30-YEAR REWIND < < The Business Plan, the Basement, and the Mac that Took All Day to Save

July 11, 2025

Early–Mid May, 1995

After getting fired on a Monday and emotionally white-knuckling our way through a Beastie Boys concert that night, we woke up Tuesday morning with one shared thought:

It’s go time.

The very first order of business? Fire up Jian BizPlanBuilder, finish the biz plan, make it sing, and go pitch our most likely early-stage investors: our parents.

We didn’t have much. We were in our 20s, had a mortgage to pay, and had just lost our jobs. But we had time, energy, and belief in our idea.

Somewhere around May 15, we finalized our plan and started pitching to the people who had watched us hustle since we were kids. They didn’t just say yes—they bet on us. Collectively, our parents lent us an incredible $90,000.

This was not pocket change. $90,000 in 1995 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $190,000 today. That seemed like plenty to cover initial capital purchases, pay for a rented space for several months, and cover a small salary for each of us for the first few months. In 1995, the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was nearly 8% and our parents generously offered us what we think was a 3-year loan at about 7%. (We were so excited we might not have written it down. Sorry, Mom & Dad.) We paid that off within 5-years but it was very sketchy at times!

That $90K went to everything:

A small office lease
Three computers
Phones, a fax machine, and a printer
Used desks and chairs (solid enough to survive a tornado)
And our first lead-generation tool: a set of five CD-ROMs called SelectPhone that listed every registered business in the U.S. by SIC code—so we could start cold calling.

The Office: 250 Square Feet of Destiny

We found our first office in the basement of the Mock Realty building in South Boulder. It was built sometime in the ‘50s or ‘60s and had a kind of lived-in charm… if “charm” includes low ceilings and limited natural light.

But we loved it.

Mock Realty had been running since 1968 and graciously rented us 250 square feet to start, which later expanded to 500, and eventually 1,000. Everyone in Boulder seemed to know the building—it was a local landmark—and we felt lucky they trusted us to pay rent.

Best of all, the building was full of other hustling entrepreneurs. We were surrounded by kindred spirits who were chasing down dreams just like we were.

The Gear

Let’s talk tech.

We found phones that could store a shared voicemail and transfer calls (fancy!). We bought a combo printer/copier/fax machine and a cabinet to hold it all.

But the real splurge? Our very first company computers. William was the only one who had ever owned a computer—it’s how we wrote our business plan in the first place—but none of the rest of us had ever been the grown-ups to purchase our own before. And we knew exactly what we wanted:

Three upgraded versions of the Power Macintosh 6100/66:

66 MHz PowerPC 601 processors
16 MB of RAM
500 MB hard drives
2X CD-ROM drives

We were 100% Apple fans—even during the awkward “clone” era when Steve Jobs had been ousted. (He wouldn’t return until 1997.) Greg and I still use Macs to this day, joined by our Marketing Manager. Most of our team uses Windows now, but hey—we’re flexible.

These Macs were beautiful. They were also painfully slow.

The “Save” command became its own ritual:

For a small file: bathroom break.
For medium files: coffee run.
For large graphics? Save, go home, and hope it was done by morning.

HISTORICAL NOTE

In May 1995, the number of websites worldwide had just crossed 23,000. eBay didn’t exist yet. Amazon had launched—but was still selling only books, and out of Jeff Bezos’ garage. We weren’t late to the party—we were early.

But that was the magic of those early days. Every piece of furniture, every disk, every decision—it all meant something. We were building something from the ground up. And we were just getting started.

WHY IT MATTERED

We didn’t start with sleek tech or startup capital from VCs. We started with family, hand-me-down furniture, and floppy disks. That grounded us. It made us scrappy, grateful, and fiercely determined to make every dollar count.