About CoffeeCup

CoffeeCup Software was started in a real coffee house our Founder Nicholas Longo owned called The Raven & The Sparrow.

The coffee house opened in 1994 and offered free Internet access to the public in Corpus Christi Texas.

The Raven & The Sparrow was a popular spot and received a few news stories about the Internet making us a hub for all things Internet at the time.

Nick starting creating Websites for businesses in Corpus Christi as a side job while running and owning The Raven & The Sparrow.

The task of creating Websites in 1994 and 1995 was daunting since there was no reliable software to help in the task.

Nick was soon frustrated and said out loud "I need my own software to create better Websites for people". Nick knew a regular customer who was a programmer so they sat down and created the first version of the CoffeeCup HTML Editor in 3 months.

The first version was free and was posted on the coffee house's Website at www.coffeecup.com This is how we came up with the name 'CoffeeCup Software'. Domain names were $100 back then so we decided to just use the name we already had and call the company 'CoffeeCup Software' after the domain we already owned. It's funny how it became a catchy name but not by intention we assure you, we were just being cheap :)

People from around the world downloaded the first version and the Founder of download.com told Nick he could charge for it by timing it out after 30 days and charge $20 if people still wanted to use it.

Nick thought this was a good idea and the 'Shareware' version was released in July 1996.

There was no credit card processing at the time so employees of the coffee house would write down credit card numbers on Raven and Sparrow receipts along with users email addresses. The Raven and The Sparrow did not have a credit card machine so we just put them on a board that had a nail in it and emailed people the software.

After a few months of this the pile of receipts grew to as thick as a phone book and Nick finally got a credit card machine. Every order had to be manually entered and this took a week. When all was said and done the pile of collected orders was more than $20,000.00.

Nick who kept being hassled by the City of Corpus Christi to get more parking for the coffee house or be shut down decided that there was a whole lot more money in software and closed The Raven and The Sparrow in December 1996.

Nick worked by himself for the first year doing tech support and orders. He spent many a night sleeping on the coffee house floor and dedicated 24 hours a day 7 days a week into CoffeeCup Software.

After the first year Nick hired his first employee and got a new programmer to make the HTML Editor better and to create more software.

The rest as they say is history. CoffeeCup after 10 years and many software programs later has had millions of downloads Worldwide and has never been afraid to try new things to make Webmaster's lives easier.

If you need to know anything else about our history just Email Nick

All our software is available to review and to write about too. So when you get the chance try out some things and talk about them in blogs, newsgroups or on your Website.