sold about fifty, before AOL shut down our account. Apparently, a few people got angry and reported me. I guess some people didn’t think getting email was as cool as I did.
Oh well, at least I still had the production company. Or so I thought.
I came home from work one night to find the house almost empty. Matt had packed up everything and headed home. The camera, the editing deck, the computer, it was all gone.
A week later, I was fired from the radio station and was forced to move. I ended up renting a thirty year old house on wheels in a trashy trailer park.
It was time to start looking for a real job.
CHAPTER 3
TRAINING ON TAX PAYER’S DIME
After a series of dead end jobs, in 1998, I landed a job working at Stennis Space Center as a video producer for the Naval Oceanographic Office. It was a cushy job that paid very well. For the first time in my life, I was making over $70,000 a year, but it was killing me. It turns out working for the government may be the fastest ticket to boredom and depression.
The position was vacant for a few months before I started. During that time, the folks in charge decided to purchase a new editing system. Without the guidance of an experienced video guy, they relied on a salesman to tell them what they needed. The result was a million dollar system that was about ten years outdated.
When I started, they were excited to show me their new purchase. I informed them the system they had was a dinosaur and the rest of the world was in the non-linear age. I expected disappointment, but they smiled and said, “Just buy whatever system you want.” I went on to replace their million dollar fiasco with an updated $7,000 digital system.
A few weeks later, I was asked to make a list and purchase any software I may need. I spent about $300 buying various editing tools. They came back to me and said that wasn’t enough, “We’ll need you to spend a bunch more on software.” It didn’t matter to them whether or not I actually had a use for the software. That was the budget and they needed the money spent.
Years later, it occurred to me how corrupt these government “spend it or lose it” budgets can be. Imagine if I had a friend in the software business. I could have bought everything from him. Or I could have signed up for affiliate deals for mainstream software and took a kickback from every purchase made.
I mentioned this job was killing me. It wasn’t all the hard work that was doing me in. My problem was sheer boredom. My day consisted of a ten minute morning meeting, a two hour lunch, then wait to go home at five.
Six months into my time at the space center, I was assigned my first major project. It was a fifteen minute overview video that was to be shown to politicians and other VIPs touring the facility. They told me the project had a short deadline, so I would have to work hard to bust it out on time. This was no problem for me, as I came from the fast paced world of the producing the news for the military and there was always a short deadline. After seeing what they wanted done, in my head, I estimated it would take about two weeks to write the script, shoot the necessary footage, and edit the final product.
“How long do I have?”
“We need it by July 15th.”
“July? Are you sure?”
“Why, do you need more time?”
It was December.
The final video had an old time marine feel to it. Originally, I did the voiceover myself, but I felt my voice was a bit too young for this, so I called Terry, a buddy of mine from my radio days. He had a much older, raspier voice. It would be perfect for the production.
Terry said he would do the audio work for $300. I emailed him the script and he sent me a CD the next day. My bosses thought he sounded great, but they balked at the fee. They said, “It would look fishy if we paid him just $300. We need to pay him the going SAG rates.”
I called Terry to explain that we were unable to pay what he was asking. He couldn’t believe the government was unable to afford $300. I said, “Terry, they refuse to pay you $300, but they are sending a check for $1,200.” Terry didn’t complain anymore.
For the next year, I spent most of my time surfing the Internet. The world was changing fast and the Internet was exploding. I watched from my cubicle as idiots got funded millions of dollars for dumb ideas that probably wouldn’t ever make a dime.
I decided I was going to start using my time at “work” to throw my hat into the dot com arena. I knew nothing about creating websites, but I had all the time in the world to learn.
CHAPTER 4
DOT COM DREAMS
A friend hooked me up with some software that made building sites a snap. I started learning about affiliate programs. An affiliate program is where you send people to a website and get paid a commission if they make a purchase. My first shot at it was a website called Go Biloxi. I signed up as an affiliate for one of the few travel sites out there and made a commission each time somebody booked a hotel room in Biloxi, MS.
I started listing the link in all of the directories. Back then, I had no idea this was called backlinking and, apparently, the search engines dig that stuff. Then, something crazy happened. My site got ranked really well in Yahoo. The people started coming - and they were booking hotel rooms! Things were much different back them. A few good keywords, a bunch of content, and some backlinks was all it took to get high search engine rankings, even in a lucrative niche, such as travel. As the Internet grew, this would become harder and harder to achieve.
I followed this up by creating identical sites for other cities. It was like using a cookie cutter. All I had to do was change the name of the site and the location of what hotels I wanted to appear. I wasn’t making the big bucks, but a couple of hundred bucks a week was nothing to sneeze at, especially since it was a ‘set it and forget it” type of system. I did the work one time and the sites continued to pay.
I thought I could make even more money by selling similar travel websites to others wanting to get in the game. I listed a brand new site on eBay and it quickly sold for $900. Soon, I was creating and selling these sites at the pace of five a week. This practice would later become known as “site flipping”, but at the time, I seemed to be the only one doing it.
Unfortunately, this was only lucrative for a few months. It wasn’t long before more and more people started selling their cookie-cutter websites on eBay. Along with the rush of new sites, came a race to the bottom. Pretty soon, quality looking websites were being sold for under ten dollars. It was no longer worth my time to flip sites, but it was a heck of a run, with very little effort, so I wasn’t complaining too much.
One of the people that bought a site from me was George, a former IRS agent running a tax prep service in Tujunga, California. George called me and we talked for hours about some of his own dot com dreams.
I remember thinking how interesting this man sounded. He was born in Lebanon and grew up in Kuwait. If I recall correctly, his mother was Greek. His accent was pretty cool.
We kept in touch for the next few weeks. Each time we talked, George would give more details about his vision. We shared similar visions, although mine were just pipedreams at the time. Impressed by my limited web design talents, George
