How I got started in email

I'm often asked, "Why email?" The focus of my career has been email and I'm now the CEO of my third email company. 

I could tell you why email is great and why it's here to stay.

I could tell you how email drives most of the traffic to social.

I could tell you why there is still so much opportunity for innovation.

The truth is that I'm an email geek because I got into the beta program.

Back in 1995 I was a freshman in college at Carnegie Mellon majoring in Computer Science. It was an incredible time. I felt like the commercial Internet was being created all around me (funny, that feeling has not diminished over the past 15 years).

I had a PowerMac 7100 with 16 MB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, and a 17" monitor. It was a badass machine. There was ethernet in my dorm room connected to a high speed network - unlike anything I had ever experienced at home on dialup.

I had no software.

Open source was still immature. Linux and Apache were powerful but there wasn't that much else that was easy to use or reliable. This was before the days of free, web-based services. I was a college kid with no cash and so that meant I had no software to run on my badass hardware.

Beta programs were the answer. I couldn't afford to buy any software, but if I could get into the beta program I could get access to it for free.

This was back before the days of free betas. Netscape's web browser was the first big free beta program. The idea of an "open beta" was novel. Most beta programs were closed, invitation-only affairs. You filled out an application form and signed an intimidating NDA. Only a certain number of participants were accepted.

I applied for every beta program I could get my hands on.

In 1995 the web was hot. The coolest program was a web server, and the coolest web server was WebSTAR on the Mac (formerly known as MacHTTPD by Chuck Shotton). It was made by a cool little company in Berkeley called StarNine Technologies. I applied for the WebSTAR beta program so I could start writing CGI scripts.

Right next to the signup form for the WebSTAR beta program was another form for the ListSTAR beta program. I didn't really know what it was, but it sounded similar and asked the same questions so I filled out that form as well.

I was rejected for the WebSTAR beta program. After all, everyone wanted to beta test WebSTAR and what did I, some measly college kid, have to offer?

But I was accepted for the ListSTAR beta program. Hurray! Now I had to figure out what it was and how I could use it. It turns out that it was a graphical flowchart user interface to a Majordomo or Listserv style mailing list functionality.

I started playing around with it and participating in their own online mailing list forum. I answered questions for other users. Soon I was hired by StarNine as an intern and then I started doing consulting and customization work on the side. I would find new consulting clients by answering people's questions on the forums.

One day, one of my consulting clients asked me if I would run their mailing list on my server for a monthly fee, instead of paying me as a consultant to fix his server when it broke or needed changes. That was the beginning of my SaaS email hosting business, SKYLIST. At the beginning it was mostly forums and groups and then around 2002 in started transitioning to email marketing.

Fast forward 10 years and my license plate says EMAIL.

Comments

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Thanks for such a great post and the review, I am totally impressed! Keep stuff like this coming.

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Awesome success story! You never know where a small step today will lead you tomorrow.

[FrancisPaulette]

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nice post,and thanks sharing!!!!

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thanks nice post,and thanks sharing!!!!

[geotargeted search engine optimization]

not too far from where i started too..

[email archiving]

I started with email marketing after college. That was my first job. Then I moved to SEO and finally, e-commerce.

[Peter Simmons]

Josh - great story - email is still king - the underlying driver of chat, tweet, sms, social and mobile

[Mike]

Great story, but I don't think that PowerMac 7100 had a 250 GB hard drive! It's amazing how much bigger storage has gotten in 15 years.

[Jess]

Funny how work-lives in e-mail link more than one person from that freshman floor.