Hello and thanks for visiting.

My name is David Coakley and I’ll lay claim to this collection of domain names, Websites in various stages of evolution, dreams, causes, and business ideas. Please don’t judge the sites based on what you see because what you see was done in my spare time between management jobs, consulting gigs, and fatherhood.

The sites don’t fully reflect the vision I have for each of them. As you will learn through reading some of my posts I tend to think big so it will become clear that these sites are merely seeds in the germination stage.

What I hope these sites do reflect is that I have at least a basic understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and how vital a difference that can make to an organization that has limited funds to spend on marketing. Because basic sites were launched well before their “time” some of the sites have some pagerank, organic traffic, and a good number of links pointed their way from other Websites… a very good thing.

I should add that all of these sites were built by yours truly. Yes, I use Wordpress, themes and scripts, but any of you who know how much time it takes to do these things on any one site will understand that I have been busy over the last couple of years. The amount of “stuff” I’ve learned amazes me. I am now proud to say that I’m part nerd, part entrepreneur, and part visionary. Oh, and probably part crazy as well.

Since I was 8 years old I’ve either been in business or business has been on my mind. It’s not clear to me whether that’s a blessing or a curse. But, it can be fun!

From my earliest days as an earthling I’ve conjured up big dreams and imagined great things. What you’ll see on these pages is a small sample of some of the entrepreneurial ideas I’ve come up with in recent years. Of course some could pass for fairly straight forward business ideas, but when you think about each of them as a part of the overall family of sites you’ll see that the possibilities could be great.

Before you write me off as just another dreamer that won’t ever amount to anything, let me point out a couple of successes that might help my credibility. If not, that’s alright because it’s always nice ego-food and motivating for me….

Comstor – In January 1986 after getting permission from my wife Kathy to quit work and start a business of wholesaling computer hardware in the DC area I “launched” Comstor. With two $3,000 cash advances in the bank I bootstrapped it and the business took off.

Eight exhilarating years later Comstor was acquired by Sage Technologies, a public company. We had grown our sales to the $60 million a year range and had a blast doing so.

If there was any brilliance involved it was in my ability to find the best people a company could find and in instilling a culture of customer service excellence and teamwork. We had a blast, we loved our customers, and they loved us.

GovCon – After returning from a 3 year “vacation” living on Maui I found myself at the helm of the first online portal for government contractors, GovCon.

Not able to leave well enough alone, I came up with an idea we named BidRadar that really caught on back in 1999 with tens of thousands of government contractors subscribing to the daily email feed of government bid opportunities. GovCon went from having decent Website traffic and close to a thousand subscribers to a wildly busy Website and a large portion of our target market subscribed to BidRadar.

VerticalNet, a public company that was valued at $15 billion at it’s peak, acquired GovCon to serve as it’s anchor in their group of Public Sector companies. In the one year I was involved in GovCon it’s value had skyrocketed from under $500,000 in January 1999 to over $12 million in December of 1999. (Yes, it was at the height of the Dot Com Boom and the $12 mil was in Dot Com stock, but catching waves is a valuable skill for an entrepreneur isn’t it?)

More to come later…. IN the meantime if you have any questions, suggestions, feedback or money please don’t hesitate to write via the comment form. Ditto, if you want to talk about doing some business.

Thanks for visiting and getting this far!

David

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David Coakley, President
Earthling Communications LLC
Gum Spring Road
Chantilly VA 20152
703.754.0402
703.542.4253
david/at/earthlingcommunications.com