Conception of the Idea

While running a prior business, our CEO and Senior Strategist spent nearly two years as the chapter president of an association of entrepreneurs. In regular interactions with 100 owners of businesses with revenues ranging from $1 million to $400 million , he kept noticing one thing: most saw their online presence as a "black box". Typically, they referred to their website as "something they needed figure out" or a "necessity but not a central part of their business". Amazingly, this included companies in industries which generated a significant portion of their business from their websites.

Through those experiences, the first seeds of the concept that became AftertheNet was formed, with the goal to create a way to more deeply connect business owners and managers to their online presence. The success metric would be whether they could see the parts of their website in the same way they looked at a salesperson or marketing brochure. The question to be asked was: Could any non-technical senior executive look at their website and provide meaningful input and fine tuning ideas?