How my email marketing journey started… all the way back to 1994! (Part 1)
It’s 1994 and I start my first year at LSU (Geaux Tigers!) majoring in… PRE-LAW! Say what? When I realized all the books I had to read… I said forget it! I then moved on to International Business. I mean, I like business and money and thought this would be a good fit. WRONG! When I found out I had to take 9 economic classes, I thought… NEXT!
Well, a new major had started called MIS (Management Information Systems). All I knew about it was that it was about computers. I never owned a computer but I had used them at my high school library and enjoyed them so I said, why not give this is a try?
And so my journey into technology began in a very unexpected way. I wasn’t one of those people that knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I was told that I was good at arguing, so I would be a good lawyer. It wasn’t something I was passionate about but I gave it a shot and found out rather quickly that is wasn’t my calling.
As I began to take courses in MIS, I started to enjoy most of my classes but the one class that I loved the mostest was… HTML. Back then, there was no HTML editors like DreamWeaver. There was Notepad. A blank page starting at me. The first thing I learned to code was Hello world!
<html>
<body>
Hello world!
</body>
</html>
I was mesmerized by how I could turn words into something completely different. I can make them different colors, different styles and turn them into something visual and interactive. A whole new world opened up for me.
I finally graduated in the summer of 1998. My parents were happy that I was graduating but they had no idea what I graduated in. My dad thought I repaired computers and my mom told everyone I worked with computers. It was quite amusing.
I moved back to Miami and my journey from MIS to email marketing began. My first job was a small startup called Globalis founded by two brothers that had worked at Apple. I began as an HTML developer. I worked with FileMaker Pro and GoLive on a Mac. My first project was to create a website for the City of Coral Gables, www.citybeautiful.net.
From there, the .COM boom was in full swing and I then moved on to Yupi.com, the biggest Latin web portal at that time. I was hired to work on www.mujerfutura.com, which was a website catering to Spanish-speaking women and it focused on beauty, cooking and lifestyle. Unfortunately, the .COM crashed in 1999 and 66% of the company was laid off. I was lucky enough to stay but I knew that I had to move on before I was let go too!
I was told by my best friend that Univision was looking for developers for Univision.com. So I quit Yupi and was hired by Univision as a Content Administrator/HTML Developer. This is where I was introduced to the wonderful world of email marketing.
If you read this far, you are a trooper! I will be posting about the rest of my journey into email marketing in my next blog post.
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All the best!
@lex@ndr@