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How A Kid Earned $2m Before He Could Drink – And The Shocking Way He Lost It
- vaksel 17y agoI posted about this yesterday, and Andrew finally upped the interview, so here is a link.
- mikeryan 17y agoJust a note, Mixergy seems to put up a bunch of interviews that I'd be interested in _reading_ but watching a 1 hour interview just doesn't work for me.
- sachinag 17y agoIf you scroll down, there's a transcript made by MTurkers. (It's Friday, so you get snark-free. Well, aside from this parenthetical.)
- mikeryan 17y agoYah, I'm aware of that and thought about raising the point. The joy of an article is that someone actually spends time "editing" the interesting information into something readable. The transcript is a bit of a poor substitute.
- jyu 17y agoI'm glad the full transcript is available. You get a lot of insight into the personality of the founder that you wouldn't otherwise.
- mcantor 17y agoI have this issue with Mixergy as well. It sounds kind of stupid now that I'm typing it out, but... an hour is a long time. And the synopses that they write for the interviews are rarely very good.
- pyre 17y agoThe fact that it's in audio is nice too. If something is only in video is demands your full attention, but something that is in audio you can multi-task while listening to. (Maybe it's only me, but I really find it hard to watch video and do something else at the same time unless the video is completely and utterly boring)
- vaksel 17y agoI actually disagree completely, yes an hour is a long time, but that is exactly why I like watching them. Most "real" interviews are so short, you never get any details, with mixergy you can actually get the nitty gritty details that help you see the actual thinking behind the actions. And since you can ask your own questions, you can actually get your questions answered. For me the interviews, fall at 2pm, so I just watch them while I eat lunch. Probably the best hour I spend per day, come to think of it.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoIf watching an interview is the best hour you spend per day, consider doing different things during the rest of the hours.
- DenisM 17y agoAndrew is also doing excellent job asking the right questions. I was going to add "that's why we're paying him", but then realized that we're not paying anything. :-) But it's certainly the kind of quality journalist work I want to survive the coming news-pocalypse.
- raffi 17y agoI don't watch all the interviews but the ones I have watched (this one included) have been well worth it to me. I find it inspiring hearing other peoples stories. It's cool to watch interviews with folks willing to get out and do something.
- bemmu 17y agoMost content on the web is text. I feel a sort of deeper connection with the people involved when I can see them talking, so I am happy there is content for me as well.
- andreyf 17y agoThe two aren't exclusive...
- barmstrong 17y agoI'd have to agree with this. An edited video or transcript would be much more appealing. An hour is much too long.
- access_denied 17y agoVideos are value-add when the presentation is well done (in terms of 'stagecraft and being able to see the slides). Merely listening endless ramble designed to keep you on the hook looses against speed-reading the transcript.
- jncraton 17y agoThis title is a little misleading. He didn't lose the $2m. He spent it all on fun stuff and then broke his SEO in some way so that the revenue stopped coming in.
- covercash 17y agoIt was an interesting interview, definitely more Howard Stern and less 20/20 as far as the guest and content are concerned. I really didn't need to know when and how he lost his virginity. His money management (or lack thereof), business "partnerships" (giving full server access to a kid in another country he never met before) and business ethics (scraping a competitor's site and spamming their users under the guise of direct marketing) painted a picture of a very naive entrepreneur to say the least. I think this interview is a very good example of what NOT to do.
- codexon 17y agoI thought it was fairly stereotypical how it was only after he was making lots of money that he was able to find a girlfriend let alone lose his virginity. Maybe for some people this is part of the allure of being an entrepreneur. About the business ethics though, there's a reason why the saying "behind every great fortune lies a great crime" is often said. Because the currency economy is mostly a zero-sum game in the sense of total money ownership (barring inflation), the people that have less scruples than you will often rake in more money than the more honest counterparts.
- xenophanes 17y agozero sum? but people take raw materials (e.g. glass and aluminum) and make awesome, valuable stuff out of it all the time.
- codexon 17y agoPlease read more carefully. I'm talking about possession of currency which is zero-sum except when the Fed prints out more bills. You can make a billion pretty trinkets with glass and aluminum, and it won't get you any dollars if no one with dollars wants to trade you dollars, and the Fed is not printing extra.
- xenophanes 17y agobut moving currency between people, for "trinkets" is called "trade". trade is not a zero sum process. it creates wealth. so, i buy something from you for $20. then you buy something from me for $20. although the currency comes out equal, we're both ahead. there's no scam here, no incentive or advantage for low scruples, no problem at all.
- ilovecheese 17y agoWait, so he cashed in a house, a bunch of cars, and kept his girlfriend showered in gifts? Sounds to me like he came out ahead. Now he's got the financial security to try whatever the hell he wants for the rest of his life as long as he can feed himself and pay his taxes.
- simonw 17y agotl;dr: built tacky MySpace themes sites, promoted them by paying "MySpace whores" with 10,000s of friends to post bulletins, got in early with Yahoo!'s beta ad program when they were massively overpaying, made at peak $200,000 a month, blew a TON of money on cars, a house etc, redesigned the site (and permanently deleted the old one) without realising that changing his URLs would kill his Google rank, blew $30,000 on SEO experts, none of whom apparently told him he should set up redirects, ended up selling the MySpace site for $75,000, still has the house.
- nfnaaron 17y ago"tl;dr: built tacky MySpace themes sites, ... still has the house." I'm having trouble reconciling the "dr" part of "tl;dr" with your concise summary of almost the entire interview. :) "built tacky MySpace themes sites, promoted them by paying "MySpace whores" with 10,000s of friends to post bulletins, got in early with Yahoo!'s beta ad program when they were massively overpaying, ..." Or, built a service that many people on MySpace were very happy to use, promoted that service very effectively within the web and MySpace community dynamics of the time, had lucky timing and benefited from his status on MySpace and the Web to get in the Yahoo ad beta stage when it was was more lucrative ... "... made at peak $200,000 a month, blew a TON of money on cars, a house etc, redesigned the site (and permanently deleted the old one) without realizing that changing his URLs would kill his Google rank, ..." Or, made more money at peak per month than most people will make at peak per year, ever, blew a lot of money, redesigned a site that had grown organically, as did his knowledge of software engineering and business, made a fatal error not just in changing the URLs but all the text on his site (html, css, javascript, etc)... "... blew $30,000 on SEO experts, none of whom apparently told him he should set up redirects, ..." When, what he should have done is spent a few hundred or thousand to have an SEO expert tell him what went wrong (or hired such before he finalized his decision to switch everything over in seconds) and how long it might take to fix it (if it could be fixed at all). If anyone had told him about redirects by that time (they probably did), it would have been too late because the mistake was already irrevocably "out there" ... "... ended up selling the MySpace site for $75,000, still has the house." Still had a business that could be sold for some amount of money, and, he's already dusted himself off and working his way back with what may be a viable and lucrative service. The guy is 22 (?), and already he's built and lost/sold a million dollar business (based on nothing but tacky MySpace themes!) without, apparently, knowing much about business, and without benefit of any experienced adviser. He learned some very expensive lessons about spending, source control and how search engines see and judge your site, and about how important it is to learn important things before they're important. He did it in the fashion often advocated here: do it, and learn what you need when you need it. Unfortunately he learned a few things a bit later than when he needed it, but it doesn't seem to have discouraged him permanently. Most of us make mistakes and learn about managing our life and business in our early twenties, we just don't think of those mistakes as "shocking" because we aren't spinning millions of dollars and our own business around. I thought it was an interesting and useful story, and I liked the "en vivo, open kimono" format.
- richardburton 17y agoSometimes it's all about being in the right place at the right time and getting a little lucky. I have a friend who had a lastminute.com affiliate account go ballistic because his affiliate code somehow got onto all of their call center's terminals. He was earning commission from every single holiday booked over the phone at lastminute.com for around a month!
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoI looked for beemodel.com that he mentioned about a dozen times, think he got the address wrong! Whoops. There is a bemodel.com but only a domain seller holding page at beemodel.com.
- thechangelog 17y agoI think this says it all: "Interviewee: Yes, that was actually an .htaccess thing I forgot to do. You can do a redirect - there's a few types of redirects you can do, there's like 301s, 401s, and there's one, there's a redirect that you can do in the .htaccess file that says, "Hey, this page is gone - not missing, it's over here." And we didn't do that, and I didn't figure that out until a month later when it was too late, when the old design, when the old site was already gone."
- bradgessler 17y agoDoes anybody else think its wrong how he blames his loss of $2mm on his website falling on Google's rankings? Umm... maybe he lost $2mm from all the crap he bought!
- forensic 17y agoHe lost his $200k/month golden goose due to falling on google's rankings. He traded his $2million in cash for some status symbols.
- jyothi 17y agoIt was an interesting interview which could have very well be summarized in 10 min. Andrew Warner has just dragged it way too long. Kid's spending patterns and his love intersts. Not necessary. It pretty much seemed like he ran out of questions or was it like a highschool kid in awe interviewing another highschool kid.
- morphir 17y agoThis is a classic scenario where a human is overspending and don't have any insight to economics. He also thought he knew his domain, while he didn't. The SEO-guy was ripping him off, and he should have taken legal action against the SEO-scam that effectively pulled the plug on his cashflow.