Our Baby Has Just Turned 8!

byKyle

2.4M followers

Updated 11 years ago

This is not a post about a baby...well, it kind of is. To set the tone of this post, I want to tell you a story. A personal story to me, and a personal story to Carson.

Back in 2005, Carson and I (independently successful at the time) met up and decided we wanted to go into business together. We independently ran very successful affiliate marketing businesses and we went to the drawing board working to come up with a “business” idea.

If you have ever tried to pull an idea out of thin air, you come up with some bizarre stuff and sometimes useful stuff. Here were some of our ideas.

• A website to change the world of weight loss for the better
• Digital Kiosks in malls that would allow customers to print coupons & find deals for the stores in the mall (our idea was taken quite a few years later)
• A NFC system within grocery stores
• Something called an iPhone (OK, that was made up)
  

Then something came to us…

A site that helped others do what we were doing. It was only natural. We were successful at affiliate marketing, we had both been doing it for 3 years and knew the ins and outs of the industry and the easiest and most effective ways to make money.

How natural!

We figured the starting point of any successful affiliate business was keywords. If you knew keywords, you could tackle any market. Literally (and you still can).

From the "beautiful" office in Carson’s parents basement, I rested my laptop on an extra TV tray Carson had kicking around and we went to work on our project...

Wealthy Affiliate, our baby was officially born. September 10th, 2005 was the day.

Like any brand new business, there was a learning curve. A learning curve not only on how to run a business (we still have lots to learn), but a learning curve on how to work together in a partnership, how to hash out ideas without throwing hissy fits (I still do this lol), and how to go from an idea to a tangible, usable product.

I just want you to take a second and have a really good laugh. Here is the site that we launched in 2005.

We charged $29.99 per month for a keyword list per week. That is what we were. A keyword list site.

People loved our service right from the Start. We were very involved and it wasn’t until months later that we decided we needed to a communication platform, so we launch a forum.

That was a hit.

Then we found that people wanted all sorts of help. Help on topics unrelated to keywords.

We offered support.

Then people wanted training.

We created training.

Then people wanted the WORLD...well, not really, but you know what I am getting at.

Here we sit, 8 years later. 8 years of evolution, millions upon millions invested, a large team working tirelessly behind the scenes, 1,000’s of hours spent hashing out new ideas, failures and successes, and a whole lot of changes on the Internet to make things exciting.

We feel like Wealthy Affiliate has FINALLY arrived...

WA has never been better. WA has never been more active. WA has never had more experts. And WA has never been a place that we are so proud to be apart of and be behind not as the business owners, but members with the community.

But it didn’t come without many failures along the way.

One of the things that we learned very quickly in this industry is that we didn’t want to be like the rest of the industry. We both come from very humble beginnings and we were instantly awakened to the fact that we were surrounded by people that were “shady” and were in the business of taking money for their own gain (scammers).

We were not raised like that and we were not interested in partaking in that. We wanted our service to get better so it would continue to exceed people’s expectations.

We have turned down lots of money over the years because it “didn’t make sense”. We have never compromised the quality of our service or integrity of our ethics for the sake of money. Never have and never will.

We have always learned that YOUR success is our success. If we don’t provide a service that people love and that they see positive results from, there is no point in being in business.

We also learned that we are NEVER 100% content with our service…

If you could listen into one of our daily phone conversations, you would hear something like this...

“This is crap”.

That is one of my favourite things to say about aspects of WA. Carson tends to agree with phrases like “this is absolutely ridiculous, what were we thinking” or “this is embarrassing, it needs to get recycled quick”...and we tend to call things "mud huts" that are not up to our standards.

However, we are proud of what we have accomplished and we have never been more happy with what Wealthy Affiliate is today. We both use WA because we want to use it, enjoy using, and benefit from using it. We build WA not only to benefit the entire community of people, but to benefit us. If we can make something powerful that we will use, then we think that others will use it too.

Although you may really love our service and I hope you do, just do know that we are never going to be content with where we are at because we always have 100’s of ideas for improvement and at any given time we have a lot of things going on in development to improve our service at WA.

We are 100% invested in WA.

We are not going anywhere. We refuse to stay still. We refuse to not evolve. And we will not stop striving for perfection, even though we know it is impossible.

Do we ever have an exciting 8th year in store for you guys and gals! We look forward to working another year with each and every one of you, and from the bottom of our hearts thank you for telling us we are crap when we become complacent, and telling us that we are the best when we do something you appreciate.

Thank you for being part of the community, you are valued by us more than you can imagine. Without you, we are zilch and this is something we absolutely comprehend. Your success is our success.

To an amazing year [grab beer/wine/coffee and toast to 2013/2014],

Kyle & Carson