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A DAY AFTER OUR TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THE STORY OF HOW PWINSIDER.COM CAME TO BE

As many of you know, yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of this website.  I want to take a second to thank everyone who sent along congratulations and also want to thank you for your support all of these years.

A number of folks that found the site well after it started have asked how it came to me.  Below is a reprint of a column that I first posted after we started the site.  It will tell you all you need to know.

DAVE SCHERER SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON PWINSIDER.COM AND HOW WE GOT HERE
by Dave Scherer @ 6:10:00 PM on 2/1/2004

FEBRUARY 1st, OPENING DAY?  HA!
 
Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men.  We here at PWInsider.com are certainly proof that there is truth in that old adage. We were all ready to rock and roll on February 1st when suddenly, our schedule got moved up on us by almost a week!
 
As you all know by now, Buck Woodward, Mike Johnson, Jess McGrath and myself have all left our former online home, 1Wrestling.com, to claim our own little piece of cyberspace here in the land of PWInsider.  I know that a lot of people want all of the juicy details concerning the back story of us leaving (and I have even been sent links to “stories” by some very questionable “sources” guessing as to what happened between us and 1W), but the truth is a lot less interesting than the stories some of these people have made up.  Let’s set the record straight.
 
In a nutshell, what happened was it was time for me to leave 1W.  It had nothing to do with Joey Styles buying controlling interest of 1W from Bob Ryder (a move that has since been cancelled by the twosome), which many less informed “reporters” have guessed was the reason I left.  I was at the site for six and a half years.  I worked very hard there and am proud of the work that I did.  But at the end of the day, I still worked for someone else.  I didn’t have the control to implement full policy.  I didn’t have the power to fix things that I thought weren’t being run the way I would have run them.  In essence, I was just an employee, running someone else’s company.  Over the last year, which was the final one of my contract, with each day that passed I knew it was time for me to put my money where my mouth was and see if my way of doing things was the right way, and that meant starting my own site.
 
When I first got involved in the website game, I was producing a print newsletter that was doing very well.  I didn’t know anything about the web, but Bob did.  He asked me to bring my newsletter online with his new website, and I agreed.  In time, my duties changed as I got to understand the medium.  When I first started with 1W, all I was contractually obligated to do was to supply the site with my print newsletter once week.  Obviously, as time went on, I did a lot more than that.  As early as last year I had a good idea that I would leave and do my own thing when my contract expired.  Again, I just felt that it was time for me to make all of the decisions that affected my work and myself.  No matter how great your boss is, he or she is still your boss.  They own the company and in the end they make the rules.  Even if you are “right” and they are “wrong”, they have the final say.  There were other issues as well, but they are probably no different than any of you have had at your job.  Again, when you aren’t the boss, you don’t have control and that is the way it is.  In the end, that was the major reason that I decided to leave.
 
So, over the last year I decided that it was probably time for me to take a chance and go out on my own.  I more seriously started considering the move last summer and had pretty much made up my mind that I would be leaving.  At the time, I was doing the weekly “Pro Wrestling Insider” show on SportstalkCleveland.com.  Paul Belfi, who owns the site and hosted the show with me, was privy to what I was thinking at the time and went out and bought the PWInsider.com name, just in case I ever wanted to use it.  As I became more and more sure that I would leave, Paul transferred the name to my daughter, who then transferred it to me.  Given how some people online, with way more time on their hands than I will ever have, like to do “searches” on domain names that people own on a seemingly daily basis, I knew that if my name were on a domain, it would cause speculation to run rampant among those types of people, which would then cause havoc at 1W.  I was proven correct last week when the ownership of this site became a hot topic among the ill-informed on two separate websites that seem to care more about my life than even my family does.  I even saw one, ahem, “intrepid reporter” pen a “story” that said that I had a “money mark” backing this site.  As if!  While the depth of idiocy among some people will never cease to amaze me, again the truth is far less interesting than the fiction.
 
For the record, I alone own this site, all 100% of it.  No one else owns any piece of it at all.  Zero, zip, nada.  If I was going to stay in a position where I was working for someone else, I may have just as well stayed at 1W.  But, as I said above, I wanted to be my own boss and do my own thing and having a money backer is counter-productive to that because it’s just another person to have to listen to, answer to and whose bad ideas I would have to incorporate into the site.  While a few people did offer to buy in, after working for 1W for 6 and ½ years, I wanted to have complete control and sink or swim based off of what I wanted to do.  So, I hope that clears it up with the conspiracy theorists out there, though I am sure they will come up with some new fictitious tales “twist to the story” in no time.
 
Back to that lame story, the aforementioned “reporters” guessed that Belfi was the “money mark” because he originally purchased the domain name and also because he listed the site on one his bio pages.  Well, if they had read the page in question more carefully, they would have realized that he listed this site on that page because he designed the front end of PWInsider.com.  He did the layout for me and designed the graphics (and did a fine job if I do say myself).  So, a money mark?  No.  Very helpful in getting the site designed?  Absolutely.  Again, the truth isn’t as scandalous as their version, but at least it’s true.
 
Had the “reporters” in question actually asked, I would have been glad to explain the above to them.  But hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good story!
 
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FARM
 
So, after deciding to break out on my own, I spoke with Joey Styles in mid-January and notified him that I wanted to leave 1W by the end of the month, setting up the magical Feb 1. start date.  Joey, Bob and myself negotiated terms of my release and I am happy to say we did so in a very amicable manner.  It was a business decision and that is how it ended up. I am very happy for that.
 
Since I have the greatest respect for Buck, Mike and Jess and have worked with them for years, I owed it to them to tell them I was leaving.  As I guess you have realized, I was very lucky in that they all wanted to come with me.  I would have been happy if one of them had decided to do so.  I would have been ecstatic if two had chosen to do so, but when all three of them wanted to come, to a start up site with no track record no less, I felt like I had hit the lottery.  I am a truly lucky and blessed man because, and I don’t care what anyone says, we have the best staff in the business, bar none.  I feel that strongly about the quality of those three.
 
About 10 days ago, the die was cast and we were all set to leave 1W for PWInsider on Feb. 1.  The plan was for 1W to announce I was leaving on 1/28, with me writing my goodbye column at that time.  We had a “Coming Feb. 1” graphic on the site.  We would have a full week to get everything up and ready to go.
 
Then, much like the business that we cover, the story began to leak out.  People at the two “sites that care more about me than my family” found bits and pieces of the story.  They managed to blow past the splash page and find the actual content end of the site, and as the word got out, Bob and Joey decided to make their announcement on Tuesday, instead of Wednesday.  I got back from a four-mile walk to about 20 phone messages and more emails than I could count.  As luck would have it, I had accidentally dusted the splash page and the site was left live.  “I will put the splash back up when I get back,” I thought.  Ha!  The 1W story went up and we were open for business, five days early.
 
So please, we still have a few things to get done, but please bear with us.  We started five days early.  The only reason we made it through without incident is, again, because I we have such a great staff.  I thank Buck, Jess and Mike for the great job they did getting through the first days of the site.  We are a veritable finely-tuned machine now!
 
That gives you the important part of the back-story.  I felt that you all had a right to know what got us here.
 
WHERE WE ARE, AND WHERE WE ARE GOING
 
So that brings us to today and our “official” grand opening.  As I said, the initial plan had been to launch today.  Instead, we had to react and launch on Tuesday.  I want everyone to know that no Elite memberships started, from a billing perspective, until today.  The first day of your sub is actually Feb. 1, in honor of our opening!  Everything from last week was on us, as a way of thanking you for your wonderful support.
 
As for the earlier-than-expected start of the site, and I am not complaining mind you, but the early start has wreaked havoc on things like our hotline rotations, our audio show schedules, etc.  Rest assured that we will get those things worked out.  We also have a few exciting Elite features in the works that I think you all will like.
 
For those of you who have not joined the Elite service, you have seen ads appear on the site over the weekend.  I wish you didn’t have to see them, but the simple fact of internet life is without ad revenue, you can't run a free site.  As I said above, there is no “money mark” so that means everything that you see on this site was paid for by yours truly.  So, there will have to be ads.  I don’t have any plans to make them excessive, but they will be on the site.  Our server has dealt with them like a champ and it hasn’t slowed the site down at all, which was a major concern for me.  That leads me to the next item.
 
One of my pet peeves is server speed.  Thus far, the server has been lightning fast and we have had amazing traffic thus far so that is a major plus.  You can rest assured that nothing irks me as much as a slow site, and I won’t tolerate it.  If the site slows down, I will take whatever steps that I can to correct it immediately.  I want all of you to get your information as quickly as possible.  Thanks to my man Warren, we are hooked up with a great hosting company and they have more than delivered thus far.
 
A number of people have asked, “How can I help the site?”  If you seriously want to help us, there are two ways you can do it.
 
1)       Purchase an Elite Membership.  I guarantee you that we are committed to this site.  It’s our home and our passion and if you support us, we will go above and beyond to pay back that faith you put in us.
2)       Spread the word of this site to anyone and everyone that you can.  Post about it on boards and sites.  Send the word out to your mailing lists.  Do whatever you can to let people know that we are here.  You can help us immeasurably by spreading the word.
 
THE THANK YOU SEGMENT
 
Obviously, we wouldn’t have gotten to this point without the help of a lot of people.  So, I want to take a second to thank them all properly.
 
First and foremost, I have to thank Buck, Mike and Jess for coming along on this start up venture.  They all had established positions at the old site, for established money, but they choose to come with me and start PWInsider.com.  I don’t know if I could have done it without them and I am glad that I don’t have to find out.  I will never forget what you three did in coming with me.  It means more to me than I can ever say.  I will say “Thanks guys” but it’s hardly enough.
 
Each and every one of you.  As I have been saying for years now, without “you”, there is no “us”.  We could write and talk about wrestling until the cows come home, but if you aren’t reading and listening, we are talking to ourselves.  So I want to say thanks to all of you for coming over to the site and an extra thanks to all of you who have supported us by joining the elite service.  You have gotten us up and running and we will do whatever we can to reward your support by delivering as much content as we possibly can.  As I said before, we are in this for the longest of the long hauls and you have all gotten us off and running in amazing fashion.
 
Major, mad serious off-the-chart thanks have to go out to my man, Scott James.  Scott did an amazing job of building our intranet and making the pages come to life.  His knowledge of building the engine of a website is amazing.  If any of you are looking to do a site of your own and need an intranet designed, drop me a line and I will pass it on to Scott.  You will be happy you did.
 
Thanks to “King Tool” Paul Belfi for designing an amazing “front of house” look to the site.  Like Scott, Paul does a great job with the front end of sites and if you are looking for a design, you can drop me a line and I will pass it on.
 
My man Warren.  Thanks for the all you did in helping us get this site on “the air” so to speak.  You were a great, great help to us at crunch time.
 
And lastly, Bob and Joey.  Though it was time for me to leave 1W when I did, I am glad that I will remain friendly with those two.  As I said before, we did a lot of great work at 1W and I wouldn’t trade any of that time for anything.
 
Well, that will end this long-winded missive.  I hope I set the record straight (at least for those who want it to be set straight!)  Any thoughts or feedback can be sent to daveschererpwi@gmail.com.
 

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