Mr. Mark Hamran

Mark Hamran founded and created AquariumPlants.com in his South Dakota garage in 1998 at the dawn of the internet age with funds he obtained from selling his previous business — a saloon named “Ole’s.” Mark was an e-commerce pioneer and was the first to ever to sell aquarium plants and supplies on the internet. In the following year, Mark’s friend and business partner, Mr. Randall Sehr was recruited to keep the operation running smoothly. Together, Mark and Randy built the business into an enterprise with annual sales in excess of $3MM at its peak in 2016.

Mark Olav Hamran was born on December 7, 1961 in Canton, SD to Olav “Ole” and Dorothy (Kidd) Hamran. He graduated from Canton High School. Mark never married, but was truly loved by his siblings, nieces, nephews, and many friends. Mark worked several different jobs after high school. In the early 1990’s, he built and operated Ole’s Convenience Store. Mark was fun-loving and had a mischievous sense of humor which often got him into trouble. He had a love of the water and was drawn to it. After moving to Florida in late 2015, he was able to spend more time boating in the ocean, which he loved.

In addition to pioneering online e-commerce, Mark had numerous other contributions in the aquarium hobby including inventing the Carbon Doser– a device used for optimally injecting CO2 into planted aquariums and being the first to import and make available exotic plants from Sri Lanka.

Mark at age 62, tragically and unexpectedly passed away on Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at his business in Florida.

The History of AquariumPlants.com

1995: The Beginning of the Internet

In 1995, the world was buzzing with excitement about a new technology called the internet. People imagined it as a global network filled with “websites,” which acted like storefronts in a digital marketplace. Instead of traveling from one store to another, customers could simply type the name of a business—called a domain name—into their computer and add “.com” at the end. For example, someone looking to buy a car might visit Cars.com or Autos.com.

A domain name is the easy-to-remember address you type into a web browser to visit a website, such as example.com. It works like a street address for the internet. When you type a domain name, your computer sends a request to special servers called DNS servers. These servers act like phone books and look up the domain name to find the website’s real location, which is a long string of numbers called an IP address. Once the DNS server finds the correct IP address, your computer connects to the website’s server, and the page loads on your screen. Domain names make using the internet much simpler because people can remember words better than long numbers.

1998: The Founding of AquariumPlantLife.com

In 1998, Mark Olav Hamran, a 36-year-old high school graduate and longtime resident of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, had successfully launched his first business, a popular local saloon called Ole’s. After selling Ole’s to a new owner, Mark began searching for his next venture. With a lifelong interest in plants and fish tanks, he came up with the idea of selling live aquarium plants. Early on, Mark understood the high profitability of selling aquarium plants. He would purchase thousands of plants at a time from his suppliers and resell each individual plant at a 4x markup. With help from his mom, Dorothy Hamran, who handled customer service, and his childhood friend, Randall Sehr, Mark launched AquariumPlantLife.com from his garage. Shortly afterwards, he began selling water equipment, driftwood, and decor to complement his growing arsenal of plant inventory he was importing from Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and the Amazon River.

Mark’s home-based business blossomed and soon, he began fielding traffic from customers across the United States. Mark found himself barely able to keep up with the demand. Professional aquatic plant growers, breeders, and aquarium enthusiasts were placing orders to his website for beautiful aquarium plants such as the Amazon Sword, Golden Moneywort, and stunningly beautiful Tiger Lotus lily. In 1999, Mark purchased the AquariumPlants.com and AquariumPlant.com domain names for $3500 in a private deal, and rebranded AquariumPlantLife.com to AquariumPlants.com. He astutely believed the shorter domain name would be easier for his customers to remember and navigate to. Mark smartly set up his new domain names to have AquariumPlant.com (singular) redirect to AquariumPlants.com (plural). This ensured that customers searching for aquarium plants online could enter either “aquariumplants” or “aquariumplant,” adding “.com,” and both would direct them to Mark’s website. The future would prove Mark’s decision to be prescient.

2000-2020: AquariumPlants.com Rebranding and Continued Success

AquariumPlants.com survived the bust of the dotcom crash in 2001 and began prospering in the early 2000’s and 2010’s. In 2004, Mark paid content writers specializing in biology to publish articles and “how to” guides for various plant species on AquariumPlants.com. Soon, hobbyists and enthusiasts began recognizing Mark as the de facto aquarium plant resource on the internet and orders continued piling in. At its peak in 2016, the website would go on to generate in excess of $3MM in sales and become the #1 destination on the internet for multiple Google search terms such as “aquarium plants,” “aquatic plants,” and “pond plants.”