Most review sites won’t tell you who wrote them. Or why. Or what they actually know about the software they’re telling you to buy.
This one will.
I Started Selling at 15. Door to Door. Office to Office.
Before I was old enough to drive, I was handling objections face to face with adults who didn’t want to hear from me. It was uncomfortable. It was relentless. And it lit a fire that has never gone out.
While other kids my age were doing other things, I had a stack of books on my nightstand that most people never read in a lifetime. Think and Grow Rich. Dale Carnegie. Tom Hopkins. Joe Girard. Zig Ziglar. Joe Sugarman. Jay Conrad Levinson. Dan Kennedy’s Ultimate Sales Letter — which I read so many times the spine cracked.
I wasn’t studying for school. I was studying because I was obsessed with understanding what makes people buy, what makes businesses grow, and what separates the people who make it from the ones who don’t.
The Moment That Changed Everything
One of the most powerful things I ever experienced happened alone in my car.
I discovered Les Brown — specifically It’s Possible and It’s Not Over Until I Win. I put that tape in and I drove. Then I played it again. Then again. Over hundreds of drives, over years, those words became part of how I think. It’s not over until I win. I don’t know how many times I listened. Hundreds. Maybe more.
Years later, when I was further along in my career, I was on a call with my business coach Alex Mandossian — one of the legends of online marketing who I’d come to know personally through the seminar world. I told him that story. About Les Brown. About the tape. About what it meant to me.
Alex said “hold on one second.”
Two minutes later Les Brown was on the call.
I got to tell him directly — this man whose words I had listened to hundreds of times alone in my car — that his voice had altered the course of my life. That when things got hard, I put that tape in. That I never gave up on anything because of what he said.
That moment stays with me. And it’s relevant to everything I do here — because MarketersChoice.com exists because I never stopped believing it was possible.
Then I Built the Software
From direct sales I moved into retail, then spent nearly two decades in industrial sales — working my way from the bottom to sales manager. I was always the person using technology to get an edge. When personal computers arrived I was the only one in our office using one to drive leads and stay organized. That single advantage let me outsell my entire sales team combined.
In 1999 I joined 1ShoppingCart.com as President and CEO and acquired the company in 2000. My vision was simple: give entrepreneurs everything they need to sell and market online — email, shopping cart, affiliate management, automation — all in one place.
What followed was one of the more remarkable growth stories of the early internet era:
| 25,000 | Paid subscribers at peak |
| $500M+ | In ecommerce transactions processed |
| 150M | Permission-based emails sent per month on behalf of our clients |
| 1.2M | Transactions handled per day |
| 25 | Full-time staff when we hit 10,000 clients — lean, fast, and profitable |
| 80 | Full-time staff when we sold to Web.com in 2006 |
| Zero | Spent on advertising — every customer came through word of mouth, referrals and affiliates |
We were one of the earliest companies operating what is now called Software as a Service. We competed with platforms that are household names today — and we held our own.
Along the way I had the privilege of meeting and working alongside many of the people I had studied for years — the men and women I call the Internet Marketing Pioneers. Armand Morin. Mike Filsaime. Jeff Walker. Rich Schefren. Frank Kern. John Reese. Jay Abraham. Perry Marshall. Marlon Sanders. Ken Evoy. Corey Rudl. Tom Antion. Jonathan Mizel. Declan Dunn. David Cavanagh. People who were figuring out how to build empires before anyone had a roadmap. I knew them personally. Some ran their businesses on our platform. Corey Rudl, one of the true originals, left us far too soon in 2005 — just before I sold.
I met Dan Kennedy in person at events we were both attending. The man whose book sat cracked on my nightstand. Same room. That kind of thing stays with you.
Mentors Magazine published a feature on how I grew 1ShoppingCart.com from nothing into what it became.
Why That Makes This Site Different
I sold 1ShoppingCart.com to Web.com in 2006. And I watched the industry I helped build evolve from the inside for the next two decades.
Today I run MarketersChoice.com — and I bring something to these reviews that no other site can offer:
I built the software. I made the architectural decisions these platforms still wrestle with today. Email deliverability. Checkout flow. Automation logic. Integration depth. When I tell you a platform has a problem — I know exactly what that problem is, why it exists, and what it costs your business.
Most review sites are written by people who signed up for a free trial last Tuesday. I spent a decade building the category they’re reviewing.
That’s not a credential. That’s a different kind of seeing.
How I Evaluate Every Platform
Every review on MarketersChoice.com gets put through the same four questions I’ve been asking about software for over two decades:
1. Is it intuitive? A platform that requires weeks of training is one most businesses abandon. I assess the real learning curve — not for technical users, but for a business owner without an IT department.
2. Does it do what it promises? Marketing software makes a lot of claims. I look at whether the core functionality actually delivers — especially for email marketing platforms, where deliverability is everything. Getting your message into the inbox is what it’s for. Everything else is secondary.
3. How well does it all work together? Having built a platform that combined email, shopping cart, affiliate management and automation, I know how critical it is for every element to work as a unified system. I pay attention to integrations, workflow logic, and whether the automation actually saves time or just moves the problem around.
4. Is it worth the cost? I assess value across all pricing tiers — not just the entry-level plan quoted in headlines, but what you actually pay as your business grows.
I built these platforms. I know what good looks like from the inside. That’s the lens every review on this site is written through.
The Bottom Line
There are thousands of review sites telling you which marketing tools to buy.
There is one written by someone who built the software they’re reviewing.
You’re on it.
— Rob Bell, Founder, MarketersChoice.com
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