The original goal of 2create was definitely to make money but my inspiration at the time was the fact there weren't a lot of comprehensive sites out there on how to build a website. Of course there are gazillions of them now but I think being one of the first definitely helped a lot. 1stsitefree.com was one of the best and most thorough in my opinion and I wanted to take it a step further than that author. (I still can't figure out why this guy never monetized that site. It used to rank #1 for almost everything!)
Yes, there were lots of smaller sites on how to register a domain and web hosting comparison sites, etc. but I didn't see any that told the story from an author's point of view, using their own experiences, personality, etc.
To be honest, the original goal of 2create was to promote LinkSky's web hosting program and Site Build It! (even though I didn't own SBI! at the time... shame shame.
) At the time LinkSky had one of the highest affiliate payouts for web hosting. (I think it was $60 or $70 bucks and I was their customer at the time.) That's when I learned the importance of recommending products that you own. I quickly began getting sales and I was LinkSky's top affiliate up until the day I moved to Powweb.
Then as I continued to learn new things I just kept building 2create and adding more affiliate programs. In 2003, AdSense launched and it was a dream for people who already had traffic because that meant instant money. Then I bought Site Build It! and started promoting them, the list goes on... 2create sort of just evolved... slowly but surely.