From nobodies in Maine to explosive fame

— -- Here's how — in less than a month — two guys from Buckfield, Maine, turned $1,000 of soda and candy into late-night fame and busy careers, all thanks to a video gone viral:

•June 3, 2006:EepyBird.com goes live at 6 a.m., featuring a video called The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiment, in which Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz drop 523 mints into 101 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke to explosive effect. The video gets 14,000 hits by 10 p.m.

•June 4:Experiment is posted on a variety of sites, including Slashdot.com.

•June 5:Late Show With David Letterman calls after a producer spots the video on a German blog.

•June 7:Grobe and Voltz go on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

•June 9:Mentos maker Perfetti Van Melle agrees to sponsor performances in the USA, Turkey, Holland and England.

•June 14:More than 200,000 curiosity seekers visit EepyBird.com in one day. In 12 days, the video has been viewed more than 1 million times.

•June 29:Performance on the Late Show.

•June 30:Performance on the Today show.

More than 11 million views later, Grobe and Voltz constantly are on the road with their mint-and-cola show, performing at corporate events and state fairs. Last month, the pair stopped in the Netherlands to grab a Guinness World Record by making 504 bottles of Diet Coke erupt simultaneously.