Meet Greg Jameson | Ecommerce Consultant

We had the good fortune of connecting with Greg Jameson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Greg, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
My father was a university professor. When I was in high school (back in the 1970’s, before personal computers), he had a research project that purchased a portable teletype machine. This was about the size of a brief case and had a modem attached to it, and a keyboard. Since it was portable, he brought it home so he could do his work on it.

At the same time, I was a junior in high school taking a class on Basic programming. The school also had a single teletype machine for all the students to share, which was older and used paper tape instead of cassette tapes. But we also had a student account on the County mainframe that we logged into (a Dec PDP10).

I soon discovered that I could log into the County computer from home on my dad’s portable teletype, which meant I didn’t have to share the old machine at the school and I could use the computer as much as I wanted to. Result: I was doing home computing about a decade before the general population!

As you can image, I racked up literally hundred of hours of computing time and never had to pay for it. I not only learned a ton, but it instilled in me a life-long passion for technology.

By the time I was a senior, one of my dad’s graduate students hired me to work with him. I co-wrote my first commercial software program (called EZ-Map) while still in high school. In college, I continued my love affair with computers, spending hours on a key punch machine writing programs. on of my professors asked me if I was the same person who had written EZ-Map. When I replied yes, he hired me on the spot and I spend the next 4 years working for him writing software.

When I went to graduate school, the PC industry was just starting. The first computer that I purchased was a Texas Instruments TI-99A. this machine hooked up to a television for the display screen and used cassette tapes to store your programs. As I was in graduate school to study Landscape Architecture (there weren’t computer science degrees yet), I wrote a program that worked on the TI-99A to do landscape design. I showed this to my major professor and thought he was going to have a heart attack.

I started working for a local landscape architecture firm and purchased on of the very first Apple II computers. Just as I was starting to port my landscape design programto the Apple, we got a call at the landscape architecture firm from someone who wanted to show us a new program called AutoCAD. I went to the demonstration, and it was obvious they guy didn’t know anything about landscape design, but the program was a lot of fun. I convinced the principles at the firm to purchase 2 complete workstations with AutoCAD on them.

It quickly became apparent that AutoCAD was not designed to do landscape design work. Since they had just spend $50K getting these system, I was given an ultimatum: Jameson – you better fix this. While AutoCAD didn’t work on an Apple, my father-in-law worked at IBM and I was able to purchase an early IBM PC AT at the employee discount. I now had a more powerful computer at home than we did at the office! Every night I would go home and re-write portions of AutoCAD to make it do what we needed it to do.

About 3 months later, the guys who had sold us the AutoCAD stations came by the office to see how we were doing. I showed them what I had done and they went bonkers, screaming “We could sell this stuff!”

Long story short: I soon found myself in business as the founder of a software company. (I had a buy out agreement with the partners at the landscape architecture firm, who I paid out within two years). Oh, and the guy who sold us AutoCAD – I hired him! I’ve been in the software / technology field ever since.

During this time I started programming in LISP (LISt Processing), the language of artificial intelligence. I am still proud of the early AI work we did. We eventually merged that first company with a civil engineering software firm and took the combined entity public.

Over the years I evolved into doing database programming and eventually building ecommerce websites that allowed people to make online purchases (yes, before Google and Amazon). Today I am blending ecommerce and AI to help entrepreneurs sell more of their products and services online. I have written over a dozen books on the subject and teach online courses that help entrepreneurs to learn how to utilize these technologies.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Having grown up before there were degrees in computer science and/or website design, one of the things I have found interesting is that design principles work across many disciplines. Sure, the medium that you work with in a landscape design is different than the medium of working on a website, but the design basics hold true. I firmly believe that my background in landscape design helped me bridge the gap into designing websites that were appealing to my customers rather than looking like a computer geek had designed them.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Since I live in Colorado, we would definitely go to the mountains for a trip with my best friend.I find it incredulous that only 4% of the US population has ever been skiing, while 75% have been to a Disney resort. I have friends who live here and have never been to Estes Park or Aspen, which I find unbelievable. Colorado is all about being outside, so depending upon the time of the year, we would go hiking, biking, or skiing and enjoy the mountains. At the end of the day, we’d find a local Mexican restaurant, get some smothered green chile burritos and was them down with a local brew. Then we’d repeat it again the next day!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
The following people were instrumental in my career, as I described in my origin story: My father, Dr. Donald Jameson
My original co-author: Dr. Dennis Child
My Professor and employer in college: Merlyn Paulson
My major professor in graduate school: Dr. Jon Rodek
The salesman who sold me AutoCAD: Don Brown
My father-in-law: Frank Weiss
My wife, who helped me turn my software into a company: Jill Weiss Jameson

Website: https://webstoresltd.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregwjameson/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregjameson/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WebStoresLtd

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/g.w.jameson

Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/WebStoresLtd

Other: Amazon author page: https://amzn.to/3r6dxfM

Image Credits
All images are screen captures of websites that I personally designed.