In
2005, video and the Internet were finally converging. As an entrepreneur, naturally I wanted in.
One day I was driving in Ossining and noticed that every house on one
particular street had satellite dishes on their roofs. I thought about
those local government board meetings you see on public access TV. I
figured the people who have satellite dishes don't get to see these
board meetings, because they probably didn't have cable TV.
I met up with our Town
Supervisor and told him about the problem. Then I asked him if the Town
would pay me if I figured out how to webcast the meetings live on the
Internet and archive them as well. He said they would pay me $200 per
month. I leased a server for $109/month and asked a few friends who
were both way smarter than me to help get it setup. So with a $109
charge to a credit card, I started a business that was profitable from day 1. Perhaps it's true that you need money to make money, but it doesn't have to be your money.
In
2007 I decided that this small webcasting service I was operating
needed a better name than "Mike Pollock International, Inc." I found
that Webcasting.com was owned by someone but they weren't using it. I
spoke with the owner and she agreed to take $20,000 for it. The problem
was, I didn't have that kind of cash. I had been using my cash to live
on and build the business. I decided I would use the few thousand I
had and put the rest on a credit card.
Right when we were
about to close the deal, the owner told me she had "spoken with a
lawyer" and he told her the domain name was worth $150k! Not only that,
she wanted another $5k for her lawyer. So she went from $20k to $155k,
just like that! I still thought the domain was well worth $155k, so I
started thinking about how I could pull this off. I worked hard and engineered the following deal:
- I put $15k on my credit card.
- I worked out a deal with a former colleague. He lent me $50k @ 12% for 12 months and he got the right to take the domain if I missed a payment.
- I convinced the owner to agree to take a $90k mortgage for the remainder, payable over 60 months.
In 2010, I had about 60 clients, mostly government agencies and a few corporations, including Coca-Cola. The business was doing well - perhaps too well. It was good money but I felt like I was needed to get back to my roots. I needed to start another business. I couldn't do both at the same time so I decided to sell the company. In the end, I sold Webcasting.com to Grancius, the largest provider of webcasting services to the government sector by client base in the country.
The domain name was not part of the deal when Granicus bought Webcasting.com, Inc. The domain brings in mostly corporate leads, not government, so it made sense for it to not be part of the deal. I still own it and may start another business on it or sell it.
