Being lonely is terrible.
In the moment, there doesn't seem to be any way to fix it. And day by day it builds.
After moving to Iowa, I experienced loneliness for the first time in my life.
I didn't know anyone for a thousand miles. I was working 7 days a week. And winter had just set in.
(If you missed that part of the story, its here)
But I kept working, and we were getting close to launching the website.
We named it BaseballWebTV.com.
It was going to be an online TV channel dedicated to youth baseball and scouting.
Here is what an early version of the website looked like:
The launch was set for one month out. And everyone was excited.
Then our programmer quit.
And back in 2004, losing your programmer was a big deal.
There were maybe 3 other people in a 100 mile radius that were professional programmers using the same tools as we did.
And those people had good jobs already.
So I took a gamble.
I told the bosses at Perfect Game that I had a little programming experience, and that my brother had programming experience.
I left out the fact that my experience was limited to messing around with a TI-83 calculator.
I also left out the fact that my brother had just taken one computer science class in college.
I said we could do it.
And a few days later my brother left school and drove out to Iowa to help launch BaseballWebTV.
But we soon found that this was not going to be easy.
We didn't really know what we were doing.
We were sort of like this guy:
We spent every waking hour in front of the keyboard learning as fast as we could.
And after a month, we had figured out just barely enough to launch the site.
I told everyone at Perfect Game that we were ready.
But two days before we launched Jerry called me into his office.
He had gotten a call from the NCAA.
And they weren't going to let us do the website.
I had moved to Iowa. I had worked every day for a year. I got my brother to quit school and move to Iowa. And it appeared that it was all for nothing.
I'll explain what happened next in the next post.
Also, if you missed the beginning of the story of how we started PosterBurner, it starts here.