Founding Foolish IT: The Short Story
Nick (founder)
Most of my life, I’ve been the guy fixing your computer. I’ve been working (mostly) as a PC repair technician in one form or another since 1996 – a bench tech, a manager of techs, a top level phone/helpdesk tech at a Fortune 500 company, and a remote tech utilizing proactive monitoring and providing managed services for businesses. In 2010 I began working for a non-profit organization as an Systems/Network Administrator, while starting up Foolish IT on the side.
Since early in my career I focused on creating scripts to make various repair jobs easier, but around 2008, I started to dabble in teaching myself a simple programming language in my spare time, with a focus on creating tools that I (and other PC repair techs) could use to make our jobs and lives easier. In 2011 Foolish IT’s flagship product d7 was released to the internet, and by 2012 Foolish IT LLC became an official business entity used as an outlet for my creative projects for PC repair technicians and system administrators.
Foolish IT: What’s in a name?
Several years prior to founding Foolish IT, I decided to register “foolishtech.com” to start a blog for voicing some common issues and resolutions I had experienced in my years as a PC repair technician. Scrolling down the page to confirm my site purchase I saw “foolishit.com” in the registrar’s suggestion box of similar names, and I couldn’t stop laughing, I had to have it!
We realize that “FoolishIT.com” doesn’t make for a great domain name. In addition to other various issues, the major roadblocks early on were being unable get a Microsoft Application ID, and for years we couldn’t get this domain on Google Apps, all due to the last 4 characters (obviously, various automated algorithms caught the profanity.)
Despite these early obstacles “Foolish IT” became a long established brand, thanks to the evolution of our flagship product into today’s d7x (for PC technicians) and the huge success of CryptoPrevent (malware prevention software) since 2013, as well as numerous other free tools that became somewhat popular or achieved some notoriety.
While the name hasn’t always served us well, it seemed foolish to change the name, especially after the unexpected success of CryptoPrevent.