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 offered to fly me out to California and help him create some website templates. He was also going to pay me handsomely. I put in for some vacation time and went.
Tujunga is a decent sized town, about an hour outside of L.A. George’s office was quite impressive. He leased a large building in the downtown area. Inside, he had a fairly large staff of employees. Some were managing the office and clients; others seemed to be just there to serve George. There was an old man, probably in his seventies, that would do anything George asked, from getting him a cup of coffee to pulling weeds in his front lawn.
I spent a week with George and his fiancée, Yvonne. During that time, we talked about how he wanted to raise millions of dollars for an Internet business. I didn’t know if it was his being so close to Silicon Valley or the hourly glasses of scotch that made him think he could raise that kind of money, but it sounded sexy, so I listened.
George’s dream was to challenge eBay. He was convinced he could raise enough money from private investors to take on one of the world’s biggest websites. While I never imagined he would come close to achieving that goal, I thought even if he could grab a small percentage of the online auction market, that would be a pretty decent chunk of change.
On the last day of my visit, George was supposed to pay me $5,000 for my work. Just hours before he was going to drive me back to LAX airport, he posed an offer to me. I could take the check for five grand or I could drive home in one of his three vintage cars. I chose the latter and three days later, pulled into my Biloxi, MS driveway in a near mint condition 1973 candy apple red convertible Corvette.
The car made me think exactly what George wanted me to think. He was the real deal.
A few weeks later, he made me an offer to work for him full time. This was a hard decision, as I had a job making seventy thousand a year and it was one of those jobs where it would take an act of Congress to lose. But the Internet was the future and I knew I would never make millions working for the government.
George offered me $60,000 a year and two million shares of stock in the newly created “BidBay.com”. I took the deal and quit my job.
BidBay.com kicked off like gangbusters. George put a fund raising team together that included a former U.S. Congressman and some fancy Wall Street guys. The money started to pour in. Millions, just as he said it would. The official launch of the site came after a professionally produced TV commercial aired during the NFL playoffs. I remember sitting in George’s living room hitting the refresh button to see how many people signed up. Thousands were coming in every minute. This was going to be big.
I was flying back and forth between Mississippi and LA about twice a month. I liked working from home, but my time in Tujunga made me feel like royalty. Every lunch was catered and every day ended with beer and scotch. Dinners were at the finest restaurants in town. This was the life I wanted to live.
Once,