It was December of 2005, I was at work, day-dreaming and surfing the Internet for a decent book recommendation. After yet another fruitless session, I grabbed a pen and jotted down the sketch you see here.

The doodle sat adrift on my desk for a month before, cleaning up my area one afternoon, I saved it from being arm-bulldozed into the trash.

One particularly slow day, I printed out a cleaned-up draft of my idea (mouse-over the sketch) and timidly approached a web-savvy co-worker I hardly knew. I told him that I wanted to create a social network for readers; a website called: Kingstack.com.

Jeremy showed some interest and with this nod of encouragement I went back to flush-out the design of the site. Many months passed. Before long, the night janitor knew me by name. July 15th of 2006, Jeremy and I signed our first contract. The name of our site was: Mybrary.com

Little did we know at the time that getting the site to where it is now would take every ounce of energy, patience and spare time that the three of us had. As Jeremy and Tim worked on the code I began raising more seed money; soon we had 12 vested members and real legal work to formalize it all (thanks Jay). The site teetered now between its two new, potential names: Readupbranchout.com and Branchism.com.

The winter of 2006 was a rough one. Moral was low and the finish line seemed to be drifting off into the distance; looking at calendars became painful; the trenches under my eyes deepened. It looked at times as though the project would never see the light of day. For treatment of my wild mood-swings, I turned to Dr. Mario. The name of the site took a momentary turn for the worse: Theafictionado.com.

Then, when we needed it most, our friend Ian helped us to secure a meeting with Random House publishing in February 2007. This meeting gave us something to work towards; a fixed date. We slaved to get ready and for the first time got confirmation from those within the industry that our vision had real potential. In the end, the name that had alluded me for nearly a year came in a flash: FeedYourShelf.com was an instant hit.

Now, here we are 15 months after this sketch, pulling back the curtain to show the public an innovative, promising web project and planning our gorilla marketing campaign. Looking back, none of this would have been possible without the tireless work (and raw talent) of my two partners Jeremy and Tim who sacrificed family and personal time for months on end and the investors who believed in us when all we had to show was an idea and some ambition.

We hope that in some small way our site turns people onto reading. Or brings them back to it. With the feedback in our forums we hope to meld our vision for the greatest social network for readers with yours.