The Early TZ Days, Building Silo Website Structures by Hand

Sometimes you don’t even know how much pain you are in until the pain is removed.

And when you discover how good the "absence of pain" feels, you generally want even more relief. 

The Theme Zoom Story

So in order to remove even more pain, I groveled on my hands and knees until my two super-genius programmer friends took pity on me and agreed to help me. (They probably only agreed to writing the code for Theme Zoom in order to get me to shut up.)

When Sue Bell and Conan Mishler agreed to take their multimillion dollar programming skills to the bank, we set up an LLC and got to work.

Market Research Driven Keyword Research

During the early months of development the "proof-of-concept-slogan" tossed around our little make-shift office was "market-research-driven-keyword-research".

When Sue designs software, she doesn't settle for small.

As I watched Sue and Conan develop the software spec, it became clear that they were designing- the ultimate PPC Silo Mapping, vertical market website blueprint building technology.

Clearly nothing like it had ever been created before.

The code-name we used for our “all singing, all dancing research-to-web system was “The Perpetual Keyword Motion Machine.” Here is an early video spec of the PKMM system that is now very near completion.

With our “evil” plan in place, the programmers sat down to work, and I set about the tasks of running a business. 

Little did I know that my painful experiences had only begun!

If You Build It (to ease their pain) they Will Come

Starting a company can be a painful experience at first- especially when you are attempting something that has not been done before. 

We actually got customers!

The customers told me how confused they were about everything.

But mostly they were confused about everything all at once!

This confusion was understandable.

The marketplace was saturated with contradictory information about LSI, co-occurrence, authority websites, AdSense Google slaps and a myriad of other distracting things.

Furthermore, silo websites architecture was still a new idea.  Explaining how to do this properly, even with diagrams, was not an easy job. 

We ended up writing an e-book “What the Heck is a Silo” in an attempt to provide a blueprint on how to structure your site, but many were still confused. (Much of this early e-book is now included inside of this one)

You see, with the early versions of Theme Zoom it was not possible to click a button and instantly publish your vertical market keyword blueprint to a completed website.

silo publisher and theme zoom integration video demo

We had not yet seamlessly integrated site builders like Drupal or SiloPublisher ™ into the keyword research side of the Theme Zoom application.

Additionally, we had not allowed third party developers, like ThemeMatic ™ to integrate seamlessly with our API. 

This is because we had not yet developed an API. (Application Program Interface)

Conan (a.k.a I just write the code) was programming this gigantic software all by himself, and he had to move one step at a time.

Nothing had ever been developed like this before, and everything was glued together with duct tape and string. Each day I asked him for a new features that should have been implemented just before the features he had just coded the day before. Its a wonder he didn't go crazy, and some of us think he did. I am told he had more fun than he ever could have when he was working at Sun Micro systems.

I look back and laugh at how insane and non-linear the development of the tool actually was, and how much patience Conan had throughout the process.

The students and customers who supported us during the first year were huge fans, and they knew we were onto something. They just couldn't quite put their finger on it or figure out what it was.

They were confused about everything at once, but hung on for dear life in order to experience “the bigger picture”. They were pursuing the same “bigger picture” that drove us to create Theme Zoom in the first place!

We owe much to the patience and dedication of our early users.

The RE-education Problem

This was when I realized how HUGE the scope of Theme Zoom actually was and what a MONSTER of a project educating the masses would be.

We discovered that it would be necessary to embrace the client success business, not just the “software tool” business, if we were going to stay in business.

Summary of Pain #8:

Having to build a website blueprint by hand while attempting to decipher and interpret contradictory SEO information that pervades the web, was a painful experience. (Our early users confirmed this)