Started small, but quickly grew (a lot)
It all started with a lone writer hell-bent on modern advancements for his own business, and nothing on the web helped. When he realized help wasn’t coming, he began to write about this evolution – publicly.
It was a lonely endeavor, because gatekeeping was how businesses survived two decades ago, and unlocking gates was dangerous, but he wanted to help others learn these new tools and new methods in this new era (remember a world when smartphone were truly brand new). On a then little known site called AgentGenius.com (AG), he wanted to reach an audience who understood that technology had well surpassed so many industries he loved.
But we didn’t do it alone
The audience began to grow quickly because there were thousands of silent people thirsting for the very info he was sharing, and he recruited dozens to come write to share their own passion for growth. Suddenly, the bar to entry was gone.
Many of our original editorialists used AG as a springboard for becoming industry influencers (long before the phrase was widely adopted). Back then, knowledge sharing wasn’t viewed as a monetization stream, just a sharing of information to help one another to advance.
When we started AG, it wasn’t set up to scale as a business, we didn’t know it would explode like it did, and we were bootstrapping that growth – we overcame so many challenges with the help of a handful of friends during that time.
It was never about OUR genius…
We eventually became TheAmericanGenius.com, covering how burgeoning technologies and practices would affect us all. It was never about OUR genius, it was always about our readers’ genius, the people we featured, the breakthroughs we wrote about, the failures and successes of industry, and countless breaking news stories. All of this we did for our readers out of our own pockets.
Now, it’s a news outlet, editorial empire, networking powerhouse, and career lifeline, yet somehow we never sold our soul while building AG for you.
As we celebrate our 20th year, we look back with as much vigor as we look forward. In the earliest days, you knew us as Agent Genius and we were wholly unstructured with dozens of writers from around the nation, shooting from the hip. While we’re more tailored in our 20th year (and we’re following all of the rules to keep us compliant with Google News), we’re still proud to cover the future of work, entrepreneurship, tech, and the “wait, is this legal?” side of innovation.
We passed up several buyout offers and made it through two (maybe three) recessions, pivots, new platforms, and actual geniuses. And we’re still here.
What’s next?
This isn’t a self-congratulatory post, friends, this is your formal invite to be part of what’s next.
While others on the internet were bloviating and arguing, we were quietly building. We’re rolling out a total site overhaul for a cleaner, faster, meatier, smarter reader experience, and each piece is built on 20 years of lessons learned.
