I began working on the Internet in 1995 with my partner Gary after a lengthy discussion during Christmas of 1995 about going into business to do high tech stuff. YAHOO was new and pretty much a mess of linked sites that were mostly useless.

We started out trying to get the Mohawk Valley area of Upstate New York into our CyberVillage and we talked until we were blue in the face to crowds of glaze-eyed audiences. The closest we got to succeed with this project was the local Workforce Development group began posting their resumes to their site and allowed us to post them to the CyberVillage site. We eventually got tired of trying to force our industrial based, nontechy, area of New York to be the cutting-edge fifth Cyber Community after the first Blacksburg Electronic Village. It just wasn't going to happen.

So we moved to buying domains and building what we called dynamic Web sites. Web sites driven by databases, which are much more common now but still not as common as they should be. Then we moved into building tools that would help developers build dynamic Web sites in a few hours rather than many days. We launched ActivEdit, ActivMail and ActivSpell. The primary means used to market our tools was to optimize for the search engines and make our pages come up higher on the search engine lists. We produced millions of pages views and about $750,000 in sales for many years, well beyond Y2K, and were fairly comfortable until around 2004 when our bubble burst. We moved forward with the email plugin and began coding a list management system, then a complete email server - list management package.