That was totally me in 2004. And I was so frustrated that I couldn't find anything industry or outside the industry developers that could help me, that I said, “Alright, well, how hard can it be to build my own?” Okay. And you're laughing, you're laughing and I should be crying to be quite honest. And any people who are listening to this who have also said the same thing, they may be crying too, because listen, if you're an entrepreneur problem-solving kind of person that's the kind of attitude that you have now. I had some technical experience getting into this. We had a pretty progressive website, I did have a creative designer and a developer that were on contract up until that point because we were starting to make some inroads into the technology and eCommerce space at Right Sleeve at the time. So it wasn't completely intimidating to me. So I made the decision largely out of ignorance and also out of extreme frustration because if you think about it Marshall, I was literally standing at a crossroads. I was like, I could be a million-dollar distributor and make good money doing that, and that's going to be my career and I'm just going to stay at a million and I'm going to be happy with that. Or I'm going to have to go down this other path where I'm going to have to invest in order to take the business to the next level. I made the latter decision because I worried that I would just get bored if I was just capped out at this particular sales volume as, a 25-year-old, right? Marshall Atkinson It's the quandary versus conundrum that Seth Godin writes about all the time.
Mark Graham Yes, absolutely.
And he's a mutual hero of both of ours,I know. But I think that this is a real challenge in entrepreneurship. And to be clear, I don't think either of us is making a judgment to the person who decides that they just want to stay at a certain sales volume versus the person who makes the decision to invest in the business. Anyways, I chose to invest in the business. And ultimately built this piece of software to the specification that I just mentioned. eCommerce capabilities, one system to manage the presentation all the way to the invoice without having to duplicate information, and all completely within the cloud. So I didn't need those expensive and clunky servers that I just felt were like old school. Marshall Atkinson Was your intent to build this just for your company? Or was your intent “Hey, I can build this and I can sell it to other people?” Mark Graham So remember I use the word ignorance, naive. When I started talking about this, which I actually say jokingly was probably an asset, to be honest with you. So I think the quick answer to the question of Marshall is that no, I didn't think that there would be a commercial opportunity.
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