Where It All Started
I’ve acquired weblabs.com. It’s the agency where I got my start in the web design game.
My step-father, Greg Koski, was a polymer engineer and owned a small injection molding company. He was also a huge computer geek and hobbyist. Around 1994, he put the company logo, a gif (hard G, like grape, FTW), on the website. His phone rang off the hook, as they say. Industry people wanted to know how he did it. How did he add an image to a web page?
Greg, being an entrepreneur to his core, kindly let people know he would be happy to help them accomplish the same for a fee. He spun up Worldwide WebLabs, an agency dedicated to the plastics industry. As an aside, this is the same time he founded the industry magazine and community, plastics.com. It was an excellent opportunity to connect and leverage these new industry contacts. With this synergy, WebLabs would quickly become the plastics industry internet agency of choice.
In May 1996, I was only two years removed from my service in the US Army. I was unhappy, struggling with PTSD, and had no prospects that resonated with me as career opportunities. I was bartending and selling cars at a dealership. I enjoyed bartending, but the cars thing was bumming me out. I enrolled in college to spend my Montgomery GI Bill money but was failing and stopped attending. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t have a reason to go. I didn’t have a goal.
Greg offered me an opportunity to be his assistant. It was an excellent opportunity for personal growth. I ensured meetings had water and snacks, and the coffee pot was always fresh and full. My job included email outreach, follow-up calls, CRM management, and cold calling plastics industry contacts and local businesses to tell them about this great new opportunity, the internet.* In 1996, very few businesses had a website.
It wasn’t long before I became curious about websites and how they are made—just a few months. I started spinning up websites to mock current events. Not my proudest moment. But they ranked in AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos right away. Greg asked me to help the guys in the “Lab” since they were swamped. This was the start of my career.
The next few years were a blur of great website projects and ad creative for plastics.com, Mobil, AT&T, BankBoston, Wachusett Mountain Ski Resort, L.B. Evans, Wachusett Brewing, GTE, Underwriters Laboratories, Aubuchon Hardware, Workers’ Credit Union, Du Pont, Directv, and more.
Recently, to say thank you for helping him sell plastics.com,** Greg gave me the WebLabs.com domain. The agency is inactive but has a good backlink profile and 25 years of maturity. I’ll I’ve done is re-platform the site to Squarespace. I’m unsure what to do with it yet, but some ideas are brewing.
* I would be interested in talking to the people who turned me down with some version of “What’s the internet? Son, I don’t need a website.”
** Holler if you are intereted in buying plastics.com.
