Twenty-five years ago today, James Okomboli Ong’ong’a launched www.middkid.com. He built middkid.com using Microsoft’s Front Page and FTP’d files from his computer at Middlebury College to a server at Burlee.com in South Burlington, Vermont. With just a few clicks on a keyboard, a bunch of packets were transmitted through phone lines, and the company that would become Union Street Media was born.    

Middlebury College, which I love dearly, had a terrible website in 1999. You couldn’t easily find anything you were looking for, from dinner menus to course registration. I had heard of the concept of a “for students, by students,” website at another school and felt that Middlebury should have one, too. Naturally, it would be called middkid.com (if one has the incredible privilege of attending Middlebury College, they’re known as a “Middkid”). 

I spent the summer of ‘99 living on campus working for the Middlebury College Admissions Office, leading tours, and doing interviews of prospective students. At my father’s suggestion, I wrote up a five-page outline of what would appear on Middkid.com and why the college needed a website like it. I scheduled a meeting with the then Provost of the College. He read the first page of my printed write-up on Middkid.com, skimmed the second, and didn’t even look at pages three, four, and five. With a flick of the wrist, he threw the paper on his desk, reached back to grab the college handbook, and said, “Let me tell you why you can’t do this.” The Provost had received “coal” from the Middlebury Campus editorial board on multiple occasions in their annual Faculty Christmas List, so I can’t say I was entirely surprised by his reaction.  

I left the meeting dejected, thinking my idea was dead, and called my father to report the news.  Au contraire! “Now you know why you want to be a businessman, not a bureaucrat,” he told me.  

I received similar encouragement from Michael Claudon, my economics professor, who had launched the Middlebury Entrepreneurs Club the previous year. Michael hosted an event with Vermont entrepreneurs, Lawrence Miller, then of Otter Creek Brewing, and Fred & Judi Danforth of Danforth Pewter. I left that meeting thinking I could start a company. 

There was one very big problem, though. I knew absolutely nothing about websites and the internet. As just one example, I did not even understand the concept of hosting, i.e., how a website went from “someone’s computer” to being seen by anyone worldwide. Shot down by the college, my business was about to fail and I hadn’t even started it yet.  

Enter Okomboli, as he was known at Middlebury College. The Vice President of the student body and one of the best rugby players on campus; he has a magnetic personality that brings up everyone around him. He worked at the computer help desk in Voter Hall at Middlebury –  which was one of the few air-conditioned buildings. During the Vermont winter, students learned to walk across campus by going through as many heated buildings as possible. I took a similar approach later during a hot August week and found him at the help desk. I shared with him my five-page printout on Middkid.com. He read it word for word, looked up at me, and said in his charming Kenyan accent, “Ted, we’ll have some fun with this.”

Oh was he right! We had a lot of fun with it –  in no small part because Middlebury College didn’t know what to do with us. It was 1999 and the world hadn’t really figured out how to handle the Internet.

At one point, the Middlebury College administration went to Okomboli to say he was, “linking to the college’s website without their permission” (a college handbook violation). They threatened to shut us down. We got out of that one by asking, “If Yahoo! is allowed to do so, why can’t we do it?”

We launched a business directory to help connect Middlebury students with the town. I would sell local businesses a profile, which was essentially an enhanced listing on Middkid.com for $140. I promised the first place I walked into, Green Peppers Pizza, that we would put their menu online so all the students could see it. Mark Perrin, the owner, said, “I’ll take two profiles.  One for my pizza restaurant and one for my goat farm.”  A few months later we had over two dozen businesses that “kept this site alive,” and $3,000 in revenue.

While we were regularly getting 10% of the student body checking the site daily, we went viral (before the word had an internet meaning) with the launch of our course evaluations.  

Course evaluations were one of the primary factors in determining if a faculty member got tenure at Middlebury. Each semester, students would complete handwritten course evaluations on the last day of class. Two students would walk the evaluations to Old Chapel where they were handed to the Dean of Academics (who supposedly read all 8,000 of them). They were then distributed to each department chair (who supposedly read all of them for their department) and they were then distributed to the professor (who supposedly read all of them). Who didn’t get to read any of the reviews? The Middlebury College students.

One of my professors, who was the tenured Chair of the Department, regularly showed up to class 10 to 15 minutes late. While this was common knowledge amongst students, the only person who might also have read about this was the Dean of Academics (if they got through all 8000 reviews). What happened when we put the course catalog on Middkid.com, let students write reviews, and let other students read them? We codified what was already word of mouth on campus. We also got an “invitation” to the Dean of Academics office where we found out they were talking to the Middlebury College lawyer about us. 

During my final January at Middlebury College (a magical one-month semester known as “J-Term”), I completed my thesis between the hours of 9 pm and 2 am in the library. The French Role in the Iraqi Crisis (of the early 90’s) earned me an A-. One of my two thesis advisors that year was up for tenure and seemed to show more interest in his reviews on Middkid.com than the 120 pages I wrote. How could I blame him? One document was a compilation of “12 ten-page papers,” and the other would have a massive impact on his life.   

After graduating, I attempted to take my real thesis on the road. We tried creating “for students, by students” websites at college campuses throughout the northeast (plus Davidson College in North Carolina, which my brother attended). The sites were supposed to be “kept alive” by the local business communities in each college town. I looked for one student who could do it all (sell local businesses, manage the site, and market it on campus).  

I found out pretty quickly that lightning can’t be caught in a bottle twice. It turned out that Middlebury, Vermont was the perfect-sized market – just enough businesses that students had choices and a small enough town that the businesses needed student dollars. As a founder, I was way more motivated than the students we recruited. Most of all, it was the very early 2000s and businesses needed websites of their own, not a web page on a college site geared toward students. So, we did what most companies do in their early years; we pivoted to building websites for anyone.

The story of how we got from pizza restaurant websites to being real estate’s most trusted digital marketing company is a story unto itself, just with fewer college hijinks. I’ll spare you the narrative. If you’ve gotten this far, you must love How I Built It stories or are probably related to me. Suffice it to say that I took to heart Bo Peabody’s ethos that entrepreneurship is about “making serendipity happen.”  

Looking back, it seems incredible to me that it actually worked out. There were so many times it could have ended differently. And, like most entrepreneurial ventures, Union Street Media was much more likely to fail than succeed. According to the Pew Research Center, only 15% of businesses make it to their 25th birthday. If you look at our total employees and revenue, the number of companies that reach the hattrick we have achieved is less than 1% (and I’ll share in future posts a few reasons why we did. Spoiler alert: the people). 

Still, it’s hard to believe that my “corporate child” is now 25. If Union Street Media was a human, it could now rent a car without paying an underage driver premium and this time next year, it would no longer be covered under my health insurance. After 26, there aren’t too many milestones where you get something that was previously inaccessible.

So, it’s worth taking a moment to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been part of the ride. Happy Birthday, Union Street Media!