Yes. The day Dave hired me to work for you. I learned a lot from Dave, Michael, you, and everyone on the Twistys team. Thank you.

Hi Michael!

You are with Femjoy now? Nice. Where are you working from? How's it going? Hit me up some time :winkwink:

Very Cool! It's great to see and understand that there is huge potential in whatever you are doing if done right :thumbsup

DAMN! Now that's awesome! Every see that guy again?

Adult Check Gold :)

For me it was the contract FreeOnes offered me in 2005. Maybe not the best step to become a millionaire but i've learned so much business wise and created a a very proper network around me.

That millionaire thingy is still on the list but hey im young ;)

so you haven't collected enough dirt about Maurice yet? :winkwink: :1orglaugh

Maurice had good timing on that. I was going to try to convince you to join us but he beat me to it. Geography didn't play in our favour but would have loved to have you on board.

Just realized I wrote Penguin and not Panda. The event predated Penguin :)

lol - only valid if he was still in the business :1orglaugh

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Funny how sometimes the best opportunities come right after a major failure or disappointment.

That's awesome!

Wow awesome post! Well said! And well done on moving on to the next one and continuing to do well :thumbsup

For me it was the week I finally got over some of my fears about costs in this business. Not long after getting my own hosting and domain (the first year or so I was in this biz I used free hosting) I got a movie gallery listed on The Hun in one of the top spots. I saw it listed before I went to bed and was happy, but nervous. Hosting back then (1998,1999) was a lot more expensive than today so I was paranoid about going over my transfer limit and spending way too much on hosting.

In the morning I woke up and saw that overnight I had blown through my transfer limit and accumulated $500 worth of overage fees. I had a couple of urgent emails from hosting company asking if I wanted to keep the site up or have them take it down. I checked my stats and saw that I had 71 signups from that gallery. I was very happy and told them to keep it up.

After three days I had about $1000 in overage fees, but I had gotten about 260 signups at $30 per so it was a very good trade off.

From that point on I realized that I was good enough at designing galleries and sites that they would convert and I didn't need to worry about losing a few dollars on hosting costs because I likely would make up for it in sales. That gallery also opened my eyes to following my own ideas. Up until then I was promoting the same stuff everyone else seemed to be, but this gallery was for a completely different site in a different niche. I realized I didn't have to do what everyone else was doing to be successful and that there was more low hanging fruit elsewhere.

I think almost all do :2 cents:

Ok my turning point was when I got the Ibill email list and mailed the fuck out of it. 100 sign ups a day? No problem FTW!!!!. :1orglaugh

You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you?re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

Fred Brooks

:2 cents:

The day Shap emailed me off-GFY changed my life forever.

Thank you Shap!

I like that. :thumbsup

His saying that reminds me of a quote from Bill Gates where he said that success was a terrible teacher because it makes smart people feel like they can't fail.

reminds me of my favourite Edison quote

That is very good.

Yes, but Nikola Tesla said he was a blustering idiot for not having a systematic approach to solving problems. That is Edison used brute force.
You read accounts of him, even at old age, putting in 100+ (even over 130, which is just work and sleep deprivation), doing stuff.
Nikola put in insane hours as well, and despite his superior intellect to Tesla (proved AC was better than Edison's want for DC) he was not a business man.

Hard work, like love, covers many faults. The higher up the food chain you move the more your game has to be together.

Not sure if serious...

Is Shap a music friend? Did you meet him in that diner that closed suddenly, or are you just fucking around?

State your case kind sir...

The Edisons are distant relatives.

True fact :)

But while Thomas invented the longer-lasting lightbulb - I merely know how to turn it on. :1orglaugh

I'm pretty sure he has more on me by now ;)

Imagine that huh ;))

Great thread!

A little hyperbole meant to draw Shap into giving me the secrets of his success. LOL

He did give me some great tips once concerning billing that helped my business grow tho.
Thanks Shap!!

Yeah I had a similar big break that got the ball rolling. Got a listing on SublimeDirectory directly to my site, not a gallery. It stayed there for several weeks and was the most traffic I had ever had. It allowed me to do link trades and grow.

Getting a listing on those big sites back then was the perfect way to really catapult a site

Mh if you think it well.. in 1990's there was those few big tgp's as thehun, much like today there's those few big tubes as xhamster. Just in 1990's there was less third world countries traffic, and more buyers.

Back in 1995 or 1996, the Usenet groups were really starting to take hold and there were some guys scanning Playboy NSS and posting them. Some of you older guys might remember people like Scanmaster, PixelMaster, Skunk, etc. I watched at how popular these guys were. They had a real passion for it. It wasn't long before the Playboy legal team started sending threats of litigation to all the guys there posting their scans.

I still have that notice on some CD somewhere where one of them posted their "resignation" along with the Playboy notice scanned.

Anyway, I thought to myself I could build a site and use authorized content in exchange for traffic. So, off I went to contact every Playboy model agent I could find and pitched them on the idea of let me promote them in exchange for traffic. This took literally months. I get content, they get traffic. At the time, and few exceptions aside, this was basically unheard of with the Playmates. It was their own content, not Playboy's.

Anyway.. everyone turned me down... I mean everyone. After about 3 or 4 months of rejections, out of nowhere, Alley Bagget replied to me directly and said, "sure, why not". After that, the floodgates kind of opened. Doors were opening that were never opened before. I had all the content I needed and now the Playmates were contacting me and calling me at home, etc. all wanting to give me content in return for promoting them on our site.

The second step to the process was with Ynot. Back then, Ynot was basically a toplist and links list. Anyone remember "Wutz New" and Superlinks? :)

I submitted my site, full of all of this newly added authorized content and they turned me down for "unauthorized content". I quickly replied and then Lisa Boyle, who was an official member, vouched for me and then a moderator named "Khan" (from Khan's classy babes) wrote me a nice email explaining that it was a unique circumstance that someone had all this authorized content and they immediately just assumed it was from ill-gotten means. And then they featured my site.

The big traffic spike came when models mentioned us on Howard Stern, and one model, I **think** it was Kelly Monaco, mentioned our site on Entertainment Tonight (Television show). Our hosting provider turned us off for excessive traffic within hours of that. I forget the bill, but it was huge.. back then it was 7 or 8 bucks a GB.

But things happened quickly. By 1997 I was doing this full time and enjoying life. I just never spent it all on cars and such. I bought real estate, land, mutual funds, etc. and just flew under the radar. Heck I still do. I come online, get my work done, log out and go enjoy life.

Life is good.