"with a little help from my friends… "
I used to be a full-time single mom, then a teacher, then a
fundraiser. After a particularly difficult international fundraising job,
I was bushed.
I had a career crisis.
On a visit to my dentist, she took one look at me and handed me
The One Minute Millionaire by Robert Allen and Mark Victor Hansen.
She literally said, “Here, take this, you need it.”
I read the book with skepticism and then one night at 3
a.m. I actually had that aha moment people talk about
and said to myself, “It’s got to be a website which will help bring
family and friends together.”
So the next day, armed with determination, I started taking courses
on the web to learn all I could.
I am not a techie!
A charitable group I was volunteering for got me started
with web help—my technicians were 14 and 15 years old. It
was a challenge working with teenagers because their priorities
were not at all the same as mine as I learned one afternoon.
When they had not met an important deadline I sent off an
email asking, “What’s up?” The reply came back, “We are
sorry we missed the deadline, but we had to see Terminator
Three. We highly recommend it.”
When the site construction proved too difficult a task for them,
a conversation with a young man I had taught in high school
led me to a company who had the ability to build the web machine
I needed.
We were off and running.
Two years later they were bought out by a larger
company who refused to give me my intellectual property.
I was making some money from the site by this time and
I believed in the project enough to take a very deep breath and say,
I won’t sue—I’ll rebuild.
The designer of my daughter’s wedding invitations is my
design consultant.
A woman I met at an Orlando conference has been a steadfast,
long distance friend and has spent hours helping me test the recipe input tools.
When her mom died, she was able to use the site to put down
some of her own memories in a family cookbook, which
helped her through her grief.
Friends introduced me to a printer, who was excited
about the project. Now he just grins every time we sit
down to have a meeting. We have become fast friends.
My original long distance internet coach graduated from college
and ended up at Harvard Divinity School and when I wrote him to proudly
say that the site had been up for two days he sat down and
spent a chunk of time giving me useful input.
People who use the site write me the most beautiful
thank-you letters and I have made friends with so many people
through the internet. I never would have met them otherwise.
I have been so lucky.
So you see – I really did "get by with a little help from my friends". :)
