This post is part of the Spreadable Startup Series, which tells stories of entrepreneurs trying to change the world.  The series is made possible by Grasshopper Group.  Each week we will profile a new company and help them spread the word!  Want in? Apply here.

Richard Felix isn’t your average startup guy. Raised in the small town of Baker, Louisiana, he wasn’t exactly surrounding by a booming technology industry or privy to a wide array of mentors as he came up in the coding ranks. But he had the special sauce: an earnest desire to learn and a longing to build cool things.

Like other entrepreneurs we’ve covered in this series, Richard taught himself almost all of what knows about computers. “Growing up, I always loved playing with Lego’s and stuff like that. I really liked to build things on my own, from scratch, and that just kind of naturally led me into computers,” he says.  After mastering rudimentary programming in BASIC and C, Richard discovered the joy of building for the web and quickly became, at 15, the town’s resident computer guy, answering questions and repairing hardware.

With a little urging from his father, Richard turned his skills into a business venture and launched his first company: Felix’s Innovative Computer Solutions. It wasn’t long until almost everyone in town came knocking, and Richard cut his teeth building websites for the town of Baker, as well as several small businesses and area churches. The beginnings of a career in consumer internet development were all there.

Richard went off to college, but his desire to build cool things remained. He started learning how to build more complex web applications, and began working on a project called Hngry.com in 2005. It was Hngry that would open a whole host of new doors for Richard, and is the project that he pointed too as being most proud of when I later asked him. The application would allow people to to find a place to eat that matched what they were looking for, filtering for price, type of food, and other criteria.

Eventually he wanted to take the application to the next step by adding menus, and contacted another company in the industry to ask about accessing their database of menus. Much to his surprise, they invited Richard to fly up to New York to meet the company executives, and the offered Richard a job with a lucrative salary. In a move that defines Felix’ startup mantra, he turned it down. “Salary-wise and all that it was great. But I wouldn’t have been able to work on what I wanted to work on,” he said. “That was really important to me.”

It still is. Since Hngry.com, Richard has launched and maintained an impressive list of web applications. First came Fresh Arrival, a predecessor to daily deals sites that showcased a single cool product or service a day. “I read a lot,” says Felix, “and there were so many cool products and services out there, I though it would be neat to pick one each day and build a site around that.” After FreshArrival, Richard teamed up with Chris Coyier (now of Wufoo and CSS-Tricks.com) after meeting in a comments thread on Lifehacker (we hope they’ve since changed their passwords).

An accomplished designer, Chris’ skillset complemented Richard’s well, and the pair decided to try their hand at building a new website monitoring service, called AreMySitesUp.com. Targeted at industry professionals who needed to monitor a large number of sites, the service was popular immediately and continues to be profitable. While Coyier has largely stepped away from the product to pursue other ventures, Richard continues to maintain and support the product, and has recently launched a white-labeled cousin, AreMySitesUp White Label (AMSUWL) with his new partner, David Link, with whom he founded his current company, Sense Labs.

Sense Labs has previously rolled out other products, including Dispatch, a powerful application that helps businesses manage support requests. Check out a demo here. Recently, though, the team has been focused on integrating AMSUWL with other popular products like Highrise. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and Richard’s looking forward to continuing to support the product and spending some more time on marketing in the new year.

But if history tells us anything, it seems likely that Felix is cooking up something new, even as we speak.

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