A few reflections on the last few weeks

Well, I’m getting ever closer to the point where I feel comfortable launching this. Even though I have hundreds of articles yet to write, I believe I am close to the point where the 50 or 60 pages or so that will be published when I launch will be both helpful and practically useful enough, especially in combination with the forum, that there will be enough value here to make launching worthwhile. The rest can be added over the coming weeks, months, and years.

It’s interesting to me the role that what’s the best mattress forum has played in all of this. Many of you who initially come to this website will be familiar with my posts there. When I originally disclosed there that I was planning to go into business as a consultant as is required there for anyone who is in the industry, I had no idea that I would be developing this website … and certainly not within any near term future. I didn’t even have a clue where to begin to build one in the first place and even the terms that are so common in the world of website building such as CSS, CMS, php and hundreds of others had no meaning to me. However when they somehow decided to apply a different set of rules to me than they had to anyone else in their history, and even though I had already self-disclosed an even stricter set of rules than anything they had required that I intended to abide by both in the public forum and in our private email exchanges, they decided to delete my disclosure post and to ban me anyway for undisclosed reasons. One of life’s amazing ironies. This forced me to learn how to build a decent website very quickly.

They also chose to keep the 809 posts that I had put there, many of them with information that had not appeared in any single place on the web before. I believe that because they are primarily in existence for commercial reasons, and because I also have reasons to believe that they may be “connected”, either formally or informally, to some rather large mattress manufacturing concerns, that their decision was primarily out of self interest and for competitive reasons and on reflection I completely understand their decision … although I would not have made the same decision if I was in their place. I find this all rather interesting how seemingly random events can lead to interesting and unexpected outcomes. I believe too though that they foresaw better than I did that I could be some kind of “competition” for them even though this was not in any way my original intention and I truly enjoyed helping the people that I helped there. My original vision was to include them in “the mattress underground” and help them to become a better source of unbiased and accurate information. Their decision forced me into building this website so that I would have a place to publish and control better versions of what I had already posted and many hundreds and probably thousands of articles and forum posts that are yet to come. In the end I am grateful that they “pushed” me into this as I no longer have to be careful in linking to other sources of great information that they do not not allow to be posted (for competitive reasons that they have already acknowledged to me), am able to speak my mind in ways that I couldn’t there, and primarily because I would not have gone in this direction without them.

So all in all in this brief moment of reflection before I officially launch The Mattress Underground, I would like to say a public THANK YOU to what’s the best mattress for the “push” to get this project started in the way it is :slight_smile: