Not only had my wife given me the encouragement necessary to start a new venture, she led me to my first doable product. Chronologically, this was in the 1995 to 1996 timeframe. We lived in St. Louis, in a small brick house that was built in the 1920s. A small part of the basement was finished and my "office" was set up in the corner.
The nearby wall was a wide closet filled with hand-made shelving. This was Jerilyn's area to store fabric and other materials for her projects, as well as a large stack of magazines for project ideas. It was the stack of magazines that presented the idea.
If she needed information for a certain type of project and remembered seeing something about it in a magazine, she had to dig through the magazines to find it. The solution we came up with was a program that let you enter information about your favorite magazine articles. It was like any simple data entry program you could imagine, maybe a little worse. It solved a problem and it did give me an excellent excuse to buy some third party controls (e.g., sortable grid, incremental search combobox) for Borland Delphi.
It was at this point that I started recognizing the need to provide as much of a packaged product as possible. This meant providing an installer, a help file, and a readme.txt. Having people be able to buy the product was also important so I contracted with a payment processing service. And when the bought the product, I had decided to send them a diskette in the mail. So I put together a simple, labeled diskette containing the required files.
And so MagTrack was born. Mind you, it has no relation to this MagTrack (and neither does what follows).
The name proved to be a small problem later on. Apparently, a guy in the UK had some business named MagTrack and it was showing up in search engines. He requested that I change the name and take my entries off the search engine. For the most part, I ignored his request and he eventually made sure his own company showed up in the search engines.
My means for telling people about MagTrack seemed limited at the time. There were some AOL and Compuserve forums where I posted messages. As far as I can remember, I did not buy any ads, print or Internet. Response was limited, which is not at all surprising. All told, I made about $300 from this venture. Not enough to cover the expenses.
So what was the benefit? This silly little product gave me a taste for what it was like to make something and sell it. I had put together an actual product. I had done what I had read about. I had gotten started.