How a fledgling freelance journalist almost accidentally invented metabrowsing when he was looking for a way to spend more time at the beach.

riginally I did not intend Quickbrowse to be a business at all. I created it to make my own daily workload more efficient - so I could spend more time on the beach.

Marc back when he used to write code on the beach. Now there's hardly time for that anymore... (Click here for a high resolution version for print reproduction)

Living in Miami's South Beach as a freelance news correspondent for magazines and newspapers back in my native Germany, my specialty used to be writing about human-interest and Internet-related issues and doing interviews with interesting people (click here to visit my former journalist web site or read a transcript of my interview with Gloria Estefan :-). I love interviewing people.

At any rate, looking for interesting stories to report home, I would spend two hours, visiting the same 20 or so US newspaper sites every single day. Lots of tedious clicking and waiting. It occurred to me that scanning all these papers could be accelerated greatly by stitching them together inside a single web page.

One could then scroll in one fell swoop from top to bottom. When (to my surprise) I didn't find a tool that did exactly this, I created it myself (I knew some programming ever since I learned playing with Apple IIs back in 1983 during my exchange student year at a High School in New Jersey).

Anyway, I wrote the code and started using the program. It cut down my daily research chore from 2 hours to 20 minutes. It actually enabled me do some scoops, picking up on interesting stories in local US papers before the big news wires would. Less time surfing the web. More time for surfing on the beach :-)

I had written Quickbrowse (which at that point didn't have its name yet) in the programming language PERL which meant that I had to host it on a web server. That made it accessible to anybody on the Web. When I mentioned Quickbrowse to some journalists colleagues on an Internet mailing list, I quickly received some positive feedback. Obviously, the program was saving them a lot of time as well.

n March 1, 1999, someone in Thailand sent me an email telling me that the Bangkok Post had written a little review about my program, making it their "Web Site of the Week." Boy, was I thrilled (and thankful to the writer, Tony Waltham, whom I had never had contact with before).

From there things just kept happening: having grown ever more excited about my little baby (which until that point was hosted under my family's domain at www.fest.net), I started looking for a name. Most suitable domains, like "quickscan.com" were taken, but then I found "quickbrowse.com".

Andrew Tobias

At that point I told Andrew Tobias, who is a friend of my better half David's and mine, about Quickbrowse. Andy, who is a well-known finance writer immediately said "Can I have a stake in this" which really surprised me because back then I was still viewing Quickbrowse as nothing more than something useful I had created for myself. Well, David and I made Andy an equal partner and with his guidance things progressed rapidly: Quickbrowse.com became a Limited Liability Company, we filed for a patent and I started working on making Quickbrowse easier to use.

Until December 99, Quickbrowse pretty much has remained a one-man show, with Andy and David being great advisers. Almost not a day went past without them feeding me ideas: "Change the color of this." "Move that button here."

All of us, Andy, David and I, were definitely having a very good time with this. Calling ourselves the "three musketeers" we would remind one another that all this would most likely amount to nothing, to then indulge ourselves in daydreams of what it would be like to sell Quickbrowse for a lot of money (remember, that was before the Internet craze imploded in April 2000).

Quickbrowse and the Press

The formidable Quickbrowse Team: Marc Fest, Jason Alphonse, and Brett Scheiner. Jason wrote practically every single line of Quickbrowse and is the genius behind its software artistry.

For some reason, Quickbrowse has been getting a lot of very wonderful press. The Christian Science Monitor compared it, somewhat light-heartedly I would say, with the invention of the light bulb. Publications like the Irish Times, US News and World Report and Playboy Magazine raved about it. The Internet business magazine Red Herring did two stories about Quickbrowse and called it "good acquisition bait". Yahoo Internet Life called, saying they wanted to include me in a story about "Internet millionaires". I felt flattered but had to say that I was far from being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, Quickbrowse had only cost me money. Three days later the Yahoo writer called back saying the editor still wanted to include Quickbrowse in the story. Yahoo Internet Life sent a photographer who spent 4 hours taking pictures of me against the backdrop of the Art Deco buildings here in South Beach. I started to feel like I was having my 15 minutes of fame ;-)

More stories followed, ranging from the New York Times to Time.com. I was especially thrilled when the venerable Walt Mossberg declared Quickbrowse his "favorite metabrowser" in his famous "On Technology" column in the Wall Street Journal edition of May 18, 2000. By the end of the year 2000, Quickbrowse had been written up in more than 80 news stories. And here's how much money we spent on public relations: zero Dollars.

Early in the year 2000, investors were calling and emailing me on a daily basis. To most of them I had to say "thank you very much, but according to US securities laws you have to be a millionaire in order for me to be able to accept your money." With the .com-craze at full flare, a lot of people with only modest means called, hoping to get a slice of the Get-rich-through-the-Internet pie.

However, among the calls there were some very potent people and groups. Several of them actually made the effort of flying down here to South Beach to meet. For all of these offers to invest millions of dollars, trust me, they wanted a big slice of Quickbrowse plus all kinds of other controls. Remember, with Quickbrowse having evolved sort of backward (starting with a product and not with a business idea) I still did not even have a business plan. Let alone a management team with a CEO who can talk the language of venture capitalist people.

Read more about David Bohnett on his VC company's Web site.

In February 2000, Geocities.com Founder David Bohnett bought a sizable stake in Quickbrowse (his company Geocities.com was sold to Yahoo in 1999 for almost $4 Billion). Having David on board as an investor and adviser makes all the difference in the world, of course. Working together with him is great and I couldn't be more thrilled.

We soon assembled a little dream team. Especially Jason Alphonse became a major asset because he re-wrote the Quickbrowse.com code from the bottom up, taking what was the equivalent of a junky old VW and turning it into what now hums along like a brand-new porsche.

After the dotcom shakeout

When the big .com shakeout started in the second half of 2000, we saw Internet startups like Quickbrowse going out of business left and right. Despite this bloodbath we managed to initiate another round of (small) funding at the end of 2000. I think what attracted investors was the fact that we still are a relatively inexpensive operation (only 3 full-time employees; and remember, we received all our press with a $0-PR budget); another factor was that reviewers consistently awarded us higher marks than our competitors, Onepage and Octopus (even though they dwarf us with many times more in funding). Most important, though, we refined our business plan when it became clear that there was not much money to be made with advertising banners and the like. We now focus on developing licensable applications that are based on Quickbrowse technology. Take the New York New Media Association's online jobs board as an example. NYNMA uses Quickbrowse technology to offer users a more efficient way of navigating search results. Another example for how Quickbrowse technology makes other sites more useful is our own qbSearch.com. Go there and see how Quickbrowse dramatically improves using your favorite search engines.

Jim Halperin

One of the investors that came on board in this latest round is Jim Halperin. An extremeley accomplished business man, he co-founded the biggest rare coin dealership in the world (heritagecoins.com); Jim is also the author of a book that profoundly impacted me long before I met him and long before he became involved with Quickbrowse. The title of the book is "The First Immortal": it's the fascinating saga of a family in a time where technology unlocks the secret of immortality. The book literally changed my thinking about the future of life (pretty fundamental, wouldn't you say). So I'm doubly thrilled about having Jim on board.

Isn't it funny that a whole new category of web services called "metabrowsing" got started because a fledgling freelance writer was looking for a way to spend more time at the beach? The one ironic thing is that I now hardly have time for the beach at all anymore, because of working on Quickbrowse all the time. But I love knowing that so many people value Quickbrowse (click here to read 1001 user testimonials ;-)

Post-post dotcom crash update (January 2002)
Quickbrowse is still up. As a matter of fact, we're the only metabrowser that's still around. Octopus.com, backed by tens of millions of dollars and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, recently closed shop. The other biggie, Onepage.com, backed by equally much money and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has stopped offering Web-based metabrowsing services. All other metabrowsing outfits like Calltheshots, iHarvest, dodots, Katiesoft -- all gone. We're not gleeful. We're not gloating. A lot has been built, a lot has vanished. That's always sad to see. Also, we didn't survive because we were so incredibly smart. We're still here because we had to stay small. We never had a chance to make the mistakes those made who came onto the scene after we were the first ones to debut with web-based metabrowsing in 1999. I'm not sure we could have avoided their fate - had we been given millions like them... Anyway. We were the only one in the beginning -- and now we're the only one again. Despite always having been the smallest one. So remember, being small can save your life. And please tell your friends that www.quickbrowse.com is the only place to go if they would like to cut down the time for their daily online regimen by combining multiple pages into a single page. We're determined to stick around. And we're still having a great time, by the way. After all, the beach is still just around the corner. And if you're lucky enough to be at the beach, you're lucky enough (click here for more on this ;-)

Come back here in the future to see how the saga continues.

Best,



Marc Fest
Founder, Quickbrowse.com, Inc.
Email Marc
January 2002