I’ve been paying for web hosting in some form or the other for about 9 years now….and every time I have to transfer from one place to another it’s a bitch.

Correction…it’s actually kind of fun because I’m generally upgrading to something faster and better, but there’s usually all sorts of fun things that go wrong.

The previous server has been acting a little funky munky lately, so all my stuff has to move (to THIS server you’re looking at now)!

It kind of got me thinking about how funny my business is (plus a lot of you other web people):

EVERY DIME I MAKE, EVERY BUSINESS I HAVE, ALL STEMS FROM SOME FILES WHICH CAN ALL FIT ON A THUMB DRIVE.

HA!

Here’s an interesting story (well…I think it’s interesting because it’s about me) that might inspire some of the younger crowd.

As you may know, I’ve never had a real job before.  I’ve always started businesses that have been successful enough to sustain me and then some.  I’m not saying everyone should choose this route, but it IS pretty damn cool.

Like any result, there’s usually a story behind it, and mine started sometime in middle school when I had a mean peach-fuzz mustache growing and embarrassing gold-rimmed glasses  that took up my whole face.  In a nutshell I “accidentally” became a businessman by starting a CD making business.  I had a CD burner when most people didn’t, I knew about downloading MP3′s when most people didn’t….therefore I had a resources people wanted…and would pay to get.  I ended up making more money than I could stuff into the little change jar in my room.  You can read more detail here.

So some stupid kid stumbles on how to make some money….

I thought it was pretty cool, but never took it super seriously.  Back then my parents provided me with everything I ever wanted, so making money wasn’t top priority.

In high school I started getting more and more into computers.  I took programming classes and was even accepted to the first ever public school course funded by a private organization (or some crap like that). There was a Cisco certification course I worked hard to apply for, and I got in!  Only a select few students from our entire district got in….all day long we learned how to setup LAN, MAN and WAN networks, hack into routers, design more efficient networks, diagnose problems.  It was a FUN class and I was proud to be in it.  I was surrounded by smart people all day and had $40,000 worth of networking equipment at my disposal! I was Cisco Certified when I was a senior in high school…that was pretty cool back in the day.

However I think where my entrepreneurial spirit started grabbing roots was in my high school computer science classes.  We had normal class during the day, but AFTER SCHOOL we had a teacher who let us do whatever we want.

I used to stay after school almost every single day for various clubs, but me and some friends would always stay late as possible screwing around on the cool new computers (and fast internet) the school had just acquired.

We were CONSTANTLY looking for cool ways to make a buck….I mean nothing serious like building a business, more like simple get-rich-quick schemes. Back then a lot of companies offered you money for browsing the internet if you kept advertisements on your screen.  So with our programming skills we setup 30 different computers to constantly browse random webpages and collect money!  Was this allowed?  NO!  Did we care?  NO!  Did it teach us something…I think very much YES.  Although it was just screwing around, it kind of made computers and the internet “fun” for us….not just boring tools.

We also scoured penny stocks to try and buy and strike it rich “if ONLY the stock would go up to $1.00!”  We tried dozens of silly ideas.

We wrote programs that would make annoying sounds based on a timer…and loaded them on the library computers.  It was HILARIOUS to watch all the computers start making annoying beeps at once….the librarians would come over to see the commotion, then they would all stop!!  Stupid pranks, but they made us think creatively.

Our school used Novell to administer the computers, and I found out a way to login to the “unlimited access” profile which let you play games.  We setup a folder on the network with all sorts of cool games and would play them before class.  None of the other students could do it.

Through Novell and my Cisco class skills, we found out a bunch of other things about the school network and would frequently be called in by school officials to help with problems! I remember one school administrators baffled and nervous look when I simply logged into the administration without him giving me any password information!

Even though we could sneak in and out of the school computer system, we never did anything bad or malicious.  If one of our pranks (like the annoying library sounds) got too much…we stopped.  We were more interested in having access to something forbidden than actually DOING anything harmful.  Because of this we never got in trouble for anything, and it was actually good for school officials who could ask us computer questions at any time and have them fixed immediately without calling a tech guy and looking dumb.

In addition to all this I started making webpages for fun.  I remember registering Neville1.com (my FIRST domain name), and posting pictures of cars on it.  I would Photoshop pictures of cars to make them computer screen background wallpapers then share them online via Neville1.com.  I called the page “Neville’s Cool Car Archive” and it started getting lots of traffic.  It was enough traffic that all the free hosts I was on started kicking me off.  I’d have to PAY for hosting, and that wasn’t an option back then.  You see, at the time there was really no way to monetize the traffic….so I’d just pay money for hosting, and wouldn’t be able to easily make that money back from the users.  I wasn’t interested and pulled the plug.

Another unique experience I had was through my Parsi Zoroastrian (my religion) community we had some exceptionally successful people we knew.  With the help of my mom I got around to asking some of these people…“Ummm….so like….what do you do?” Basically that question was masking my true question of, “Why do you have so much more money than everyone else?”

….every single time the answer was they owned their own (successful) business.  I would inquire further.  What did they do? How did they do it? Who buys from them? How come people buy from you, not someone else?  Then I’d ask the clincher question: “Can I come see your business?”

Every single time the answer was yes.  They were all proud of what they did and were happy to show an inquisitive young person around.  I saw large ecommerce warehouses, housing tracts, large apartment buildings and various other projects these people ran.  They explained the ins and outs, the advantages and downsides….all sorts of valuable information I was lucky to have…but brazen enough to ask for.

This appealed to me.  I don’t know why, but I always thought what they did was so much “cooler” than what most other people did.

Thus started my journey into entrepreneurship.  It shakily started out as just messing around and inadvertently being creative…but after years of experimenting and trying things out, it started working pretty well.

Be curious…try things….don’t let people’s warnings stop you…..be creative and have an almost childlike curiosity about everything.

I knew these green spray painted shoes would come in handy some day!

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!!

Here’s a question I’ve been getting more and more geared towards my business House Of Rave:

Have your sales gone down in the poor economy?

It’s actually a fantastic question and relatively interesting to hear different answers from different business owners.

So, have your sales gone down in the poor economy?

Most people expect that sales simply stopped coming in after the economic downturn, this hasn’t been true even though House Of Rave sells things people buy only on disposable income.  In fact, if you never told me there was a “recession” going on, I probably wouldn’t have noticed too much….people still order all the time (although I’ve seen a very significant drop in big orders from large corporations).

The MAIN problem I’ve had which takes a DIRECT shot at lowering my sales is all the cool products are out of stock.  Almost all of my previous best sellers are no longer being manufactured.

HouseOfRave sells “hard to find” and “unique” products….which often means “they don’t sell it in big stores”.  This has been great so far, but a problem I’m seeing now is manufacturers are on tight budgets and don’t have the capital required to mass produce slower selling items.  I may be able to sell 10 per day of an item, but a manufacturer might need to sell 10,000 of them per day to keep cash flow moving.

….so unless an item can move HUGE quantities quick, the product might be discontinued.

This has been the predominate way that my business has been affected.  The cool part is, with more marketing and more effort I’ve been able to maintain and grow both the profit and sales of the business, but it’s required more effort than in the past (keep in mind I used to put NO effort into it at all).  Before, I would just slap products on the site and they sold….it doesn’t seem to be quite as easy anymore.

Many smaller manufacturers and product patent holders are going out of business now.  Think about it, to manufacture just ONE simple product you must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for materials and labor, store them, then find people to buy them.  Before you make even one CENT from the product, you could blow through a half-million dollars on credit.  If the product is a flop (note the importance of beforehand PRODUCT RESEARCH) you’re screwed…..and I’m just using the example of small-scale manufacturing of novelty products.

While my business doesn’t have the extreme overhead of these manufacturers, I feel their pain indirectly when a cool product of theirs goes out of stock.

Do you have your March 2010 goals lines up?  I do:

Remember, I keep them on my iPhone:

At the beginning of this month one of my goals was to make a blog post every 2 days on this blog…well my last one was THREE days ago, so I need to make up (Carnaval in Austin definitely got in the way)!

I have 12 minutes to write/edit/publish this post before the security guard at the library kicks me out, so here goes:

I just read a post by Dave (brought my attention by Adam’s Twitter stream) about his transition from having a job to owning a business.  I always like it when people take that leap, even if it doesn’t work out, I’m sure they will learn a massive amount.

It made me reflect on my own experience with this.  I’ve never had a job except one in college where I did NOTHING but work on my own businesses then promptly quit when they made me do work.

After college I never got a job…I didn’t (still don’t) even have a resume.  I simply continued running my businesses I had already started.  It’s really the only way of working I’ve ever known, and I must say…I like it.    Judging by the way most people talk about their jobs, it seems I’ve made the correct choice.

One thing I really like about owning a business, aside from all the fun stuff like being able to label your own role or change what you do by starting a new business….all your success depends entirely on you.

In ten years if I’m homeless and living on the side of the road, you can point directly at the person whose fault that was.  I like that responsibility because it puts you in charge of your destiny a little more than working for someone else.  In a sense, they control your future.  If they go out of business, you do too.

I know people who worked for Dell at the right time in history who made millions on stock options, and people who worked the same jobs a few years later who weren’t quite as fortunate.  That irks me.  It’s kind of a lottery you play.  You COULD get successful, but your involvement doesn’t dictate it.

Ok, the guard is giving me the stink-eye, time to jet!

For Christmas my brother bought me a Samson C01U Studio Condenser Microphone. That’s basically fancy talk for a high quality microphone I can hookup to my computer:

I stopped making monthly goals a while ago because I rarely followed up on them. They always get stuck on a sheet of paper somewhere which I promptly forget about on day 2 of the month.

I consider my first REAL business to be House Of Rave (link), but before that were a bunch of other hair brained ideas to make money.

In college I was first exposed to people who would get drunk when they go out. It was always fascinating because: