Dr. Michael Ambrose was in sixth grade at Orchard Lake Middle School in West Bloomfield when he started his first business, a dial-up internet website that featured the mid-1990s meme "Dancing Baby" and sold $15.95 dancing baby T-shirts.
It was 1996, and his big break was landing in the top results on the hot new search engine Yahoo! Visitors poured into his website after seeing the 3D-animated "baby" on episodes of "Ally McBeal," where it appeared as a metaphor for Ally's ticking biological clock.
"I said, ‘Mom and Dad, I made this thing called a website that 10,000 people a day are looking at, what do you think?' " Ambrose, now 35, recalled. "And my dad’s first reaction was, ‘You need to sell something.’”
Today, Ambrose is an Ann Arbor pediatrician and the founder and director of another fast-growing but very different business: an electronic medical records company, DocNetwork, with clients in 49 states and four countries that is geared to help camps, day cares and schools track the health backgrounds and medicine regimens of their participants and students.
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Among other things, DocNetwork provides reminders about daily medication schedules and gives alerts about food allergies.
The company started in 2009 and is up to 1,250 camps and about $5 million in annual revenue, he said. Its 46 employees have outgrown their leased office in Pittsfield Township outside Ann Arbor, and the company is preparing to triple its office space next month.
In an interview, Ambrose said that few other companies deal with these types of medical records.
"We were the industry leader from the beginning," said Ambrose, who also works as an emergency pediatric physician several evenings a month at St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor Hospital. “From our research, about 80% of the market is untouched."
DocNetwork eliminates the need for parents to fill out new medical forms for every new camp or school. They need submit the information only once, Ambrose said, and it follows their child to any place that is set up with DocNetwork.
Camp or school administrators “can click one button, 'show me all of the kids who have food allergies in week two of camp. Show me all the kids that have asthma,' and so on," he said.
3 dancing babies
Ambrose was not the creator of the original Dancing Baby animation, but he helped to publicize it. Before the meme became widely available online, he said he obtained copies of the animation file from someone in a chat room.
He then posted the meme on his personal website, and later created the crashdesigns.com site that sold the Dancing Baby T-shirts he and his father ordered from wholesalers.
"There were three different versions of the dancing baby and I had acquired all three versions," he said.
Ambrose said his business and websites never encountered any copyright issues.
"They were happy because we popularized it," he said. ”This was before Napster, before Facebook, before YouTube, so the concept of all that copyright stuff was brand new."
Ambrose graduated from West Bloomfield High School in 2002 and went on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Proceeds from the sale of crashdesigns.com helped to pay for his schooling, including University of Michigan Medical School, although he said he can't recall precisely how much the business sold for.
The crashdesigns.com website itself no longer exists.
"But it essentially paid for medical school, which was pretty exciting," he said.
DocNetwork gets started
Ambrose came up with the idea for DocNetwork while volunteering at a summer camp between high school and college and seeing camp administrators struggle to keep track of medical paperwork for hundreds of campers.
“They were dispensing medications all of the time, they were collecting medical forms, and errors were being made," he said. "They would lose medical forms, they would have a hard time reviewing the chicken scratch handwriting that was on a medical form, and so I approached the camp administration and said, ‘there’s got to be a better way to do this.’ ”
He developed an earlier version of DocNetwork while in college, and later upgraded and expanded the application during his free time in medical school. The company landed its first paying customer in 2010, he said, and has nearly doubled in size every year.
Asked whether his early business experience with a "dancing baby" had any influence on his subsequent decision to become a pediatrician, Ambrose replied, “I think it’s fair to say that it had an impact.”
He added, “I grew up in a big family; I have three younger sisters who I was always taking care of, and I started going to summer camps in the first grade, so I’ve always been around kids.”
Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2019/10/08/doctor-dancing-baby-meme-doctnetwork/3774127002/
2019-10-08 10:00:00Z
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