"I needed a better
player," Frankel says, recalling the thing that drove him to code 12 hours
a day. He wanted to build one that would look as familiar as a home
stereo, with the sound quality jacked up with effects like 3-D surround
sound and reverb. He also wanted a playlist feature that allowed you to
sort MP3 tracks or play them randomly like a jukebox.
Frankel spent his days with his feet propped up on a subwoofer,
interrupted every now and then by his mother, popping her head in to
suggest it might be a good idea to go outside. "I was, like, 'Outside's
overrated,'" he says. In April 1997, Winamp 1.0 was born.
By all accounts, it was a near perfect piece of consumer software and
had roughly the same effect on the world of digital music that a 1994
browser called Mosaic had on the world of the Internet and computing. It
was the killer app, the Thing That Changed Everything. Within a month of
uploading the software for distribution from his website, it was getting
40,000 visitors a day. Within 18 months, Frankel's free Winamp had been
downloaded 15 million times.
"You rarely find the alpha geek who has the creative and technical
skills to take a product single-handedly from concept to an audience of 15
million users," says Rob Lord, Frankel's director of online strategies.
The sheer volume meant that even a small percentage of users who sent in
the suggested $10 registration fee amounted to a viable revenue stream.
Sure enough, the traffic coming to winamp.com was generating $8,000 a
month in advertising fees alone. Frankel built a company, Nullsoft -- the
name wa s a gibe at Microsoft -- around the product and hired a half-dozen
fellow twentysomethings to run the website and maintain the database of
users. His father Charles, a lawyer, signed on as legal counsel and
resident adult.
