It started innocently enough. The two men worked together at one of the largest Application Service Providers (ASP) in the Midwest. One was the strategic marketing director, the other a marketing consultant who had been operating an online gallery for the past year. After working together on marketing projects promoting the company’s value proposition, the two decided they made a good team and worked well together. They looked at the corporate path ahead of them, and decided it was time to throw caution to the wind and try something entrepreneurial instead.

But what? They both enjoyed the energy and excitement of strategic marketing. They knew the Internet would play a large role in the business. The online art gallery owner kept talking about this thing called permission marketing and email campaigns. The strategic director kept talking about the marketing difficulties Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) have and how they needed assistance in getting their message out.

After awhile a vision was born. In a sushi bar in downtown Minneapolis, the two drew an outline of a marketing campaign on some napkins and set off to develop a new company. The new business would help companies promote themselves through the Internet using permission marketing and email newsletters. The company’s name was InternetVIZ and their singular focus is creating, editing and producing Internet newsletters.

InternetVIZ began by putting HTML newsletters together as Word document and sending them out singularly through HotMail.com. Then, one day, they found an article profiling iMakeNews in a web-marketing newsletter. They immediately went to the site and signed up for the service.

The benefits of the iMakeNews service were apparent at first blush. All at once, InternetVIZ was able to develop a rich statistical understanding of their readers’ habits and which aspects of the newsletters were compelling. iMakeNews also enabled InternetVIZ to scale beyond their early capabilities. Immediately they were able to take advantage of a distribution system allowing them to send 10’s of 1,000’s of emails at once. And they no longer had to manually format or send their newsletters one at a time (a great relief to the wrists of the InternetVIZ partner responsible for that duty).

Since first coming in contact with iMakeNews InternetVIZ has grown tremendously and now works with several national companies, providing them a newsletter creation service from start to finish. In addition, they have expanded their service offering to provide a content service for companies looking to outsource this repetitive task.

Now, when the InternetVIZ team meets for sushi, their napkins are filled with ideas about further leveraging iMakeNews’ capabilities. And no one’s wrists hurt anymore.