“This was a wonderful and well deserved recognition to MyWants” says Kelsi Guidry, CEO of MyWants.

The first years of MyWants Inc. is not so out of the ordinary and could be considered somewhat of a typical starting of a company. MyWants Inc. was actually started on February 17th 2007 as TeenWants Inc. by Kelsi Guidry who had recently moved to Thibodaux Louisiana to attend Nicholls State University. However, the timeline of MyWants Inc. starts a few years prior to that.

In 2004, Kelsi Guidry was an avid user of the internet. As a teenager, Kelsi found himself searching for things in search engines that gave him a difficult time finding exactly what he wanted. Kelsi thought to himself “I know there has to be other teens, somewhere, that has searched exactly what I am looking for, and found the good stuff!”. So Kelsi’s question was. “Why isn’t there a website for teens to get their wants all in one place without having to search up and down the internet to find it?” This was the thought that sparked off the idea for TeenWants.com, a website to do just that. Kelsi quickly purchased the domain name with the intent to build the best teen website he could.

Kelsi soon realized that he purchased a domain name and had ZERO knowledge of building a website. His only option was to find a web developer who can do the job for him. Kelsi had a couple thousand dollars saved up from working and decided he could use that to pay for the project. Kelsi did a little research on the web and found a developer who could do the project within his budget.

The site development had finally started. TeenWants.com was on the road to becoming one of the next big teen websites. Development was being done a little at a time, and changes were seen on a regular basis. After about a month, Kelsi began seeing the site stay unchanged for large periods of time, and then finally realized that the developer had abandoned the project. So at that point, Kelsi began reading and researching on HTML to finish up the project to the best of his ability. At that point, the first look of TeenWants.com was born, but awfully undeveloped with only a hand full of static HTML pages.

Kelsi was still determined to get his web idea up and running, so he decided to draft a complete scope of work for TeenWants.com that would outline everything that he wanted in the website. There would be no way that confusion would happen with this document in place. Kelsi also decided that he was going to hire a local web developer to finish up the project. Kelsi’s idea of having a local developer would pretty much rule out the ability of having the site not be completed. Finally, a local developer of a big internet service provider was going to get the job done. Kelsi met with the developer a few times in person to relay his ideas and to present the new developer with what he had from the first run.

After a month or so of development, Kelsi did not really notice any changes in the site besides the ability to log in and create a basic profile. A basic profile REALLY means a basic profile. The website stayed looking the same with its awful looking HTML design and layout with the added features of creating a profile, logging in, and changing fields. And that is where the similarity of Kelsi’s scope of work and the website started and ended. Kelsi was now out of money, out of a full functioning website, and out of patience with working with so called web developers who obviously couldn’t create a website that was outside of the basic HTML and general login type websites.

Kelsi went almost two years until he started thinking of his teen website idea and how it could possibly still make a difference online. He redeveloped a scope of work and went out searching for a large scaled web development company that could do the project. At this time, Kelsi had also created a business plan and started showing it to friends and family. Before he knew it, he had found a development team to start working and had a hand full of friends coming to his apartment on a weekly basis to discuss the project and goals of TeenWants.com. Being that Kelsi wanted to make this a legitimate company and bring on more development and pay people for helping out, he decided that he should create TeenWants Inc. as a company which can handle all of this without being completely under Kelsi’s name. He also needed to use the company to raise money for operations of this entire project. It was at this point that Kelsi Guidry officially created TeenWants Inc. on February 17th 2007 and obtained his first investor, a friend from high school.

As development of TeenWants.com continued, Kelsi and a few of his friends began searching for more investors who were interested in the idea of TeenWants Inc. and were excited about seeing the development of TeenWants.com. Kelsi and his friends successfully raised enough money to support the full development of the project as well as pay for a few employees to operate the business. Development was going smooth and preperation for content was being put in place for completion.

As this was going on, Kelsi and his friends purchased a few other domain names with the “Wants” idea of having a website for a particular niche to have one place to get all their wants. This sparked the purchase of domain names such as PokerWants.com, CollegeWants.com, HealthWants.com, MovieWants.com, and more. Being that there was multiple names, TeenWants Inc. did not fit well and the company was officially changed to MyWants Inc. to fit all the websites under one company.

It is our pleasure to send Kelsi Guidry, President of MyWants Inc, to the reception hosted by the Monroe Chamber of Commerce, The Louisiana State University at Monroe’s College of Business, and The News Star on June 26th 2011.

We are in hopes that Kelsi can accept the award on our behalf. However, winning or not, it has been a great pleasure to have MyWants Inc. make such great strides since it’s operations began in Monroe, LA in mid 2010. We look forward to even more progress in the years to come.