In 1994, when he should have been in class, Aaron spent his days in the University of Victoria library, wrestling with code and making web sites.  The browser of choice was NCSA Mosaic, which would soon change it's name to Netscape.  The web was all text-based, there were no images yet.  In 1998 Aaron finally bid adieu to his day job and went home to mess about with his computer.  It was much more interesting and a fantastic way to lose money.

Thus Wondermill was born.

In 1999 Shannon and Noam signed on and we set out to make history, or some other such thing.  Noam handled the servers, Shannon took care of the newsletters, and Aaron said rather unhelpful things like, "I think we're gonna make it!"

Things were somewhat... disorganized at the beginning.  The first time Shannon was paid she wondered what she'd gotten herself into.  Aaron announced that they would have to find an ATM, and ten minutes later they were sitting in her car outside a 7-Eleven -- Shannon holding her hands out while Aaron counted twenty-dollar bills into them.
Because we started out on credit cards instead of venture capital, we've always been careful with expenses. This served us well during the "dot-com crash" of 2000.  We pulled through, but not without some white-knuckle moments.  At our lowest point we owed over $27,000 in credit card debt. Yikes!

We worked from our homes making fun-oriented websites and publishing several online newsletters.  The advertising market was starting to slip, and we would eventually have to pursue new ventures.

When we decided to stop publishing, our readership had grown to more than 250,000 subscribers.

At this point we were still camped out in Aaron's living room to save money. It was pretty crowded, but it worked out fine.  We had two decent chairs and one that was less-than-comfy.  If you had a good chair and went to get a bite to eat it was surely gone by the time you returned. Our next project was a service that let people tell their friends about sites they like.  We paid the webmasters who used the system, and advertisers paid us to reach that audience.
Along with being late to the game, we were pretty tiny compared to our well-heeled competition. In the graph on the right, we're the little red line at the bottom-right. Things did get better though - as advertising rates continued to fall many webmasters moved over to us because of the customization we offered.

Our little red line has moved upward since this picture was taken, but the graph can't be updated.  Along with many other internet companies, the company that provided the data went out of business that year.