This is our story.
In The Beginning...
By DW on Wednesday, July 4, 2007
In 2001 Serena Rockey and Darren Webb, the founders of True Media Corp., were working in Victoria, BC as part of the Online Solutions division of the now defunct Calgary-based Big Picture Technologies, Inc. when the dot-com crash happened. Big Picture had made poor choices while flush with investor cash and its final months saw its CEO frantically trying to bring in new money to shovel into its many unprofitable divisions while its CFO came up with more and more creative ways to avoid creditors.
When it inevitably kakked out, Big Picture left us holding bags of worthless stock options but some very valuable skills. With no final paychecks, a new mortgage and a baby on the way we would have been in a tight spot but luckily we live in Canada! Team Canada kicked in with Employment Insurance checks and gave us a few months to put our Internet skills to work and, shortly before our son Jackson was born in a kiddie wading pool in the living room of our downtown loft/office, we launched HomeschoolingSupply.com with 700 or so products on hand-built HTML pages.
Lessons We Learned from Big Picture and Put into Practice at True Media:
- In business, it is important to invest your scarce financial and human resources in projects that have a good chance of making money.
- The fewer meetings employees have that involve arguing over semantics and not producing tangible results that further the money-making goals of the company, the better.
- People aren't as interested in receiving complicated explanations of why you can't pay them as they are in actually getting paid.
- Place yourself in the shoes of your customer and try doing business with your company. Really. Try it. Is it easier/more fun/cheaper to do business with you than the other millions of clever, talented people who also tried to be web designers and online retailers after the dot-com bust?
Growing E-Tail Businesses and Babies
HomeschoolingSupply.com is our original online business that services customers exclusively in the USA and which has grown to feature over 20,000 educational products for parents and teachers. And, around the time our second child Frances came along, we added TeacherSupplyUSA.com as a sister site to HomeschoolingSupply.com except aimed at the school and teacher market. Unlike our delightful children, both businesses make money and have made money every year since we launched them.
The Diversification of True Media Corp.
It's fair to say that HomeschoolingSupply.com and TeacherSupplyUSA.com were born of necessity but OpenSourceLife.net was literally born of a dream. Serena, in the historical tradition of log-sawing problem solvers, saw the concept for OpenSourceLife.net in a dream that answered the question "How can regular people make money with Google AdSense* without having to build and market their own websites?" Lots of other people dream about sheep or going to school without pants on but here at True Media, we live, eat, sleep and dream the Internet.
Over a period of months the idea evolved into an HTML mock-up for the site and with the bulk of the programming and testing completed in 2007 (literally on our wedding anniversary), OpenSourceLife.net threw open its digital doors. True to its concept, OpenSourceLife.net is a place where people can Ask a question. Answer a question. Earn money! with their own Google AdSense account. In late June 2007, OpenSourceLife.net received approval by the Google AdSense team to allow its members to apply for an AdSense account more easily and without having to leave the OpenSourceLife.net site.
Now, regular people (and know-it-alls...) can come to OpenSourceLife.net, see a question of interest (eg. "How do I get red wine out of a white carpet?") and read the answers provided by other OpenSourceLife.net members (eg. "Try club soda or salt"). Joining the OpenSourceLife.net community is free (and otherwise painless) and members can share their own questions and answers. Answers voted helpful by other users get posted to member's own personal pages where the member can earn Google AdSense cash. Yes, we know about the wildly popular Yahoo question and answer site but it wasn't the inspiration or even the model for OpenSourceLife.net. We know that people prefer to earn money, not "points" for contributing. (This is a corollory of number 3. "Lessons We Learned from Big Picture and Put into Practice at True Media", above.)
When Business Is Pleasure
Early on, when people asked what we did for a living, I would sometimes mumble something about "we sell stuff on the Internet". To my mind and given our experience with Big Picture and the dot-com melt down, a career as an online entrepreneur lacked the respectability of other industries. Over time and as our business has grown, I've come to understand that providing a good service, paying the bills on time and doing something you like and that you're good at counts for a lot. A good business, like a good idea, benefits everybody - its employees, its customers and its shareholders.
* Google AdSense is a trademark of Google, Inc. And, yes, the asterisk also appeared in Serena's dream.