About us

We have a proposition for you.

We want to give you $100; let’s get the ball rolling. All that needs to happen: You send a friend or colleague our way. If we end up taking on a website project for them, we owe you a $100 finder’s fee.

Your neighbor’s grandma needs a WordPress site? $100. Son-in-law needs Drupal work? $100.

That’s $100 for you, from us, if you send us someone who becomes our client. Thank goodness, we can finally send Ben Franklin home to you.

Example scenario:

Your aunt: My small business needs a new website.
You: You should hire Engine.
(She hires Engine)
Us: Here is $100.
(We give you $100)
You: Thank you.

Stipulations:

• Make sure they mention your name when they contact us. Obviously.
• No chicanery. We know you won’t do this, but we want to make sure nobody else tries any of that oh-boy-I’ll-get-my-friend-to-refer-me-and-we’ll-split-the-$100 nonsense. We’re all grownups here.
• No limit. We love building websites as much as you love getting $100. Which means we’d be insane and cruel to cut off you and us both. This offer stands, rain or shine. Why not refer 10 friends at once? One friend per season? 1,000 friends by 2049? Think big!

These are our terms. Your task: Make it rain like Tlaloc.

Our company is named ENGINE Industries. But why? That’s what keeps you up at night. WHY?

We came up with engine first (more on that in a minute), but needed a word to go with it since some hard-working domain campers have locked down engine.com for no good reason. We liked industries since it sounds, yes, industrious, and since the plurality implies we do a bunch of different things. Which we do. Plus it plays into the same kind of mechanical, utilitarian imagery as engine, and there’s a little near-rhyme in engine and indus. ENGINE Visions or ENGINE Enterprises (or whatever) sound jarring.

So, back to engine — it comes from a quote by Ernest Hemingway…

Book is like engine.

Hemingway and a vehicle
that contains an engine

It’s a really rich image. Writing a book is like building an engine. All the pieces have to work together. Kind of like websites, too.

There’s kind of two ways to read the line, as it relates to websites. Obviously Hems didn’t know he was talking about websites at the time, but so what.

If we think of a book as a creative thing, and an engine as a useful tool, then we can look at a business website as sort of a book about engines. Like using expressive web design to present an e-commerce system. Does that make sense?

On the flipside, there’s also using rock-solid web development to back up something pretty. Like an engine that drives a book, or a stout CMS that powers a fashion blog. Is this sounding like 3 a.m. wisdom?

It’s a great metaphor forwards and backwards. Our clients need their sites to run like great engines and look like great books. Final bonus nugget: we deal with search engines, so. Engine.

(The quote itself isn’t actually from a book. The big fella delivered it while promoting Across the River and Into the Trees, a late-career novel widely described as self-parody. The minorest of minor Hemingway; I don’t know anybody who’s read it. Of course, the rest of the quote shows Pops sailing into mock bravado…

Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually.

…but we’ll ignore all that.)

The following list is unimpressive in length.

Here are the web outposts on which ENGINE currently maintains a presence:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Kiva

There will probably be more soon, but we don’t really have time to invest in this kind of thing. We have our individual Twitters and Last.fms and Foursquares and so forth, but there are only so many hours in a day. We’ll update this list as we find more sites worth thinking about keeping up with.