I haven't blogged about this yet, but thought it was about time. About 6 months ago, Tony and I decided to take the "macsupport.com" domain name he owned and form a new company, creatively titled "MacSupport.com". He says it was my idea, although I don't remember specifically. I'll take credit if it's offered because, even if we fail, I think it's a good idea.
With a loan from his dad (thank you Tony Ricciardi, Sr.!), we founded the company as 50-50 partnership. We lucked into finding a brilliant web developer, Francis, to create our site and ecommerce system, and, after finding a nice space on 7th avenue right near Penn Station hired a terrific young, eager first employee, Liam.
I've never been a "boss." I've been an employee and a consultant, but i've never had "staff." I realize that one of the things that I didn't expect to feel with "staff" is proud. Proud that i'm paying them to work for me. I think that feeling goes across the board for Macsupport.com, actually. I look around our small office and can say "this place is mine." That's a GOOD feeling. It's a SCARY feeling, but it's a good one. Knowing that if I (or Tony) don't do the work, it simply won't get done has kept me on edge for months now, and much more so since we went live, November 6th, 2009. It turns out that all of the complexity of getting a company up and running is nothing compared to getting people to come give us money. Although I KNOW we offer a great service, at what I think is a pretty good value, advertising is not something i knew, or really know, anything about. However, hiring a firm, or even a person, to do the advertising for us is really out of the question financially. It's us or nothing.
We've made some spending mistakes, to be sure, but I think we're making some progress. The questions seems to be: Can we survive long enough for people to know we're available? I hope so, because even though it's a lot of work, I'm really enjoying being an integral part of the team that makes it grow.
So, without further ado, tell everyone you know that uses a Macintosh to head over to www.macsupport.com and buy an incident and use our service. We'll help you. It's what we do.
Leave a comment