During the start up years of GraphicBiz —1996 and up— most of our customers came from elsewhere but local: California, Venezuela, Spain, Texas, etc. Those were the years when GraphicBiz occupied a small home office at home. It was great!

Back then, when commercial Internet was hot wow new, it was kind of magical to do businessdesign for people and businesses that were so far from you but so close thanks to email, ftp and the web, a complex technological accomplishment but still so simple to use.

The story goes like this: Once I decided to stay at home to help Astrid with the kids, and grabbing new technologies at hand in the middle of the nineties last century, I started GraphicBiz. Hand drafted some ideas and drawings, registered the domains, and created the first graphicbiz site ever: v1.0. Zero clients.

Then my site won an award from my internet service provider and I was catapulted, for a whole month, to the home page of one of the most transited web sites back then. Work started to flow. It was kind of scary, I dare to confess: My english was basic at its best, and I was still building the links between the vast career experience I brought from Venezuela and my new home town, Miami.

Frankly, it wasn’t that hard: It pays to be a good graphic designer! Referrals pumped the business up and soon I was designing and developing enough banners, graphics and web sites to make a living.

The new century came and with it a faster, fatter and funnier Internet, better computers, new specs and standards to build better web sites, and I was swallowing all of it. Then it struck me: Dozens of customers in my domain, but just a few local ones!

(still writing, please come back for more…)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Stories, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.