The story behind Graklink

The first company

On New Year’s Eve 1999 I was sitting next to my partner at a kitchen table we had pushed against the wall, waiting to find out whether Y2K was going to erase everything we had spent months building. Two cheap computers sat side by side on that table, networked to share one dial-up connection. Mine was an eMachine. His I can’t remember. We sat there and watched the clock tick steadily toward the hour of our demise. Midnight came and nothing broke.

Then, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, instead of being wiped out by Y2K, we were discovered by a housewife in Texas who knew exactly where to promote her affiliate link. Sign-ups started climbing. We had been getting 10 or 15 new users a day. Suddenly it was thousands. I still remember how it felt to finally be noticed.

I had built that site, onesrc.net, earlier in 1999 because I was never satisfied to just surf the web. I wanted to build a piece of it and see if I could make a buck in the process. I have always learned by doing and by making mistakes, though some of the mistakes got expensive. It was my first website and my first application. The site was ugly (most were back then). The app was small, had no obvious bugs, and did what we needed. The Wayback Machine still has the site, if you want to see 1999 for yourself.

We were taking a swing at established leaders like AllAdvantage, and after that New Year’s morning we had real traction. We passed 100,000 users quickly and eventually landed north of 600,000 accounts, with about 90,000 people using the site on an average day. My favorite memory of that time came from Alexa, which measured web traffic back then the way Nielsen measured television. In early 2000 they published a list of the fastest growing websites. As I remember that list, onesrc.net sat above a new search engine named Google. Our paths diverged a little after that. I feel bad for those two. I think they would have loved my life.

Then the money stopped. We made lots of mistakes and never turned the momentum into a stable business model, and we were living on internet advertising in the exact year internet advertising died. When the bubble burst, the revenue all but stopped. We crawled along for another year or so, and then we folded.

Back to building

I bounced around for a few years, then put what I knew to work and spent the next decade in IT, from Desktop Support up to Director of IT. Corporate life left me bored and burned out. In 2016 I went looking for what came next on Craigslist, and I noticed that Transportation sat just below Technical Support in the list of job categories. As a kid I loved pumping my arm at truck drivers to get the horn. I followed the link, found a company willing to hire me and teach me, and learned to drive.

That is how I ended up in the sleeper bunk of a Freightliner Cascadia, building things again. I have driven every state in the lower 48 over the past ten years. The first thing I built out here was a word game called Four Letter Words, because I love word games and hate how much advertising publishers make you endure just to play one. It isn’t finished yet. The power supply for the laptop I build it on disappeared somewhere on the road, and my backup is an Intel MacBook with no fan that overheats the moment the dev environment spins up. You cannot source an obscure power supply from a truck stop.

Why Graklink works this way

So while I waited, I chased a different idea. A friend needed a QR code and didn’t want to commit to yet another subscription to get one. That bothered me, and the more I researched the market, the more it bothered me. I wanted a one-time price for a purchased redirect, with optional subscriptions for the additional tools a customer chooses. Hosting, security and support still have ongoing costs. I don’t have investors. I don’t have a headcount. It is a crowded market, but the gap is real, and the same idea solved a problem I had been wrestling with in my own game.

So Graklink runs on a mission I can say in one sentence: Bring enterprise marketing tools to anyone doing it themselves: at prices one person can pay, in plain language, with no sales call.

I have already lived through the version of this where everything you built depends on money that can stop. Revenue that vanishes in a season. A business that folds a year later. That memory is built into how Graklink works. A Graklink QR code needs no subscription to keep redirecting. Refunds, deletion, safety actions and service availability are separate under our Terms. There are no scan caps, and there never will be. You can buy a QR code once, for a few dollars, and never owe us again. And nobody here will ever ask you to book a call, because the person this is built for is the person I was at that kitchen table: doing it myself, watching the clock, hoping the thing I built survives the night.

This time I am building it so it does.

Wes Marvel
Founder, Graklink
Somewhere in the lower 48