I honestly can't remember how i found FM. It wasnt via a friend or word of mouth or EMD, just somewhere in the hundreds of pages i view daily.
What i do know is i signed up for a free account Nov 7, 2001. I believe they were finishing up some beta testing at that point, and were asking people to help test stuff and were soon offering very low prices on all accounts. I was being cheep and didnt take them up on it (did they ever offer a lifetime account? i cant recall... if so i'll kick myself in public for all to see).
I sent an email to the webmaster(not sure who it was, they didnt sign the reply, though the header has the domain optimaldecisions.com in it.. any ideas?). I was very enthusiastic about helping out, and my ideas were rather dumb in retrospect, with the exception of my comment that "the address book could be a little more robust". Funny that!
It wasnt until the end of May 2002 that i finally got a member account and started using it full time.