
This guy looked for ways to market his video and started using direct mail methods. Within a few months, his video had sold a bunch of copies and he had made over $200,000 in pure profit. It was pretty clear that the video was legally and ethically shady, but he was only selling an information product and he had not done any of the actual hacking needed to make the descramblers. Legal and ethical questions aside, he had figured out that selling information products was a great way to make a bunch of money and now that VCRs were present in just about every household and video was inexpensive to produce and somewhat unique, producing “how-to” videos looked like a big growth opportunity.
I bought into that idea, but balanced it out with the practical need to make enough money on other projects to pay for the equipment and labor to do the work. I put together a business plan for a video production business, and set it up so that any local specialty work would cover the income needed to stay operational, and a percentage of time would be set aside for working on information products. When I put my final equipment list together, it looked like I was going to need about $10,000 to purchase a Video Toaster, three editing VCR decks, an S-VHS camera and the needed accessories to do basic video work. But if I hit the jackpot on a video like this guy did, I would pay that money back in a hurry!
I did not have that kind of money just sitting around, so I was going to have to get a loan. Dad had set up a partnership for me and my siblings called LEMM that was occasionally used as a partner on some of his cattle feeding ventures. I did not have the borrowing capacity for a $10,000 loan, but LEMM did, so I visited with dad and our banker about starting this video production business and having LEMM provide the security. Dad was not real excited about me starting the business, as he felt it was going to be a distraction from my broker job. I was very adamant about wanting to do this as a part time venture, and I had put in a lot of work on a business plan that showed exactly how I was going to make it work. The banker felt that the business plan was decent, and I was able to get the loan. Dad had not given his full approval for it, and was in fact going to tell me that we could not do it, but I had already gotten the check, completed the paperwork and signed for LEMM. It was too late now, and that monthly payment looked like it was going to be easy to handle once I was bringing in some video production revenue.
Soon after the loan was approved, I had to make a trip to Eastern Nebraska to visit another brokerage in Grand Island. The author of the information package that I had purchased, lived near Clarks, NE, about 35 miles from Grand Island. I decided to call him up and see if I could stop by to visit about some of the things that were in his information package. He seemed hesitant at first, but finally agreed to a meetup.
On the drive to Grand Island, I was overflowing with questions about how I could grow my video production business, what kind of equipment I should get next and what kind of projects I should be focused on. After all, this was the guy who was selling the plan and he had to have a lot of great knowledge that he could pass on to me that would help me take my business to the next level. I couldn’t wait to meet this sage and pick his brain.
When I arrived at the farmhouse I was met at the door by Evan Williams, another farm kid about my age who had also gone to the University of Nebraska. I started to pepper him with questions about the video business and it soon became clear and he did not really know much about video production. He showed me his room in the basement, where he had a computer, piles of specialty magazines and neatly organized shelves full of books, papers and videotapes. One of the shelves was marked “Video Production Package” and had a few copies of the information package that he had sold me. Evan was not an expert in video production, he was a direct marketer. He had purchased reprint rights to several information packages and placed ads in specialty magazines for the packages. When someone responded to one of his ads, he sent out a finely crafted letter that made it sound as if that package had all the answers they would ever need about the subject. The package that I had bought for $195 probably cost all of $15 to print and $3 to ship.
I felt like Dorothy after she discovered the Great and Powerful Oz was just a little man from Omaha hiding behind a curtain. I was expecting to meet a business guru, and instead I met another frustrated farmboy, who had dropped out of school and was living in his parent’s basement selling reprinted information. However, my disappointment soon vanished, because he had something to show me that he thought was way more exciting than direct mail marketing or video production.
Evan asked me, “Are you on the Internet?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. There was no Internet when I was in college, just a bunch of mainframes and green screen terminals in the Computer Science and engineering departments that looked like relics from the Cold War. I had seen ads for 1200 baud modems and Compuserve in Byte Magazine, but had no idea how they could be very useful. There was no Google or Yahoo, and Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser, was yet to be released to the public. No, I was definitely not on the Internet.
“What exactly is the Internet?” I asked him.
Evan booted up his computer and I heard the modem tones that sounded like a fax machine and in a couple of minutes some primitive graphics from the Prodigy online service popped up on his screen. He showed me email, bulletin boards and best of all, newsgroups. This was right in the middle of what came to be known as the “Eternal September” among old-school Internet users, when a seemingly endless stream of new users discovered the Internet newsgroups through Prodigy, Compuserve, Delphi and America Online.
“This is going to change everything,” he said.
Despite the clunky graphics and pokey interface, I could see that this was a game changer. Having the ability to get information about nearly any subject and direct access to experts was a simple and yet very powerful concept. All of the shelves full of information packages on the back wall were going to be obsolete very soon.
Another subject that we talked about was “multimedia”. Multimedia computers — machines with high powered graphics cards, CD-ROM drives, sound cards and graphical interfaces were now the must have item. Educational programs and titles were coming out for these new multimedia computers, and multimedia production was picking up steam. The graphics and sound capabilities and the seemingly limitless storage capacity of CD-ROMs meant that these new, low cost personal computers had a much larger potential utility for education and entertainment.
I left Evan’s house with a renewed energy. I squeezed a multimedia computer and modem into the equipment list. It was time to pick a name for the company, and it seemed like the name should have media in it. One day my father made the remark that I was good at coming up with “inventive” ways to waste my time. I took that as a compliment and used it as part of the name for my enterprise — Inventive Media. I cleared out the spare bedroom in my rented farm house, ordered my computer and video production equipment and waited for it to arrive.
When the equipment showed up, it was like Christmas! I hooked everything up as quickly as I could and started teaching myself how to use the system to make videos. The Video Toaster and AmiLink editor, hooked up to a set of Panasonic S-VHS editing decks was far better than anything I had used in college and almost as good as the broadcast quality gear I had worked with at KSTF. The Video Toaster could do all kinds of cool things, like character generation, special effects and even animations. For the next couple of weeks, I raced home from work to immerse myself in instructional videos on how to use the Toaster and all of the related software that came with it. When I was done with that, I fired up my 14,400 baud modem and dialed long distance to Cheyenne, Wyoming so that I could get online with CompuServe and America Online. My monthly long distance bill started to look like a loan payment, but the access to information was addictive and it was refreshing to be able to interact with other people with similar interests even though I was sitting in my little two bedroom farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. At some point, I picked up a copy of Boardwatch magazine, which carried a list of BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems) and found out that there was a local BBS in Scottsbluff, run by a guy named Jerry Allen. I called him up and met him at his house in Scottsbluff, a little place crammed full of computers with a few phone lines in the back for his BBS. The BBS scene was interesting, but it lacked the worldwide level of interaction that the Internet had.
The next few months were a blur. The video production business started to take off and I was able to establish a little bit of regular work doing commercials and promotional videos. My brokerage job started at 6am and was over at 3pm, so I had plenty of time to work on the video business after work. My boss at the commodities brokerage let us put together a short market report for the nightly news on KSTF, so I was able to visit the TV studio after work every day to deliver the report and hang out with my friends that still worked at the station. By May, I had Eric working with me part time on the video production work. He had a natural talent for it and having him help on the production side let me find more business, write scripts and work on building the business.
One of our customers at the commodities brokerage was a computer teacher at the community college named John Harris. He also raised cashmere goats and it sounded like they were gaining in popularity. That seemed like it might make a good informational video/package, so I worked out a deal with him to be the subject of our first informational how-to video — Raising Cashmere Goats for Fun and Profit. Admittedly, the subject did not have a lot of sex-appeal. But it was a specialized subject and it was pretty easy to market to people interested in the subject through classified ads in goat magazines and online on rural living newsgroups. Production on the video went well and I wrote up a fairly detailed book to go along with the video with the information John had given me. We priced the package at $50 and placed our classified ads in Goat magazines and online. The first order came in the next day — from an engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in New Hampshire, who was looking to raise some goats on his farm. Over the next two years, we sold over 100 copies of Raising Cashmere Goats for Fun and Profit, and it generated more money than any other single project that Inventive Media worked on.
By the summer of 1994, I was ready to move on from the commodities business. I told my father that I was ready to quit and work on the video production business full time. He felt that I was caught up in the excitement of it and that it would not be a good career move, so he asked me to stay on through the end of the year. I committed to stay until December, and spent the rest of the year setting up plans to go full time with Inventive Media.
During my online searches through the video production forums I came across a man named Chuck Hemstreet, who lived in Fort Collins, Colorado and produced specialty videos. After a trip to Denver, I stopped in Fort Collins to visit and he told me about a new venture he was starting. He was planning to purchase time on the newly available cable access channels and air promotional videos about local businesses as part of a business showcase program. He said that he might have some work for Inventive Media if we were to relocate to Fort Collins.
Fort Collins was a popular destination for young adults from Western Nebraska that wanted to get away from home. It was home to Colorado State University, close to Denver and growing rapidly. Eric and I had talked about moving to Fort Collins, and it certainly seemed like a lot more fun place to be than Scottsbluff. From the outside, it seemed like there was a world of opportunity waiting there, and we had a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new and exciting opportunity in video production.
Late that fall, I met a man named Jim Hanna who was preparing to start up an Internet service in Scottsbluff. He had hired a consultant named Howie Grapek, who lived in Fort Collins and was helping Jim setup his ISP. I had lunch with the two of them and it was very interesting. Howie was a high energy, very positive guy, and he had all kinds of stories about the cool things he was doing in his regular job at Hewlett-Packard and on the side with his hosting business called Knightweb. He invited me to come down and visit his office in Fort Collins the next time I was in town and told me about a community Internet group called FortNet that he was involved in.
That pretty much sealed the deal. It was Fort Collins or bust! On December 1, 1994, I gave my two weeks notice at the commodities office. I had a great feeling of relief and excitement about the future. Eric and I lined up an apartment on the south side of Fort Collins and an office space for the video business. As soon as the Christmas holiday was over, we packed up and moved to Colorado.
The first few months went fairly well. Chuck had lined up our timeslot for the show — 7pm on Thursday nights. At first we thought that was a great spot, but it was quickly overrun by Friends and Seinfeld, leaving few people to watch our locally produced business showcase. It was a thrill to see something that we had produced on television, but it came with the realization that few people were watching.
Based on Howie’s recommendation, I went to my first FortNet meeting on the Colorado State University campus. In Scottsbluff, I was one of the very few people who even knew what the Internet was, much less spent any time on it. At that first meeting, I was surrounded by computer science graduate students, power-user geeks from Hewlett-Packard and people that made their living by being extremely smart and capable with computers. I was the dumbest guy in the room, by far. After sitting through the presentations and discussions about Unix based systems, modem configurations and systems administration — all of which was completely over my head — there was a time at the end of the meeting for open questions. The group was intimidating — it felt like the second semester of CompSci all over again. But I had a question that needed to be answered. I had read about the Mosaic web browser program, and wanted to get it running on my computer but I couldn’t figure out how to download it. Timidly, I raised my hand. The moderator pointed me out and I stood to ask my question,
“What is the command to download Mosaic from a terminal prompt?”
Here we go again, I thought, as I prepared to deal with another room of people looking at me like I was the village idiot. There were a few stifled chuckles and a guy a couple chairs away from me audibly sighed and said
“Sz.”
That was all I needed.
I offered my thanks to the group, went home and downloaded Mosaic. There was still more work to do — I had to sort out the weird complexities of how to get a TCP/IP stack running on my Windows 3.1 computer and learn the basics of troubleshooting a dialup-PPP connection. AOL and Prodigy hid all of those things behind their user software, but there was no way around it this time — I had to get it figured out. Eventually, I got Mosaic running on my PC.
Opening up that web browser for the first time was an epiphony. I was used to text-based browsing, which was fast but clunky and always felt very dry. Mosaic added color, different font sizes, clickable links and pictures. Someone from FortNet recommended Yahoo as a great place to search for information. Yahoo searches lead to an astounding amount of good content, and links to FAQs about how to setup networks, troubleshoot problems and even design your own web pages. I started teaching myself how to learn online, absorbing as much information as possible. I kept showing up for the meetings, and got invited to the after-meeting events where all of the sysadmins would hang out. My studies of the Unix FAQs had given me enough knowledge to hold my own with the group and eventually I was accepted into the group of sysadmin volunteers that helped to run and maintain the network. It turned out that a lot of the initial intimidation I had felt was not a true reflection of the FortNet volunteers. They were funny, warm, very smart and often socially awkward, and we enjoyed a great camaraderie.
While it was great to get an opportunity to learn about the nuts-and-bolts of the Internet at FortNet, the business climate in Fort Collins was not as good as we were expecting. Before we left Scottsbluff, we started production on a promotional video for the Scottsbluff Chamber of Commerce, an 8 minute video that generated $5000 in revenue for Inventive Media. In Fort Collins, we were only making about $600 for a comparable type of video — a criminally low amount considering the hours of work that went into producing them. We were scraping by on $300 and $500 projects, the business finances started to deteriorate as bills piled up and more money had to be put into the business. Fort Collins was an expensive place to live, and in our line of work it seemed like there was always someone better or willing to work for less. We were dependent on Chuck for work, but he was struggling too, and had his own bills to pay. Half of our work was still coming from Scottsbluff, and we were making frequent trips back home to pick up these projects. I had even started doing some web page design and computer consulting, but it wasn’t enough to keep Inventive Media alive.
Eric and I had been friends since grade school, but the failure of Inventive Media and associated financial strains had taken a toll on our friendship. By fall, he had moved back to Scottsbluff and I was living by myself in Fort Collins. In December, I started looking for a job and wound up as an office manager for a startup company called GeoSpatial Consultants. GSC was established to win contracts at the nearby Rocky Mountain Arsenal to do environmental analysis and cleanup work. I jumped right into the job and did the entire setup of the office space, buying furniture, setting up the network and doing all of the odd jobs that needed to be done. About four months in, GSC received the contracts, but within a month political strings were pulled by the previous contractor and our contracts were revoked. By the end of June, GSC had closed up shop and I was out of a job.
When GSC closed, I went back to Scottsbluff to figure out what I was going to do. I also had a suspended license, due to a speeding ticket that was not paid on time, but I didn’t know about it because the mail was sent to an old address. To add insult to injury, I was arrested for driving without a license and was now stranded at my parent’s house.
To say I had reached a low point would be an understatement. I had gone out on my own, moved to the big city and failed epically. It was too expensive to live in Fort Collins without a job, so I had no choice but to move back to Scottsbluff. My friend Danny gave me a ride to Fort Collins so I could get my license reinstated and start loading up my belongings. Fifteen miles along in the return trip, the engine in his VW Van started sputtering, and left us stranded in Wellington. I had to call my mom to have her pick us up. The comedy of pain had no shortage of punch lines.
My venture in Colorado had left me broke, jobless, carrying an inordinate amount of debt and feeling like a big disappointment to my family. I felt a lot like the late Chris Farley’s Saturday Night Live character Matt Foley, who ended up living in a van down by the river. Except I was living in a trailer house out by the pasture. I sat down with my dad after dinner one night, and opened up about the depression and frustration that I was feeling. The gist of his advice was to “get back on the bike and start pedaling.” I told him I didn’t know where the bike was and I had no idea where to go once I found it. His response was that I should be at work at the feedlot the next morning at 7am, because there was work to be done and there was no reason to be sitting around feeling sorry for myself.
The next day, I showed up for work at 7. It was a weird feeling at first. The other workers at the feedlot knew that I did not want to be there, and weren’t sure how I was going to handle it. There was nothing that I wanted to do more than get away from the feedlot when I went off to college, and here I was loading feed trucks, helping to work cattle, cleaning pens and doing the grunt work at the feedlot.
It was exactly what I needed.
I started to get into a groove, and developed a rhythm with the work. Even though it was not mentally challenging, it felt really good to be outside and work as part of a team. Before college I had been dismissive of the work and borderline incompetent. Now I took the job seriously, performed my job to the best of my abilities and developed a rapport with my coworkers. Over the next few months, my frustration and depression started to fade, and it felt like I was earning back my self-esteem day by day. I started to not worry so much about living in a trailer house, being broke and driving a $25 car. I knew that I was capable of more, but I needed a mental reset, and working that feedlot job gave me a new perspective and appreciation for hard work.
During the time working at the feedlot, I was doing a few video production and computer consulting jobs on the side to make payments on the equipment loan. Eric and Danny had rented an office in Scottsbluff to have as a hangout place, and it had a big room in the back so we setup the video equipment there. When they did not want to pay the rent any longer, I took over paying the rent so that I would have a place to work away from the cramped, non-air conditioned trailer house. A lot of hours were spent at the office in town just to enjoy the air conditioning when it was hot outside. The video work was tedious, mostly wedding videos and the occasional specialty project. One of the worst video projects was for a horse association in Sterling, Colorado. We had grown up spending a lot of time at horse shows when we were little, and spending hours around a dusty, boring arena that smells like horse manure was one of my least favorite childhood memories. For this project, I had to video tape two days of a horse show. The first day, I had to videotape for 20 hours straight with only two short breaks. I only managed to get in three hours of sleep the night before, and instead of putting me up in a hotel room, the group shuffled me off to sleep on a couch at the National Guard armory. The second day, I videotaped for another couple of hours, and then picked up my check. To this day, I think that was the hardest $500 I have ever earned. I hated to do it, but that is what had to be done to pay the bills and keep up with loan payments.
By the spring of 1997, my head was in a much better place. I had reconnected with my old friends and made many new ones. The video business was boring, but consistent enough to generate some income. I had steady computer consulting jobs, helping people with their Internet connections or fixing computers. There was a lot going on with the local Chamber of Commerce, and I started to participate in their business networking activities and getting involved in community functions.
One of the community functions sponsored by the Chamber was an event where they brought in a “futurist” to help community members visualize the trends that were shaping the world and how our communities could change to benefit from them. I was hired to videotape the sessions for the Chamber, and invited my dad to come along to one of the sessions. Three of his friends, Roger Frank, Vinc Aulick and Max Miller attended the session. We had a good conversation after the session about things that the community needed to have to prosper, especially when it came to technology. One of the most talked about subjects during the sessions was Internet access; how it was an important equalizer for rural areas and a necessity for keeping up in a global community.
I had known about the Internet for a few years at this point, and had spent quite a bit of time helping to run FortNet during my time in Fort Collins. I was also doing a lot of Internet related tech support for customers of the local ISP, Prairieweb. Prairieweb had a policy of only accepting payment through direct deposit, so I had a group of 20 or so customers, mostly businesses, who would pay me for the service, and then I would write a check to Prairieweb on the first of the month. I was doing this mostly as a favor to people who did not like dealing with Prairieweb, and it made me think that there might be enough room in the market for another ISP.
It was time to move on from the feedlot, and I knew what I was going to do.
I was going to start an Internet Service Provider business.
|
