Shane Merem was one of those kids that took everything apart. He remembers taking a robotics class at age 10. The top of his Christmas list was a Radio Shack 2001 circuits project kit — EVERY YEAR. In his words, “So yeah, I was a geek before it was cool to be a geek.”

His first passion was digital electronics. Building circuits from scratch. After successfully working in that field until his early 20’s running the service division of a large automotive electronics company, he boldly started his own business and his real education began. Shane spent some years in computers when the DOS era was strong and the text version of Windows (version 3.1) was becoming extinct.

Shane found the engineering and software side of things were still his favorite. He had a reputation for taking on projects in areas in which he had no expertise. After buying $500.00 worth of books and software, he would complete the project successfully and within budget. Some projects were small and some were huge. He still has piles of books around his office and home.

Shane formed a company named Magnus Software in 1995 specializing in POS (Point of sale) software for grocery store cash registers. In the same time frame, he had just started dabbling with dynamic, data-driven web-based applications. This was
technology that the average Joe had not heard of. It was a perfect opportunity for him. He spent a couple of years selling websites door to door. The Internet was so new that most prospects threw him out with the most common objection —“The Internet is just a fad, it won’t be around long.” You can imagine how long ago that was! Over half the business population were non-believers! He has sold and built websites for a long time.

Magnus Software spent the end of the 1990’s building 1 to 3 sites per month. They were ‘big money’ sites for ‘big money’ businesses. They were the only companies that could afford to do it and business was good. Lisa, Shane’s wife, ran the business side of things while they both earned terrific customers and a great reputation in the web industry.

Nothing lasts forever – as he hit the year 2000 and into 2001, around the “Dot Bomb” era he found he couldn’t give away a website. Everyone was sick from losing enormous amounts of money in the “Dot Com” stock market investments. He had to come
up with a plan. Instead of a few customers paying big money, he knew he needed a second business model that everyone could use and most could afford. That product was named “Website Forge.” Approaching his fourth decade of life, Shane is known
for building million dollar sites with Website Forge and Magnus Software.

Shane and Lisa enjoy time with their three kids in Fowlerville, Michigan, not far from where they grew up.