

Young & Stupid: How I Made 2.5 Million - merrick
http://www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/05/how-i-made-2-5-million/

======
mattmaroon
This is by far the dumbest thing I've ever seen here.

I don't think I believe any of this, other than that he wants to make money
off of the internet because everyone wants to make money off of the internet.
For one, he claims to be writing a book, despite having an apparent 5th grade
reading level. I hope he spent about $100k of that $2.5 million on a ghost
writer before he lost it. Also I'd bet he's telling the truth about being a
high school dropout.

For another, he claims to be running bemodel.com, but that site does nothing
but display stock photos.

I also find it hard to believe that anyone who would point out "The Secret"
(and not the book version either, but the movie based on it) as their
inspiration could ever scale a website to enough traffic to make $100k+/mo.
I'm skeptical he could even spell PHP let alone use it.

I have to say, it's VERY tempting for me to buy his ebook about making women
chase me. That has to be a non-stop laugh riot.

~~~
m0nastic
My experience with "The Secret" involves attending a New Year's Party with my
brother several years ago where we stayed up all night playing drums with a
group of people. When the morning came, and we all got up to go home one guy
said to us "I have this movie that you have to watch" and proceeded to lift up
his shirt and remove from his pants a DVD.

We realized that he had to have been keeping this in his pants all night, and
as my brother and I made our way to the car I told him "you realize that we
have to see what that is the moment we get home".

Upon arrival back at my brother's apartment, we proceeded to watch the movie,
and were mystified that someone had tried to compile an hour and half video
around the idea of "positive thinking"; much less that someone had thought
enough of it to carry it around in their pants to impart to strangers at a
party.

~~~
Qz
Don't underestimate the ability the promise of simple answers to life's
problems has over people desperate for said answers. I know people who buy the
Law of Attraction nonsense hook line and sinker. Of course, these people also
believe in that personal sovereignty nonsense, and that every country in the
world except Switzerland is run by the Rothschild family, who are also
apparently multi-trillionaires...

~~~
m0nastic
I once got into an argument with someone about whether The Law of Attraction
abided by the Law of Conservation of Mass; because if it did, than it didn't
seem any different than stealing.

~~~
Qz
It's just hokey nonsense. All you have to do is nod your head and pretend you
don't think they're totally bonkers.

------
brc
There is so much I could write, but this sounds exactly like many lottery
winner stories. The 30k blown in Vegas part, especially.

My personal philosophy is that you've got to get yourself correctly life-
balanced. Adding money just amplifies your current habits. So if you're
working 24x7 with no life balance, adding a lot of money will just amplify
that out-of-control nature.

What's sad to me is that there was nobody in this guys life who could act as a
mentor and provide advice.

~~~
njharman
35k of 2mil is 1.75%. Not an unreasonable amount to throw away on
entertainment. Money is not an end itself. At some point you gotta spend it or
why bother getting it in the first place.

All the expensive cars are much more of an issue. Fun is fun, "status" is a
total waste.

~~~
hugh3
Spending 1.75% of your income on entertainment is fine -- in fact, it's pretty
miserly.

Spending 1.75% of your total net wealth on entertainment, in one go, though,
is dumb. Maybe it was multiple trips, but still, Las Vegas is a very easy, and
very unsatisfying, way to spend large sums of cash. The only worse item on the
list is $20K in strip clubs.

 _All the expensive cars are much more of an issue. Fun is fun, "status" is a
total waste._

Cars aren't fun? Maybe you don't enjoy driving, but I sure as hell do. If I
had a $2.5 million windfall I'd be buying some fancy cars too.

------
dangero
Google Cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6D9e6fs...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6D9e6fs0_rMJ:www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/05/how-
i-made-2-5-million/+http://www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/05/how-i-
made-2-5-million/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1)

------
merrick
In his mixergy interview, Andrew Fashion shared his story in great detail
about his rise and fall. With respect to the 301 redirect, I asked Andrew to
ask him if he 301'd old urls to new ones. Andrew Fashion's response was that
he didn't know at the time about 301 redirects and that after he launched his
new site he deleted his local copy of the old site. When his traffic plummeted
he couldn't go back.

~~~
nocman
I'm not sure whether to respond to that with "How stupid can you be?" or "I
find that very difficult to believe."

------
moe
I cringe every time he writes "could of" instead of "could have".

~~~
m0nastic
I cringed about twice every sentence; his writing style is terrible.

Which isn't to say the message isn't useful to people (although I nearly spit
out my soda upon seeing him go on about The Secret).

It sounds like he has a good sense for churning out websites which are useful
to people though, so kudos to him (and hopefully he can pull another one out
and actually hold onto the money this time).

~~~
greendestiny
Yeah the writing was terrible, no doubt about that. I definitely feel there
was a great lesson there in his simplicity of execution - he saw people using
myspace sites so he built one. The massively introspective and precious
process of coming up with "ideas" that I can't help be a little obsessed with
seems ridiculous compared with just seeing and doing.

~~~
m0nastic
While that's true, he seems to reiterate over and over that his aim from the
beginning was just to "make money"; which while I have nothing against (I'm
certainly not a socialist), I think is detrimental to actually creating
something worthwhile.

Reading the post reminds me of a lot of kids I grew up with who were basically
hustlers; they just wanted to be rich and would try anything they could think
of (usually some combination of managing musicians, selling drugs, or stealing
cars) to attain it.

In retrospect, I don't think any of them ended up being rich.

This kid did though, so what do I know.

~~~
greendestiny
Well myspace profile tools whilst not exactly a long lasting boons to society
were pretty useful to people. It's not content scraping or otherwise just
gaming the system. I won't post what the article makes this guy sound like to
me, seems unfair after I've said I found it informative :)

~~~
m0nastic
I feel like I got a good impression from the picture he posted (which had the
added bonus of letting me know that I charge more for a portrait shoot than
Michael Vincent...which is odd because he's a much better photographer than I
am)

;)

~~~
greendestiny
Can imagine how much you'd want to charge to do a portrait of that guy? You'd
have to use an exponential representation just to write it efficiently.

------
istari
The author met the prerequisite for getting lucky, which is several tens of
thousands of hours of failure and iteration. Sure, if he were more mature, or
wrote more coherently than a fifth grader, or had any kind of formal training
whatsoever, MAYBE he could've done better, kept his site going, created
DuckDuckGo, etc.

But those things are all secondary. He, unlike 99% of anyone who attempts
anything, put in those 10K, 20K, 30K hours, and through those countless
iterations made his own luck.

------
japherwocky
I read this guy's story a year ago, and thought it was interesting. He worked
really really hard at something, without any particular skill or talent, and
made a bunch of money!

A year ago, he was launching a social network for models:
[http://www.andrewfashion.com/2010/08/16/whats-been-going-
on-...](http://www.andrewfashion.com/2010/08/16/whats-been-going-on-bemodel-
and-more/)

Now he's leveraging his antics to get in with the HN crowd. He doesn't write
great, he doesn't have any real insight to things, and yet he's on the front
page of HN and will probably make some $ out of all of this. He'll probably
land 2 or 3 more articles, establish himself in the community, and then launch
bemodel with a HN/Reddit post that will get lots of free traffic.

I dunno? On some levels I think he's a twit, and on other levels he seems like
a savant

So what's the moral?

~~~
redorb
Don't read too much into it?

------
chrisaycock
As PG might say, the primary killer of start-ups is the start-ups themselves,
not any other competing force.

------
coryl
His story proves that anyone can be successful on the internet. And that it's
better to be lucky than good.

~~~
njharman
Anyone who is ADHD, clinically obsessive, and does nothing but chase success.

~~~
ssharp
And is good at fudging details.

Make $100,000/month = Make $100/month.

Buying a $420,000 house = Live in mom's house

Buy a brand new BMW = Buy a 1982 Volvo.

Write a post saying how you made tons of money and blew it = Please buy my
book - this Volvo isn't getting any newer

~~~
trustfundbaby
It looks legit. Here's the mixergy interview with the guy
<http://mixergy.com/andrew-fashion/>

and here is the second post with screen caps of his earnings with his
publisher id in the top right corner (for google)
[http://www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/04/young-stupid-how-
i-l...](http://www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/04/young-stupid-how-i-lost-my-
millions/)

------
maxawaytoolong
This is amazing. A good friend of mine was the dot com 1.0 version of this
guy. He even had the same BMWs! It's eerie how similar the stories are...

------
antidaily
There is a Mixergy interview with this guy: <http://mixergy.com/andrew-
fashion/>

------
dstorrs
He makes a huge deal about how he killed MySpaceSupport.com by rewiring the
URLs, etc and how this eliminated all his revenue, permanently, so that he
sold it off in 2008. I'm sure it was a major factor, but I think the changes
in the economy, the popularity and demographics of MySpace, and the rise of
more popular social networks may have also mattered.

~~~
brc
It's not clear whether he just made the basic mistake of not 301 redirecting
the old Urls, or was it that he did but still lost places anyway? Perhaps
there is more too it than just a new set of Urls (in terms of search engine
rankings)

------
Qz
If I had 2.5 million spare extra dollars, I would probably use it to live the
way I live now, without having to work ever again.

~~~
hugh3
Are you currently unemployed?

If not, what would you do with the extra hours every day?

To me, $2.5 million sounds like a pretty good start towards a comfortable
retirement, but I'd want to supplement it with another couple of million
before I really declared myself ready to never work again.

~~~
Qz
I am unemployed yes -- I live very cheaply and spend my time maybe 1/3 hanging
out with friends, 1/3 hanging out by myself (aka video games/reading this web
site), and 1/3 working on whichever personal project I'm interested in for the
time being.

I actually did the calculations yesterday and figured out that on my current
budget, even adding in an extra 50% to cover random things I might need or
want, I would only need 1.4 million dollars to live this way until I'm 100
years old...

------
lusis
I couldn't manage to get past the second or third "him and me". When I got to
the "dropped out of high school" part, it all made sense.

