My Entrepreneurial Ack! Story (Part 4)

Parts 1, 2, and 3 outlined quite a few Ack! moments in my life... most of them lonely epiphanies; lonely bus rides, lonely reading, lonely thinking and lonely struggling to make ends meet. That was all about to change.
When I originally learned what a Content Management System was in 2004, I did a lot of searching.  I wanted my own CMS and while Rob Place and I had one for storefronts, we still hadn't developed something for creating dynamic navigation and pages (that would soon come). So I turned to the web. A search for "CMS" led to the likes of James Robertson of Step Two, Carmine Porco, then at Prescient Digital in Toronto.  Both of these gentlemen were producing articles that were ranking well.  I called up Carmine Porco and told him I was starting a tech firm offering CMS and he was very encouraging, welcomed me to the eco-system and said he was from Prince Edward Island... ah, us good ol' maritimers know how to get along!   He said Prescient was tech-agnostic, in that they did not in fact have a preference of CMS ... so I suggested that they reach out to me as I would be happy to support their initiatives (they were only consulting and very rarely implemented).  I also asked if I could post copies of his CMS articles on my own site and reference them.  "No problem Giff. Thanks for asking"  Ack!
The other result that came up for a Google search for "CMS" was, of course... Wikipedia.
Wikipedia... oh how I would get mad on Wikipedia.  I thought it was my God-given right to post at the bottom of this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system, links to five articles that were housed on my own site:

Articles About CMS and Web Portals

• What is a C.M.S?
• What is a Portal?
• Do You Need CMS?
• Want to Buy a CMS?
• Choosing the Right CMS
• CMS or WebPortal Software?

Every night I would post those links on Wikipedia... and every morning... someone would remove them, citing that I was attempting to advertise AWF.  I was convinced I was attempting to educate people.  Back and forth for months, I'd add the article links... and they would be removed.  I got madder and madder... more and more stubborn, until there was actually a group of people who were against me.  Ack!  But I didn't stop (I was getting around 30,000 hits a month to my website).  Then one day, I received an email from a guy in Germany who said, "Dear Mr. Watkins... are you aware that someone in your organization is persistently posting CMS articles linking directly to your site?  This person is in violation of blah, blah, blah... etc."  So I emailed back and said that I was not aware of this activity, that I would discover who the culprit is and put a stop to it.  I said out loud to myself, "Okay Gifford... no more posting the articles on Wikipedia.  It wasn't a week later however that I received another email from the same man; "Dear Mr. Watkins... there is a non-profit organization called "Overseas Vote Foundation" that has just lost their main programmer in a contract dispute.  I'm not sure if you would like to help them, but they are in dire need."  I contacted the executive director and quickly learned that yes indeed, they were in trouble... it was ten weeks before the mid-term American elections and they had over one hundred domain names pointing no where. Sam and I had servers in his basement in Nova Scotia, we continued to service our clients and build back-end applications, but I had gone off and conducted yet another world-wide search for another hoster and project manager.  It was during this search that I contacted a DotNetNuke firm in the Ukraine (DNN Masters) and asked Chris Klezneski about hosting.  Chris told me that a guy named Mark Saunders hosted their stuff.  Within minutes my phone rang and Mark Saunders introduced himself to me.  Mark was half Canadian and half American and so I now had DNN servers in Canada... and in the United States. Plus Mark I would soon discover, was not only a fantastic server administrator, but would become one of my closest and dearest friends.  After being informed the Overseas Vote Foundation was in jeopardy, I called up Mark and said, "Hey man... there's a non-profit organization in trouble.  Since you are an American I thought you might like to help them, they have no money, we'd be doing the work pro bono... with a chance that we could be compensated down the road."  Mark said he was onboard, so we called up the director Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat and told her we'd love to help and what did they have, if anything, of the old site that was shut down.  All they had was a screenshot and a flat file of over 7000 local election officials.  Ack! Within a few days we had them up and running. I built the front end, and Mark built the back-end, a module that would allow folks from all over the world to get in contact with their location election officials so they could vote.  Without the system in place, over 7 million Americans world-wide might not be eligible voters.
We were soon getting email from people from all over the world, thanking us.  Soldiers in Iraq, diplomats and embassy workers... our work was reported by newspapers and radio stations.  
In the interviews I didn't mention we used DotNetNuke.  And it was brought to the attention of Shaun Walker, who sent me an email to the effect; "Dear Mr. Watkins, many DNN Community members are upset because you did not give credit to DotNetNuke... blah-blah... you should be more vocal about DNN... blah blah..." and that got me thinking... maybe I should... just maybe I should.  Ack! If I was going to go "public" about DotNetNuke... I needed first to determine if the creators of DNN were committed, moral, and most important of all, going to be around for a long, long time.  I wasn't going to commit to DNN, until I was certain DNN was good, right, and true... and more important to me; I was not going to be affiliate myself with people I knew nothing about.

My next step would involve some traveling... to meet Brian Scarbeau, the first DNN user group founder in Orlando.  If the founder of a DNN user group could convince me that I should be more open about DotNetNuke, I would consider it.  Ack! To be continued.