(FORTUNE Magazine) – REX HAMMOCK age 46 Hammock, a Nashville publisher, has built Websites for his customers over a span of five years. This year he's introducing the first site of his own, smallbusiness.com.

Within weeks of registering the domain name smallbusiness.com in 1995, I began to get calls from people who wanted to buy it--from individuals and from large corporations. I even had a big-company CEO track me down at home. I was offered over $1 million for the name. I always just felt that it should be used by small business, not used to sell things to small business. It sounds goofy, but I considered myself more a steward of the name than an owner of it. And I waited until I had a good business idea to launch my site.

What we're doing from a technology standpoint is being very, very enthusiastically received by the people I meet on the West Coast. But one of the questions I'm always asked is, Can you do this in Nashville? We have to remind people that the city has a great standard of living for employees and that we also have a natural pool of talent coming from Vanderbilt University, which is right across the street. We have low overhead--less expensive labor and real estate. And we can see things you might miss being in a big tech market. I don't hang out with Internet people here, but I do when I go to San Francisco, and the Internet is all they talk about. It can be so easy to get wrapped up in what these very smart people are saying, you begin to think that's the entire universe. But in Nashville I'm around real people, living in the real world. That might sound snide. But it's a real benefit.

Did you see the movie The Patriot? There's this scene where the patriots are in Yorktown and they let the British invade them and wipe out their front lines. But then, when the British cross over the hill, there are more patriots waiting for them, ready to fight. That scene reminds me of the first wave of Internet innovators, who are getting mowed down. Maybe we'll be the second wave, able to learn from other people's mistakes. Sometimes being a laggard lets you see the dead bodies in front of you.