When Mark Cappitella got disgusted with being a stock broker, he convinced his family that he would go insane if he did not start the business he had always wanted to do...making jigsaw puzzles. Of course, the jigsaw puzzles that he created were hand carved, custom designed, and of museum quality. And they sold in the price range of $100 to $50,000. In 1998, he bought a computer for his house in the Connecticut River Valley, and started to put up his web page.
As he explains it in an email "I didn't know a thing about the net but I knew puzzles and so I treated it like a puzzle" (E-Mail response). He launched his first web page on June 12, 1998, and got his first hit four months later. He quickly answered the Email from the customer and was depressed to find out that the person wanted to sell him something. In October, 1998, he went to an Internet Seminar in New York and that was where he learned about Search Engines and Meta Tags. After the seminar, he went home and redid his web page to the form that is reproduced here ((E-Mail response).