A ShoeMoney Decade

With 2010 rolling in I have been thinking a lot lately about the key points of the last 10 years of my life. I remember December 31st 1999 like it was yesterday. I was not out partying for new years... instead I was in the data center for the chain bank I was working for waiting to see what happened when the clock rolled over to y2k. Of course nothing did happen.... but I had to be on call all day Jan 1st just incase.I worked in corporate America, being an IT monkey (specializing in computer security) for chains of national banks, until 2004. That was when I got fired from my last job. I remember that like it was yesterday. They were perfectly right in firing me. After all I had little interest in that day job. I was never a very good fit for corporate america. I never understood why we needed to have 40 meetings and get approval for something I could fix in 20 seconds. It's easy for someone like me to get very frustrated very quickly and instead focus on what I could get results from immediately... my own business. In 2003 while working in corporate America I started my nextpimp site. It was just a fun hobby site where people could upload their mobile ringtones and wallpapers and share them to the world. By the time I got fired in late 2004 the site was growing rapidly and my wife made the suggestion that I should just work on my own stuff. I was pretty scared to work on my own stuff full time especially since I was bringing in most of our household income with my wife in Residency Training. But, I figured what the hell.. after all I could draw unemployment for a few months to supplement our income until I could figure out a way to make money. I had been toying with buying recycled computers (also while working in corporate America) and reselling them on eBay and did this along with grinding on nextpimp for a couple months while on unemployment to see if I could make it work. I cashed a total of 2 unemployment checks (around $200 apiece) until I got my stuff together. I was doing pretty well with the reselling on eBay biz and building up a bank roll making bigger and bigger purchases. By mid-2005 nextpimp had exploded with the ringtone phenomena. It was getting about 75-100k unique users per day. A Google rep contacted me and told me all about their AdSense program. They said they would be willing to offer me a premium revshare (whatever that was) and thought I would make really good money with Google AdSense. I gave it a shot. A couple months later I made the famous adsense check. Obviously it rocked my world. Just a few months ago I was on unemployment barely making ends meet.... and now I was profiting well over $100,000 a month. The amount of money that could be made online blew my mind and I became infatuated with it. I followed the money and quickly realized affiliate marketing was where it was really at. I started a wordpress blog to write down things as I was learning them. I was really transparent about everything I was doing and very open with numbers. Some people took this as bragging... many thanked me for showing real results and being honest with my experiences. Either way I started gaining quite a following in the SEO/online revenue space. I studied every way to make money on the internet and worked 18 hour days. I had become a wiz with all forms of revenue and applied them to other properties I was working on. 2006 was one of my best affiliate years ever. Our mobile properties were growing at an torrid pace. We did over 100,000 ringtone leads at 12-18 per lead. I also had nextpimp subscriptions up to 70,000 paying members at $19.95 every 6 months and was making a decent chunk from donations and contextual revenue. But this all paled in comparison to the gold mind we discovered in pay-per-click marketing. We could take all of our best converting keywords from our websites and bid on them in search engines. I was working like a mad dog. I only had one other employee... David Dellanave and he was somewhat part time until the end of 2006 when I took him on as a full time salaried employee with revenue sharing. But it was just us 2. In 2006 I also partnered up with other industry leaders to create an event called the Elite Retreat. 2006 was a crazy year, and crazy profitable. In 2007 the ringtone industry really came under fire and I was worried about having all my eggs in one basket. I had already lost interest in maintaining nextpimp and outsourced it to some hungry kids for a percentage of the revenue (which they basically did nothing and just took the percentage of the revenue). So I started taking on advertising with ShoeMoney.com. At first the advertising was not a significant portion of revenue. But everything starts somewhere. David and I were feeling a bit down after the amazing high profits in 2006 and while we were still making great money there was a downward trend. So we decided to do something completely crazy and launched our own advertising network called AuctionAds. I don't really want to rehash the entire AuctionAds story but it had a very happy ending when we sold the company to Media Whiz only 4 months after we launched it. AuctionAds taught us a lot about ourselves and also put us on the radar of many VC companies. I kind of got caught up in it a little bit. Now we were having all these firms wanting to invest in what ever we wanted to do next. After cashing in with the AuctionAds sale in 2008 we got a bit lazy and changed things up a bit. I made the decision to change the direction of the company a bit. I had always had the dream of having offices... you know really cool offices complete with rock band, 60" plasma tv's, kitches with tons of junk food and plenty of room for interns to boss around. Something I could show my parents and friends that was really concrete. So I moved ShoeMoney media out of the house and into offices. I also made the decision that it was full steam ahead on the ShoeMoney brand and to stop focusing so much on fly by night affiliate marketing. But then in 2008 I made the mistake of doing what many other entrepreneurs do. I invested in one of my true passions. Mixed martial arts. We purchased the domain Fighters.com and built out a really awesome website. We also hired 15 staff writers across the world to produce content and also paid for all their travel and equipment. It was a huge mistake. I was not doing a very good job actually running the staff writers (I was still managing all the other day to day aspects of ShoeMoney) and soon found Fighters LLC in a lot of debt. That sucked and was a hard one to swallow. I fucking hate failing at anything. I was looking to sell the fighters company in late 2008 when all of a sudden the market crashed and investment money dried up. In 2009 we did end up selling fighters.com and pretty much broke even. Disappointing but whatever. It was quite a learning experience. The good part about 2008 was the blog revenue was now approaching $500k/yr and growing. Our pay-per-click revenue was also holding steady, and our conference - the Elite Retreat was now an industry-leading event. In early 2009 we had a company approach us about building them out a tools suite they could sell. They offered to pay us $500k up front and part of the residuals. We passed but decided instead to launch our own line of tools called ShoeMoney tools. The service took off right away and we knew we were on to something. We had been building in house SEO and PPC tools that were keys to our success for years and now we were opening them up to the public. The only downside was that the tools only cater to a few thousand people. But the feedback was amazing. The market was hungry for a ShoeMoney product that taught them the basics of how to make money online. So I created the ShoeMoneyX training course and released it free of charge. This thing took off like a rocket. We had hundreds of thousands of people go through the course and the feedback was amazing. I actually was worried about releasing the course because I thought the information was too basic. Little did I know it was not quite basic enough. We got thousands and thousands of emails from people who wanted more information and specifically to be walked through some of the processes step by step. So we started working on a new product called the ShoeMoney System with some key goals in mind. The main goal was to create a system to teach people to make money online that would work for anyone. Regardless of social or financial class. I also wanted to create a system for people to make money online that required little or no capital investment. So we started filming and kept what we were working on pretty hush hush. I got regular every day people (all with day jobs) and started teaching them step by step how to make money with every platform possible. We also teamed up with Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Facebook, AOL, Sponsored Tweets, and many more companies who give each new ShoeMoney System user free money to use on their networks (over $2500 total). I wanted to do all of this at an amazingly low cost to the user. The goal was less then $200 a month with a 100% money back guarantee. I want this to be perfect so we also used 20 beta testers from all different backgrounds to get real user experience feedback to create the perfect system to make money online. After all the hard work it's ready to go and comes out tomorrow, January 26th. As you can see I had a busy decade, but it really didn't get crackin until about 2005. Years fly by so fast. I wonder where this decade will take us. I am excited to find out!