My first online business was submitting URLs to search engines for people.
We needed clients and after writing letters to a bunch of local churches (Shouldn't God be online?) we realized we needed to look online for clients. No bites from the letters.
So we figured we'd email people and tell them about our great service. In those days, you could do lookups in AOL by name .. like "Brian" and out would pop a bunch of email addresses. So we wrote a program and obtained (my recollection is) 10 million AOL email addresses. This was 1996. Next we wrote a program that send these babies out but man, the server we were on must have really sucked because we crashed it. This was my local dialup ISP. They called my house within 30 minutes. I'm like "Answer the phone and say I'm out of town!" Then we wisened up and set up a better operation and sent out all the emails. We had a response within 24 hours.
First client: Adult (dirtyonline)
Second client: Adult.
The rest is history.
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