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Bryan Heitman might have had a hunch his homespun business would make him a millionaire before he was old enough to drink legally. But there's no way he could have predicted the lessons he'd learn:

Lesson 1: The more customers you try to please, the fewer customers you'll have. Lesson 2: The more customers you have, the less likely you'll turn a profit. Lesson 3: The more money you lose, the greater your odds of staying in business.Alas, such logic is lost on a sixteen-year-old. When Heitman became an entrepreneur in 1997, he was a quiet sophomore at St. Joseph Central High School who battled boredom by logging thousands of hours on his computer. Since his middle school days, the Internet craze had been building to a full frenzy. On the West Coast, kids not much older than he were launching Web sites like Yahoo and Excite.com and becoming millionaires.

As he advanced through puberty, Heitman blossomed into a full-blown computer guru. Working late into the evenings in the basement of his parents' house, he wrote programs that would allow people with basic computer skills to launch and maintain their own Web sites. Soon he had a sweeping business vision: He'd rent chunks of cyberspace and host clients' sites for them. He dubbed his infant empire CommuniTech.Net. It was small, but it beat pulling in $4.25 an hour to bag groceries at his father's supermarket.

He'd heard through relatives that a distant cousin, Gabriel Murphy, was looking for ways to tap into the wide-open high-tech marketplace, too.

Murphy had spent most of his high school years in the Kansas City Northland before moving to St. Joseph for his senior year. When Heitman started his business, Murphy (who'd gotten married the year before) was a sophomore at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, studying business management and marketing.

Gabe Murphy was the yin to Bryan Heitman's yang -- a fast talker with a firm handshake. "He was going a hundred miles an hour all the time," says Lenny Hihath, a childhood friend who went to school in St. Joseph with Murphy's future wife. "You could tell he was going places. He was always so excited about life." (Murphy's and Heitman's lawyers would not allow their clients to speak with the Pitch for this article.)

Murphy pursued goals relentlessly. "No matter how much I tried to blow him off," his wife, Stephanie, told the Kansas City Business Journal in 2001, "he just never quit asking me out, so we eventually went out, and the rest is history." (Murphy ultimately proposed to Stephanie on Ricki Lake's talk show.)

"People tell him no, and that's even more reason for him to try," Stephanie says.

But after reading Heitman's earliest e-mailed business pitches, Murphy passed on the idea. He couldn't see the potential in hosting Web sites for individuals and small businesses at competitively low prices.

Heitman kept at it. He programmed his site so that it would send him an e-mail every time a new client signed up. He began forwarding the notices to Murphy, and when they started to arrive at the rate of three or four a day, the young Ivy Leaguer realized his mistake.

Without telling his wife, Murphy decided in the fall of 1997 to skip a couple of months' rent and bills so he could scrape together $1,800 to invest in the company. By the following autumn, he and Heitman were charging their clients a nominal fee -- less than $10 a month. Most of their big national competitors -- such as Verio and Affinity -- were charging $50. Soon they had so many customers that Murphy decided to take a leave from school the first semester of his senior year.

By then, in the fall of 1998, the operation had moved from the Heitmans' basement to an 18-foot-by-15-foot office in a complex in St. Joseph near Interstate 29. It was barely big enough for a four-desk cubicle. Rent was $225 a month. Heitman spent his mornings at school, his afternoons and evenings at the office. "I remember during our senior year seeing him at the pay phone all the time, getting updates from Gabe," says Jason Squires, Heitman's high school computer buddy.

By the end of 1998, CommuniTech had several employees, 3,000 customers and $400,000 in annual revenue. And by May 1999, when Heitman and Murphy had graduated from high school and college, respectively, they were drawing salaries of $30,000 and supervising a staff of twelve. The operation had gotten big enough to move to Kansas City's burgeoning Crossroads District, a hip neighborhood of revamped warehouses just south of the downtown loop.

Within another two years, the company had taken over five floors of the Main Mark Building (the one with the giant "Byte Me!" banner on the side), wiring the suddenly hot property with miles and miles of high-tech infrastructure. As annual revenues grew into the millions, CommuniTech sparked a mini economic boom in the heart of the city, with other young businesses springing up around it. In 2001, the company of sandal-wearing twentysomethings had generated so much buzz that Kansas City's Chamber of Commerce named it Small Business of the Year.