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.
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.
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...
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.
It's incredibly dumb, and fascinating. Worthwhile not as a good lesson on how to make money, but as a lesson on the lack of self-awareness among some of those who luck into money.
Page two, where he goes on to describe how he spent all his money on frivolous crap, is the icing on the cake. It combines just the right proportions of cautionary example and ridiculous schadenfreude to make a good story.
I also find all that hard to believe. To me it sounds like a dude trying to make money on the internet by going viral. Hell I bet he just finished reading Crush It (not in a a negative way... I thoroughly enjoyed Crush It, Gary did a good job there)
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.
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.
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.
It's not just the amount, it's the action, particularly when in context of some of the other waste. Gambling away the same amount of money that people get for doing a YC round is not the right sort of thinking for long-term success.
It's also the pervasive attitude of using money as a means to impress others. No amount of money will fix that, because there's always someone richer to impress. You mightn't think wasting 30k in vegas was fun, but I'd ask if he would do the same thing in a less 'glamorous' place.
Frankly I would see the cars as less of a waste because presumably they still have some resale value.
edit : I'll just add to that, think of any mentor you can. Now ask yourself : would that mentor suggest blowing that cash on gambling, strippers and expensive gifts for an (obviously) fair-weather girlfriend was a good idea?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 :)
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)
Indeed it is not perfect use of the English language but why complain about it or brag that you noticed the mistake? Most people who understand English can read 'txt' as 'text' and 'wrk' as 'work' and if the theory that intelligence is defined by how well you can predict, then you are only bragging the way about the ways you lack intelligence. I have never considered myself as smarter than average but my brain parsed that whole text without error.
Some people can't read through a spelling or grammar mistake without cringing. I am one of them. I don't know why -- maybe the brain's error-detection techniques work by making me really uncomfortable every time I see one.
Anyway, it has nothing to do with "bragging" when you complain about errors.
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.
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!
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
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.