The Following Inspiring Story Is From http://www.andrewfashion.com/category/young-stupid/
This blog is to explain how I made 2.5 million (rough amount pre-tax) on my own, what I did with it, and how I lost it, and how I plan to get there again. This will be a story of facts, true events, and possibly more… This story is to be a reminder of myself that greatness can be achieved by anyone, and hopefully to inspire you and maybe inspire myself again. If you keep up with any of my blogs, you can tell I am a venter who has lost his Mojo. So let’s dig in to some of the details…
July to October 2005 Wow it’s hard for me to even believe it was this long ago? Four years ago I guess… Ugh, how time goes so quickly… July through October was where I was busting my ass off, literally, like you see in the movies, day and night programming. I was barely 18 years old now, just turned 18 in May 2005. I just moved to my 2nd apartment complex ever. My first roommate was Michael Bale, a friend I have had around since elementary school. Him and I have always had the same interests in making tons of money on the internet, ever since early high school, including having Counter-Strike 1.3 in common, haha. Him and I went our seperate ways for a little, and I moved in with Kurtis, my 2nd apartment as I just stated. I basically gave him free rent, food, etc… if he agreed to help me work on my websites. Photoshop websites, art community websites, myspace sites, etc… I had a few photoshop sites, and I forget the names to them, a humor website (thehumorworld.com), and iDesignThis.com an art community. I have always been a website guy, programmer, and entrepreneur at heart. I literally spent every waking second on the computer building websites, drinking 12 packs of soda every single day, fucking literally. I could down a 12 pack of any type of soda quicker than any human on this earth, guaranteed. Keep in mind, I dropped out of high school because I hated it, and wanted so badly to make money off the internet via Google Ads, banner ads, any type of internet advertising, because I knew it was there, I made small amounts of money off my photoshop websites, $20-$150/day depending on how well we did or how much work we put into it. This is how I was paying rent and for food, barely making enough to cover rent. Talk about stressful, living off internet revenue, not a stable job when your small time on the internet. This is where I picked up some momentum, I sold iDesignThis.com for $2000 cash on Sitepoint.com. Now this was my first website I have ever sold, and I built the entire thing myself, well, I lied… Kurtis designed the interface, and I programmed the entire community, front-end to back-end. I forgot to mention, I did get a few small side programming jobs as well that paid, a buddy of mine in New York got me a few small jobs doing PHP/MySQL work. So, I saw a MySpace website called chasebadkids.net, and I was so into MySpace, it was obvious to myself I needed to build a MySpace site. I’ve always built support, help sites, for some reason I just liked to help people out on the internet. So I purchased MySpaceSupport.com, Kurtis” actually gave me the domain idea, and built the first few user interfaces for MySpaceSupport.com, and of course I spent every waking second programming the site, building the profile editor, the tools, layouts, etc… Kurtis” helped me a pretty great deal with designs as well. Now I had Google Ads on this website, and was making only a few bucks a day off the site. This is when I got into MySpace Whoring, when posting bulletins and having a shit load of friends actually meant something. I still have 4 accounts with 30-60k friends each, means nothing now, but back then…. Big accounts were fucking gold mines, it took me hours and days of whoring to get all the friends I had, it was like building the most insane online image ever, everyone knew who I was, it was crazy… I would slowly go from 1k, 2k, 5k, to 30k, to 50k friends in a few months, I was in chats with big MySpace Whores, even a few times I ended up in chatrooms with Chris Crocker, Forbidden, etc… It’s funny as hell to think about how big they are now… So I started paying MySpace Whores to post bulletins for my site, and every time they would post a bulletin for me, my traffic would spike huge, naturally my site would grow and spread via Links, word of mouth, bulletins, SEO, and oh it did. My site grew faster than any website I have built in my entire life of being on the internet… I started making $100-$350/day easily with Google Ads, and then the magic month came…
November 2005 I switched from Google to Yahoo Ads. I remember this night like the I know the back of my hand… Michael Bale came over, and it was obvious I was doing better, my close friends knew I started making decent money now. The night he came over, I switched to Yahoo Ads, and in approximately 4-8 hours, I don’t know how long we were bull shitting around, but that night, my Yahoo account showed I made $2000 that fucking night. I was hysterical, freaking, saying wtf, there is no way. But there was, and it was real. Naturally my site kept getting bigger and bigger. I made $100,000 in November, and since Yahoo was a Net 45-60 company…
January 2006 I received my first check for One-hundred-thousand dollars around January 15th… My life was changed, it was real, the check was in my hand, I showed everyone, my friends, my step dad, and of course the bank. It took 10 days for the bank to clear it, but after the first one, they cleared every other one instantly.
February 2006 Bought my first car in cash, 2006 BMW 330xi black on black, all options, paid $49k cash after tax, another $3k for plates and registration.
March 2006 Bought my first house in Littleton, CO. I put $80k down, $11k in closing costs, the house cost me $420k. I met Rose, we fell in love. I flew her to Hawaii last minute, we made the decision to go that night and bought the tickets that night to leave the following morning, 16 hours before departure, and my first trip ever overseas. We played UNO on the plane, cute right? Money does buy happiness, people who disagree are either A) Poor, B) Stupid, C) Envy the rich, D) All of the above
December 2006 I was unstoppable, rich, had a girl who loved me for me, my own house, my own car, an 11 foot Christmas tree, and spoiled the shit out of her. Probably spent 3-5k on her just for Christmas, not including the 5k photoshoot I paid for with Michael Vincent.
April 2007 I flew to Miami with Rick, and his friend to completely give MySpaceSupport.com a face life, this was the month and the year that destroyed me. I didn’t know a lot about SEO. Did a complete site face lift, code restructure, URL Rewrites, etc… When you have a site that is #1 for a very competitive term on Google and Yahoo search engines… You can’t just change your site completely, changing the URLs killed my page rank, my authority, any power my site had, was dropped completely, and I fell off of the search engines. 40% of my traffic was from search engines, 10-20% direct, and the other 40% from MySpace Profiles. I spent approximately 15-20k in the redesign, and it made me lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Leads me to believe, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fucking fix it.”
August 2007 Moved to San Diego with my ex-gf Rose for 6 months, then to LA for 6 months. Lost a lot of money, and wasted a lot of money on expensive rent.
August 2008 Moved back home to CO into my house, came up with the idea of beModel.com with Jamie.
April 2008 I sold MySpaceSupport.com on April 17th because it just kept dying, and getting worse, ever since the SEO drop, I was never able to get back to the top, traffic kept dying… I sold it for 75k cash.
Conclusion Have you ever heard of “The Secret?” It’s a movie based on one theory, one law, one rule, The Law of Attraction. Let me tell you, my entire life, well ever since I started building websites around the 6th grade, and figuring out you can make money from it in the 9th grade, I have craved and wanted to make money so badly off the internet. It was my constant thought, and at some points I was making small amounts of money from the internet while in high school. I had no negative thoughts in my head, and I know it for a fact, how badly I wanted it, and it came, when I dropped out, cause I never stopped, ever. I programmed day and night working my ass off to make money from the internet. If I wasn’t skateboarding, I was on my computer 24 fucking 7, literally… All the way from grade 6 to grade 12, I went through my VB phase, C++ phase, Hacking/cracking phase, Subseven phase, and ended up sticking with PHP/MySQL/XHTML/CSS… The fact that what I wanted and saw in my head so bad came true? Making millions off the internet… Now that’s not the only law of attraction moment that happened to me… The entire time I was making millions, the entire two years, I was worried, worried to lose it all, worried my site would die, worried I would get banned or cut off. Guess what, it happened, which goes to show that “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.” — Buddha, so now you know how I did it, I had a vision and persevered. I hear two things a lot from people, I am ADHD and can’t ever concentrate (true), and that I am insanely persistent (true). If I want something, I never give up, ever… You must persevere, and I must continue to persevere, or I will never reach the top again. From these 4 years of experiences, I have lost a lot a faith in people, in relationships, my trust has basically been shattered, and have a hard time believing anyone anymore. People will say and do anything to get where you’re at. But if you want the fame, the money, that’s one of the consequences you must deal with, just keep you’re guard up. I feel I need to keep my guard up more, but that’s the story, that’s how I did it, and how I plan to do it again. Well it’s a little different now… beModel.com
Where it all went What can I say, I was Young & Stupid – a book I am currently working on. Girls, cars, house, house upgrades, trips, toys, Vegas, strip clubs, taxes… Be smart with your money, invest it, don’t buy anything I did, I learned my lesson the hard way… Stocks, commercial real estate, accredited investor, hedge funds, IRAs, businesses, ugh, the list goes on… Not once will I let this happen again. The toys and Vegas trips were fun, but it ate my alive in the end. The top is where you can finally breathe, and live to your fullest. Trust me. Great thanks to my friends Kurtis”, and Michael Bale for being there when I needed you guys, and helping me out. Part 2: Young & Stupid: How I Lost My Millions
You Can Read Part 2 Here: http://www.andrewfashion.com/category/young-stupid/
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