The Marketplace is under renovation. Thank you for your patience.
Behind The Firm List Blog
Memories & Babies
No, Annalisa and I are not having a kid. But my best friend Tori is. She's in the hospital where
they are inducing labor.
Why do I mention this (besides it being a very important moment in her life and that she is very important to me)? I mention it
because it reminded me of when I started a rather website. Tori and I were roommates in Tacoma, WA when I came up with the idea
for a website that would become a valuable resource to people from around the world.
I spent lots of long hours doing resource, building the site, pouring in as many listings as possible. It started fairly small.
It was just another site off of electricalsocket.com. It was an undertaking that I was grossly unprepared for, in the scope of what
it became, but at that time, there really wasn't any glimpse in my mind that it would grow to an audience of 2.5 million hits a
month. I never figured I would have people from all over the world emailing me.
Perhaps you thought I was talking about The Firm List, but I am not. Could have. Almost the same situation. But no, The Firm List
was not the first large global resource I built. In September 1996 I started a site called The New Baby Name Index. It grew out of
an interest I have in words. I created a site which had nearly 10,000 names with thousands more being submitted by the users from
around the world.
Unfortunately, by about 1998, I had little or no time to spend on NBNI. The Firm List was a large reason for this loss of time &
focus on NBNI. Part of that was I really had nothing in common with the flood of new parents looking to share the joy of their newborn.
It was no longer about the words, it was about the names.
So sadly, I let the site linger. It was/is still used extensively, but I never had the chance/energy to add the thousands of names,
respond to the hundreds of emails, etc.
Just recently, I debated shutting the site down, but at that time, a friend of mine offered to take it over for me. I was happy
to pass it on to someone who wanted to maintain it, but at the same time, it was sad. Even though I haven't done much with it over
the last couple years, it's still my baby. I spent a lot of time and effort on it. I had a lot of plans for it. Once you transfer
control, you have to give up all that. I still play an advisory role, but I am no longer making the decisions, writing the code, etc.
And it has me thinking about The Firm List, with inquiries from people asking to buy it, with periods of time when I feel swamped by
it, I wonder how long I will be able to manage it all by myself.
But do not despair, I have no immediate plans to transfer this site to anyone else. This is still my baby and I have a lot of plans
for it.
