You’ve Got Mail

It had been almost two months since I shipped seventy-five thousand subscription cards to a factory in Vermont, where they were being shrink-wrapped into PowerBuilder 4.0 boxes. After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

No tracking numbers. No confirmations. Just faith.

* * *

One afternoon in Manhattan, I was walking past a CompUSA when something stopped me cold.

In the front window stood a mountain of PowerBuilder boxes — hundreds of them, stacked floor to ceiling like a monument. That was the official shipping day. The equivalent of an iPhone launch before anyone called it that.

I just stood there, frozen, staring at the boxes.

My cards were inside them.

All of them.

My hands started shaking.

This wasn’t just another software release — it was the release. PowerBuilder was redefining client-server computing, and its newest version was now out in the world, rolling into offices and developer desks everywhere.

And tucked inside every shrink-wrapped box was my subscription card.

Proof that I was somehow part of this moment.

* * *

I wanted desperately to buy one — to tear it open and see it with my own eyes. But the price was nearly $3,000, money I didn’t have.

So instead, I stood there on the sidewalk, staring through the glass, knowing that something extraordinary had already happened.

I didn’t need to open a box to confirm it.

I was in.

* * *

That week, I moved my Macintosh upstairs into my bedroom.

I bought a small foldable table and set it up wherever it would fit — which wasn’t much. Most nights, I sat on the edge of my bed, hunched over the keyboard, laying out the first issue.

It wasn’t glamorous.

But it was mine. Steve Benfield, my editor-in-chief, had selected ten authors and ten articles for the premiere issue. As soon as he accepted a piece, he sent it straight to me.

The files started trickling in one by one.

With each arrival, the magazine began to feel more real.

I settled on a three-column layout in Aldus PageMaker. Each article opened with a half page of breathing room, followed by text set in 11-point Times Roman and headlines in 16-point Arial.

The pages looked fine.

Maybe not perfect — but to my eyes, at two in the morning, sitting on the edge of my bed, they were more than acceptable.

They looked like a real magazine.

On weekends, I’d print the latest pages I’d laid out, tuck them under my arm, and take them with me to the movie theater in Newark.

I’d watch the movie, sure — but mostly I sat there flipping through the pages in the dark, admiring them like they were already published.

I couldn’t help myself.

Holding them in my hands made it all feel real.

One day, in the middle of working on the first issue, I walked outside to check the mail.

Electric bill. Gas bill. My Chase credit card statement. A few pieces of junk mail.

And then something different.

A small note from the post office that read:

Please come to the Jersey City Post Office to pick up mail that did not fit in your mailbox.

Curiosity got the better of me.

I jumped into my beat-up Honda Civic and drove straight to the post office. I handed the slip to the clerk.

She disappeared into the back room.

A moment later, she returned carrying a huge stack of boxes.

They were my subscription cards.

All of them.

Right there on the counter, in front of me, was proof that this wasn’t just an idea anymore.

It was happening.

* * *

I ran home and dumped the pile onto the kitchen table. One by one, I started flipping through the subscription cards.

They were all filled out — names, addresses, credit card numbers, expiration dates. Everything.

This was the early 1990s. There were no fraud alerts. No identity-theft panic. People simply wrote their credit card numbers on a card, dropped it in the mail, and trusted the system.

Trusted me.

* * *

I counted them slowly, afraid I’d misread something.

Five hundred twenty-three subscription cards.

At $119 each. I did the math twice. $62,237.

There it was — spread across my kitchen table.

More money than I’d ever made in one place.

Not from a paycheck. Not from luck.

But because strangers believed enough to pull out their credit cards and mail them to my home address.

I stood there staring at the table, realizing that this wasn’t a side project anymore.

This was a business.

* * *

The next day, it happened again.

Just like Groundhog Day the movie!

Another yellow slip in my mailbox. Another drive to the post office. Another stack of subscription cards waiting behind the counter.

Then it kept repeating — day after day.

* * *

But the piles were getting bigger.

The second day: 769. The third day: 951. The fourth day: 1,110. By the fifth day: 1,432.

I started keeping track because I almost didn’t believe it myself.

By the end of the first week, I had received 4,785 subscription cards.

They kept coming in daily, faster than I could process them — each one filled out by someone I had never met, each one mailed to my home address.

* * *

By the end of that month, the total was well over a thousand subscriptions — most at $119 each, many international at $149.

Developers from around the world were signing up.

Trusting a magazine that hadn’t even printed its first issue yet.

I wasn’t chasing the business anymore.

It was chasing me.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the span of about a month, I had become a paper millionaire — on paper only — thanks to the trust of Powersoft chairman Mitchell Kertzman.

I couldn’t help myself.

I loaded every subscription card into my beat-up Honda Civic and drove them to work like they were a trophy. I showed them to anyone who would look, joking that there was a million dollars sitting in my trunk.

It was absurd.

And I knew it.

But I also knew what it meant. That was the same day Carmen quit her accounting job and moved into my Jersey City townhouse to work out of my home office full time.

At that point, this wasn’t just momentum anymore.

It was commitment.