Early on in High School, between school and sports, Dan started trying to sell golf balls that he would go find in the woods of a local course and custom golf ball display cases that he made in his basement.
There were multiple challenges aside from the operation being bootstrapped, including this was before Dan had his drivers license and before modern online marketplaces.
So, instead of spending funds that did not exist for advertising, he created a golf portal as a means to create product awareness with golfers.
The site included data that Dan aggregated from many sources, including reaching out to golf associations internationally for permission to use their data.
This eventually transitioned into joining an affiliate program with Amazon.com (before it was the Amazon of today), which returned a percentage of sales.
Dan also recruited advertisers (this was before modern ad platforms like Google of today) such as golfballs.com. To sell more ads, Dan eventually reinvested funds into and installed custom ad tracking software.
Between advertisers and others, Dan would continue to be asked by more businesses to help develop and manage their digital applications and services, which eventually gave way to Pebblehaven.
While in college, Dan received an unsolicited inquiry from an out of state buyer about selling the portal. He proceeded with the offer in hopes it could both grow as a resource for golfers, while allowing Dan to focus more on college and Pebblehaven.