Message Rain is the creation of Glenn C. Koenig, of Arlington, Massachusetts.
History: During the last week of February, 2009, I had come up with the idea of making stickers of the first two messages ("Don't bail them out ..." and "Too big to fail ...") in quantity. On Friday, I visited Adart Signs in West Medford, Massachusetts, to design the text on screen and then see what they would look like printed out on the sticker material. I wanted to put up a web page to offer them to the public, but I wanted to have a domain name other than the ones I already had (Open Eyes Video, Dancing-Data, or Energy Stories). When I started poking around with a browser, I found that the first few ideas I had for a new domain name had already been taken.
Then, on Friday night the 27th of February 2009, (actually early Saturday the 28th, around 12:40 AM), I was driving back to my home in Arlington from Dance Friday in Brookline. It was raining lightly and I pondered the sense of something falling down from the sky all around us. I likened this to how ideas seem to occur to me at times, seeming also to fall out of the sky. So the phrase "rain of messages" occurred to me. I shortened it to "Message Rain" and decided I liked it that way better.
So when I arrived home, I found that the name was available and registered it. Then I began to wonder what to do about hosting. I didn't want to start yet another hosting arrangement, as I already had three and they cost approximately $10 per month each. So I realized that I could just start a new range of pages on one of my exiisting sites. As my main business account goes under the name Open Eyes Video, that's where I decided to create the new pages.
By Sunday morning, March 1st, I had the page up, with scanned in images of the first two stickers. By that afternoon, I had already sold two at a League of Women Voters brunch in Arlington. Then commences the ardous work of real marketing and promotion.
Pricing: When I sold the first two stickers, I only collected $2.00 each. There was no shipping because I just handed them to each buyer in person. But what should I do about sales tax? I didn't have any change on me when I made those two sales, the customers just handed me two one dollar bills and we were done. I have had a sales tax number for years, but didn't want to carry change around with me, just to facilitate customers who then needed to pay $2.10 each. So I decided to make the actual price 1.90 so that it would come to an even $2.00 with the tax included. But then I'd have to charge everyone else (in other states) 1.90 also. This seemed like an unnecessary complication when it came to computing prices and managing the bookkeeping of this in general. So, I decided to sell to Massachusetts residents at a discount ... a discount that just happens to be equivalent to the regular price, minus the 5% sales tax. That way, everybody pays the same price, I make a little less on sales locally, and I still hand the tax I collect over to the state at the end of the year, as usual. And I save a huge amount of time by not having to make change. Fair enough?