Work began on GozBay back in 2006 when Zachary Gosling began working on an internet auction concept that he would use to compete in a Future Business Leaders of America Competition. After about a year in development, Gosling received 2nd place recognition at both the State and National levels of the Future Business Leaders of America E-Business Competition.
After receiving 2nd place recognition at the State level, a local TV station WGAL ran a story about GozBay which grabbed the attention and support of many people in the Lancaster County area. A few month’s later when GozBay received 2nd place recognition at the national level, WGAL ran a follow up story on GozBay since Gosling was the first Student from Lancaster County to earn 2nd place honors at a National Future Business Leaders of America competition. At this point GozBay was receiving around 100,000 hits per month and Gosling knew he had created something special and decided to turn GozBay into a business by selling advertisements to local businesses.
Gosling continued to work on GozBay by adding new features, which GozBay users suggested, every month and was interviewed by three local newspapers about his success with GozBay. The following summer in 2008, a producer of Philadelphia’s 6ABC Action News contacted Gosling about running a story on GozBay for their “Right Now on the Net” segment of the evening news.
Gosling quickly took advantage of the opportunity by deciding to offer the next 2000 users who registered on GozBay no fees for LIFE. He did this because he knew that these next few thousand users would be the foundation for GozBay and would be the people who help build GozBay into a very successful internet auction website.
The story about GozBay ran on 6ABC on June 16, 2008. This story captured the attention of people all over the greater Philadelphia area and in the month of June GozBay received just over 3 Million hits. GozBay quickly out grew their shared server and began leasing a dedicated server from a reputable internet services company in Chicago.
Gosling did the best job that he could possibly do at keeping GozBay stable, considering the exponential growth and at the same time trying to add as many new features to gain a competitive advantage in the Internet Auction industry.
Unfortunately on October 31st 2008 (Halloween), hackers found a security vulnerability in the listing process of GozBay and carried out a malicious attack which crippled GozBay. This attack was aimed at destroying our 11,000 active listings and over 75,000 closed auctions as well attempting to destroy our database of our users. Unfortunately the attackers were successful at destroying the thousands of auctions that GozBay housed as well as destroying our database of users however we were able to recover over 90% of our users and their information.
Shortly after GozBay was taken offline, the owner of a successful IT company contacted us regarding the future of GozBay. With his help along with the backing of Angel Investors we have put an exceptional team together capable of providing the security, scalability and resources required to make GozBay a successful auction website. This team consists of security experts and IT professionals, Attorneys, and expert programmers along with the founder Zach Gosling. Each of these key individuals now has a stake in GozBay. On June 1st 2009 we released an extremely aggressive new GozBay.com. Our #1 goal and attention was directed towards site stability and usability, after which we focused on additional design enhancements and feature requests. After 6 months of minimal issues with GozBay we updated the design and added various new features on January 13th 2010. GozBay is now running stronger than ever and is gaining new users every day.