It was exactly 10 years ago today when we flipped the switch and launched OnMilwaukee.com. Over the years, I've gone back and looked at what we presented to Milwaukee in 1998, and I usually roll my eyes, shake my head ... and smile.

Honestly, on Sept. 1, 1998, OnMilwaukee.com wasn't very good. It wasn't very pretty. It worked somewhat well. It had a skeleton staff and no money, and most of the people who we'd been pitching our idea to for the previous six months were less than impressed and told us that a daily online magazine and city guide could never fly in Milwaukee.

Call it the naiveté of youth, but we launched, anyway. We knew that even if we didn't have the final product ready that would change the media landscape in the city that we loved, we had a good idea, and we'd figure it out as we went along.

I remember checking our traffic analysis program the next day. I think most of the visits come from me. I didn't expect to light the world on fire on Sept. 1, as the only launch splash we could afford was a quarter page ad in the Onion, and a little PR from the Journal Sentinel announcing our arrival buried in a tech column.

Nothing about launch day was too unexpected, really, but the pressure to succeed was on. Among the three active founders, I had quit my job in April, Jon quit that summer, and Jeff was basically mailing it in at his job and would officially quit about a year later.

Even 10 years ago, OnMilwaukee.com wasn't a hobby for us. It was our passion, our career, our calling.

It still is.

In 1998, we didn't know much about building a dot com business, but no one else really did, either. We came before Google and most of the sites we now use every day. Locally, media was in a total state of denial about the Web. The daily newspaper had a Web site, barely, but all the other publications you read around town appeared to be wishing this fad called the Internet would just go away.

That was a major reason we launched OnMilwaukee.com. We wanted to shout from the hilltops and describe the Milwaukee we chose to call home -- not our parents' Milwaukee, not what we read in those publications targeted to someone else.

As for picking the Web as our medium, we wanted to be cutting edge, but we also couldn't afford a printing press. Ironically, considering the cost of producing a site that is read by more than a million visitors a month, it would've been much cheaper to go the print route. I think of that every time I see our server clusters at our secure hosting facility in Brookfield (and subsequently pay the bandwidth bills), but I digress.

As little as we knew about building a Web company, we did know a thing or two about journalism, public relations and networking. We worked hard in those early days to hook up with people who could help us where we were the weakest, and we forged relationships with programmers and civic groups, sponsoring every event under the sun. We became part of the community, trading advertising for business cards and mousepads and letterhead. We ran OnMilwaukee.com like a brick and mortar business before we even had an office.

So when we met our investors two years later, while we didn't have much a of business plan (we found ourselves ripping it up and rewriting it every two months, since the nature of the Web was changing so rapidly back then), we did feel like a real business. When we stumbled early on -- and it happened a lot -- we worked to learn from our mistakes.

We changed focus a few times. In the very beginning, we expected to be only a city guide, with just a few feature articles sprinkled in to keep things interesting. We quickly morphed into a magazine, keeping the city guide current, but relying on the unique editorial content to differentiate ourselves from our competition.

Then, a few years ago, we embraced the concept of blogging, which lots of people still don't really get. Think of blogs like first-person editorials about anything and everything. They don't necessarily relate to Milwaukee, but establish the unique personalities of our writers. Blogs are fun to write, too, since they inject our opinion, showing that we're not just blindly optimistic cheerleaders of our city, we're also constructively critical at times.

All this has helped make ourselves experts, both in building a media company and learning all the ins and outs of Milwaukee, that we had previously taken for granted. Even though we had joked about throwing a big party when that "huge" venture capital deposit showed up in our checking account, we never even made a toast. We just buckled down and worked harder.

Sometimes people ask me if, 10 years ago, I would have imagined myself still working at OnMilwaukee.com, and if I pictured a profitable company with seven figures of revenue. Maybe this sounds a little flippant, but I guess I didn't really think about it.

I never thought we'd fail, not even once, in 1998. I thought either a larger media company would gobble us up for millions within a few months, or we'd be in this for the long haul. I didn't expect to hear from peers that much bigger other newsrooms refer to us as competition and are forbidden from working with us or including us in relevant stories. But I also didn't expect to entertain the president of the United States in our office in 2005 or to cover the All Star Game or to spend 12 hours with the Milwaukee Police Department's vice squad for an investigative story on prostitution.

I definitely didn't expect to work with more than a dozen great people who share my vision for OnMilwaukee.com, a group that has schlepped up to our cabin in Wasuaukee the past three summers for the OnMilwaukee.com Retreat. I didn't know that I'd be standing up in coworkers' weddings or making lifelong friendships with both current and former employees. I didn't know that I'd meet clients and readers who come up to me and thank me, personally, for giving them the impetus to relocate to Milwaukee.

In other words, I hoped, but didn't know, that we'd become so engrained in the fabric of this city. When someone recently said to me that if OnMilwaukee.com ever went away, Milwaukee would be a worse place, I think he was right.

That said, we're not going anywhere, though we do have some big expansion plans on the table. In the last year we launched OnMadison.com, mostly to see how it would work, and while we're still recruiting writers for the site, it has worked well. Now we're developing software that will let us launch sites big and small, geographically targeted but also by topic. I'd tell you more, but that would ruin the surprise.

And of course, we plan on doing some other fun stuff to celebrate our 10-year anniversary. We're working with our friends at 2-Story Creative to develop some new anniversary-themed identity pieces and an exciting event to commemorate this milestone. Stay tuned for that, too.

So thanks, Milwaukee, for enabling us to stick around for a whole decade. We owe all our success to our readers, our partners, our clients, our coworkers, our friends, our families and the tons of support from the entire city. As much as 10 years seems like a long time, in many ways we've only recently moved beyond "start-up" mode, and that means the next few years will be a fun ride.

I encourage you to take that ride with us. I promise -- it's gonna be a fun one.