The Early Years of Running a Company After the Discovery Channel, I started my own company in earnest. My first products were InfoMagnet and TILE: InfoMagnet So, after Discovery Channel, I'm back to computer consulting and trying to break Audio Atomizer into the radio station market (that didn't work). I decide to write InfoMagnet, a program which makes it easy to join LISTSERV mailing lists. After about 6 months work, InfoMagnet shipped in July 1994. It did fairly well, selling a few hundred copies, but never enough to make a business out of it. Many university libraries purchased a copy, but we never saw the multiple site licenses that we were counting on. After three years of pushing InfoMagnet, we decide to drop the product and instead concentrate on writing a new list server, which would not need a separate windows program to make it easy to use, instead utilizing a web interface to do everything InfoMagnet used to do. TILE During this period, I'm still computer consulting like a maniac, because I now have four employees (Stewart, Susan, Damon, and John E.). I'm doing work for Discovery Channel, who let me know that they're starting to plan their Web site and that they'll need a program to convert their Lotus Notes databases to HTML. This seems like a good product idea to me, so we start development. We're in beta testing most of fall 1994, and in January 1995 we release version 1.0 of TILE. TILE is really useful for three types of applications: for people already invested in Lotus Notes, for companies where web authoring is not centralized in one person, and for publishing databases (SQL, DBase, Paradox, etc. on the Web. Working with Colorado Supernet (highly recommended Internet provider) we develop tile.net, a site for demonstrating the TILE technology. Now, Lotus has released a competing product, the vastly inferior :-) InterNotes Web publisher. Still, we've got the better product, and we've managed to attract a number of major customers, and continue to do well with TILE. We persevere with TILE for a few years, but eventually it becomes clear that Lotus is going to win this battle. They have started to withhold crucial technical information from us, so it is not possible for us to come out with versions of TILE which work with the latest versions of lotus notes. In 1998, Lotus releases Domino, and advertises it heavily on television. It features the same basic functional idea as TILE: making a web site from a Lotus Notes database. The End of TILE, the beginning of Lyris In July of 1996, we decided to officially cease development on TILE, take all the money we have made from it to take a year-long sabbatical writing Lyris, the list server that will be our next major product. We also decided that we had had enough of the Washington area, and since we could work anywhere (since I would be programming for a year), that this was a good time to move away. We buy airplane tickets to San Francisco, in hopes of finding some place to rent, get lucky & find a fabulous house in Oakland, and one month later a moving truck pulled up in front of our Maryland house and moved everything to California. Previous Page: Gainful Employment Next Page: Running a Company