Who here did'nt start in this industry on the right foot?
 

I know everyone likes to act like they're top dog around here. And the elitist attitude is so fucking worn out. Everyone makes it sound like this industry is soooo much hard work, and then turns around and acts like it's the easiest thing in the world to do, and critisizes each other for any sign of a lack of knowledge.

For once, I'd like to hear some stories of triumph from webmasters who did'nt have it all peachy when they first started.

I think VA2k is a good example (from what I've read) who's run into a lot of uphill battles throughout his history, but seems to have overcome them.

You?

left foot for me

C'mon, now, don't you think that was a little too obvious?

I made the mistake of starting out with a TGP. hehe. Took me ten of 'em before I learned my lesson, now they just float while I tend to the paysites. :)

I didn't do well at first. I started out just as dumb as they come and could not make anything work out. I was convinced that there was money to be made so I borrowed a large sum of money and hired a manager. After trying a couple of managers and being on the verge of losing all...I found a manager that was talented, even though he had not worked in porn before. He in turn knew a few others with talent. He turned things around and the money began to come in. It was his talent and the talent of the crew that made the business. He became a close friend and I sold the business to him several months ago. I still get X percent of the business for X number of years.

i just moved the hustle from the streets to the net...not that difficult, but I wasted a lot of money on advertisement in the beginning

it's been slow for me

Sometimes I get bummed out because I look at people like Juicy and Drinkinghard who started basically the same time as me and now theyre both doing very well and I'm still struggling.

I feel that, man.

What do you do?

im saving saving saving,

as much as i can i want to go full out with my ideas and go for bust if i have to,

people go broke because they think that if it works for someone it will work for u.

just galleries.
I did OK when I promoted ARS but then I moved my traffic over to revshare and everything went down the tubes after that.
I've always made a small profit but I've never generated much money doing this.

So how dumb is this.

I have been shooting since 1978 and when the Internet started with BBS sites I had a couple of clients. Nothing to big, my main market was videos via mail order and magazines.

Would sell at $3 to $10 a pic and the guys would take 10 to 20 pics from a set. But I rated it as small time. Then in 1998 a guy contacted me and wanted to meet me and talk about doing something together on the net.

We met and I sat and listened to him and at the end said I would think about it. To be honest he did not impress me. So I just carried on with what I was doing.

He was Richard of Richards Realm and he wanted to put up websites together, his knowledge my content, work together and split it down the middle.

Am I stupid or what????

i cant seem to walk

I bought my very first site for $10.00 from webriches.com... I was all pumped up after reading how I could make millions and millions by only spending $10.00 and looking at their graph examples. Man, what a dumbass I was Hahaha


I think my very first site was a freesite, I used sponsor content, maxcash to be exact.

Did the TGP thing for a while, did ok with it, when I really started doing good with it my host went down and no one would list me anymore after that..

So I moved on to AVS sites... did really well with these after a certain person helped without helping.. thanks bro. :winkwink:

I still do AVS and Free sites, just not as heavily as I used to.

Got burned out on the AVS sites after a few months of submitting 20 sites per day for about 3 months to any AVS service that would list them.

Stopped doing that and moved into learning design...

Now I design full time and I have a few of my own things in the works.. I'm pretty damn content with where I am now and couldn't ask for more....


I'm not rich, don't care to be. Would I refuse more money? Of course not, but I'm not complaining. My main concern is and always has been to be able to care for my family. :)

I worked from 1996 until 2001 for beermoney. I had no idea about networking, bbs's or nothing.
Although I wasn't that serious about it either. But if I'd known how to get information then like I know now, I'd be enjoying my life a lot more now(not that i'm complaining now).

apprearing and disappearing is fun.

:glugglug

:thumbsup

Im still broke and I will always will be.. :)

What site do you run exactly? Ive seen ya around allot and you have some funny posts, just not clear on what bussiness ya run.

Oh I sure entered the scene on the wrong foot, Opened a site called FreeHun.com.....Now that was a bad move, after a small legal battle with TheHun over copywrite infringment, we settled the matter out of court, and I went on to other ventures......So I started out on a really bad foot...hehe :(

http://www.jesterdesigns.com is my main income.
I have some small tgp's too.

I know alllll about you and your shady past Mr. Fletch.

I dunno what foot i started on, but it sure as fuck wasnt the right one.

First venture was pleasuredvds.com ... design and dvd's costed me $6k+, i was doing all kinds of business plans and shit, even had a budget worked out! Turned out i had no clue what it would take to promote a site and make decent sales. I would make near $13 profit per sale, i was doing math and scratching my head at some super huge numbers!

Man what a waste that turned out to be!

When i found out i needed link trades to get SE hits, i started learning about this world.

Infact im not sure they know it, but nastyjack and nakedXchange were my very first link exchange buddies!

From there i found ANS and made some friends quickly (its a very friendly board). Had a friend help me get started and i fucked her ... stole her designs! ANS kinda disowned me, Frank got me blacklisted everywhere .... and Fletch wont stfu .... you all know the story, lol

Like everyone else i started with galleries, then "free sites" then TGP's. I was heavy into TGP's for a long while until GoGoBar slapped that outa me.

The last month or so i have completely given up on everything pretty much. Im sick of giving away free content, and im sick of funneling millions of hits and making pennies. I have focussed my energies into learning the SE world.

Im currently waiting on an order i placed for 300 "free site" designs, i will push them when they are done.

Between my 300 free sites, and my 20 or so domains, im hoping to funnel a decent amount of SE hits.

Its hard to find link trades when nobody likes you, so i have set my mind on developing my own little network. It is all going according to plan so far, right on schedule.


So in answer to you question, nah i didnt start on the right foot. Im not exactly a success story, but after a long time i finally realized alot, and i finally have a plan other than just "making money". My plans and goals are meant to payoff in the long term so im not concerned with the instant results.

Ok my fingers hurt. Later

not Fletch, i think your mistaken pal.

Fletch is a saint, would never do anything wrong!

I started out in mainstream, and sucked at it. For 3 years I studied, struggled, revised, revamped, and sold about 3 credit cards and a few hosting packages and wasn't ever paid for them. Thoroughly depressed by all this, I decided to try my hand at porn. In early 2001 I built a god-awful 2-gallery site with sponsor content and put it on a free host with ridiculously large headers and footers, and the money just rolled in. I often wonder what would have happened if I'd just carried on like that, because now I have 30 domains which I have to keep updated, and while I'm definitely earning a lot more than I did with that one free site, my profit margin is smaller and I have much less free time.

Still, I'd never want to go back to a regular job. I'm still learning every day, getting better at scaling down/optimising, and am now approaching my goal in life, which is maximum self-sufficiency with minimum effort.

Funny thing, the god-awful 2-gallery site, though on a paid host now, is still there, untouched, and is still selling steadily.

Cool thread....

I started out thinking you could get rich so fast and learned right off it was a big lie. Got my first host and created this TGP, Link List thing. Had like a 100 or so pictures on it and they all got hotlinked. End of the month came and I got the bill for my bandwidth overages. I learned the meaning of bandwidth theft real quick. Site got shut down because I couldn't pay the bill. I started using free host for my TGP galleries but the host were always getting shut down for cheater and CP. So I gave up and moved to AVS after reading an article about it on the web. Started out with CyberAge and doing good ever since.

If you don't make mistakes then you never learn and if you give up you will never win.

I love this one...:)

Hopefully sometime within the next century I'll get on the right foot and have some kind of grand success story. I'm biding my time, learning the industry, until I can afford to start up a paysite or two.

My ideas will probably get huge recognition and then burn out real fast like so many of them do. But as long as it can generate enough profit to fund more of my ideas that's all that matters...

I started investing in porn in 1984 when the whole phone sex phenomena started. I was 27 at the time.

976-LICK was our first number. Back then things were so primitive compared to today. Digital voice/audio cards hadn't even come out yet so my partner and I had to buy a rack full of Takashio industrial looping cartrigde tape machines to broadcast our phone sex recordings.

I remember being in the sound studio making our moaning and groaning recordings with these girls we hired to do simulated orgasms and thinking to myself guys will go nuts for this stuff and call a zillion times.

Back then you had to locate your equipment near a telco central office so we rented a small room in the bottom storage floor of an office building in downtown LA. There was this black pimp dude getting into the biz too who setup in the little space next to ours. He had the whole pimp outfit going on and always walked around with these big boobed white hookers so when we used to bump into him I used to think oh god what have I gotten myself into.

Anyway we had invested about $25K which was a pretty good chunk of change back then and I'll never forget the first days our ads in the Hollywood Express were going to hit the streets.

My partner and I were sitting there in that little room glaring at a rack full of these tape machines and none of them were clicking on yet and we were thinking we might have just made a dumb investment.

Then all of a sudden the little red play light clicked on machine 1 and we immediately high fived each other thinking cool man our first phone sex sale. In the middle of that one playing machine 2 clicked on and started to play. Then machine 3 kicked in. And we just looked at each other knowing holy shit its working. Then machine 4 clicked on. Pretty soon all the machines were clicking on and running and we knew we had just hit the mother load.

We quickly added more 976 numbers and started running ads like crazy. We printed up cards with our numbers and would go anywhere and everywhere to drop them in places where people would pick them up and call.

Back then 976 numbers were limited to each state and we said to ourselves we have to figure a way to do this nationwide. That was the birth of 900 numbers and we were invovled with convincing AT&T to get into the pay-per-call industry like the bell telco's were all doing. AT&T started with 100 900 numbers and we had 2 of them that were authorized for phone sex. It was a monopoly then and we had guys calling us with offers in the hundreds of thousands wanting to get the numbers even before they were activated. It was amazing, but we turned down one offer for $500,000 for both the numbers, which was a shit load of dough, and I can't tell you how hard it was to say no thanks to that kind of money, when you're at that young age, but we knew the income we could generate would be mind boggling in comparison.

We bought a full page ad in Hustler with the 2 numbers displayed and a pic of a famous female porn star in our ad. Digital voice cards were just coming out so we setup the whole system on a little IBM PC AT that had about 640K RAM which fed the anolog signals into digital audio from our office in LA to AT&T's 900 broadcast network.

The day Hustler hit the newstands and we got the first call counts it was unreal cause we were getting about 1,000 to 2,000 calls every hour 24 / 7, about 25,000 to 50,000 calls a day. Then we expanded into mainstream pay-per-call programs and it was a great biz till the Internet came along.

The rest as they say is history.

Wow you have been around for a while, 1,000 calls an hour is a shitload....how much bank did you make from those 900 numbers, im assuming way more than the $500k offered too ya?

Great fuckin story KRL.

Just proves the old adage is true about timing.

Started with an idea for an online indie record label back in late '98 (with someone else who posts here). Messed around with that for a while and couldn't really figure out how to make a living with it but at the same time I started to get good at webdesign and such so I started doing some freelance work. That was going alright until many dot-coms starting going bankrupt.

On the suggestion of the same person I was working on the record label stuff with, I started working on porn sites. Got like 40 domains and a dedicated server right off the bat. Tried a little of everything, TGP, Toplists, link sites, SE stuff, etc. Was going slow but it paid the server bill and was good for some a little spending money so I kept with it. Started putting together WebmasterVault.com in late 2000 and that's been my main project for the past few years and has been doing well. Expanded operations and started a few other resource last year and now I'm expanding further into paysites, which should be launching pretty soon.

Yep, one of my great missed opportunities in life. When the phone-sex thing hit Holland, a friend and I wanted to do exactly the same as KRL. Worked out a business plan, needed about $1000 to get the thing up and running, very excited about it. Then I told my gf, and she flipped...said she'd kick me right out of the house and her life if I even considered doing it. Being very much in love, I decided to drop the plan. 5 Years later when we broke up I decided to pick up where I'd left off, but no go...at this stage there was a massive waiting list for 900 numbers, and the price for a line had increased astronomically, it was way out of my league.

..so you got in to online porn and now you're a millionaire?

before you learn how to walk ya better learn how to crawl.

with that said neither my right leg or my left go me far.
i fallowed my dick all the way to getting what i wanted

Nope, far from it. And I doubt if I'd ever be one...my goal isn't to be stinking rich, just comfortably well-off.

Started out shooting for magazines back in the early 80?s and spent about ten years earning enough to buy our first house and travel the world having fun. Got into the property development business in the mid 90?s quite by accident and made enough serious money to invest in the adult internet side properly. Both our property development business and pay site interests are still going from strength to strength and we are now busy building a secure future and working towards a very early retirement when we feel that the time is ready.

What have we learned along the way?

Learn from your mistakes or they are just wasted.

Save your money and then make it work for you.

Spread your business interests to maximise profit.

If someone can do a better job of it that you can ? Then pay them to do it for you.

You make better business decisions when you are using your own money.

Oh? And nothing beats the feeling of paying for your first brand new Mercedes and driving it out of the showroom no matter how long you have to wait! :2 cents:

No big story, after 3 years I make a pretty good living...TGP'S, free sites, AVS...about $8000.00 every 2 weeks, I'm not rich but I work for myself and love it.

The 976 was lucrative as heck. When AT&T got into 900 the max you could charge the first year, was only .50 cents first min and .35 cents each additional. AT&T was paying .05 cents first min to the IP's (Information Providers) (that was their corporate name for phone sex content producers LOL) and .035 each additional min.

So lets put it this way, we did really well off those nickels because of the volume and great hold times, but we calculated we were making AT&T shareholders $3 to $5 Million per month, which to us was obscene since they weren't risking anything.

After the first year, we went to AT&T corporate and said look guys this split deal where you guys make 7 figures and we make 6 figures isn't going to cut it long term if you want this 900 industry to flourish and people to create all sorts of other mainstream 900 programs besides phone sex that have higher startup costs. If you want to build this into a major revenue center you have to give a fairer deal to your IP's. So then they flipped the deal and the IP's started to get the majority of the money.

The funny thing is we ended up getting a C&D from a state AG or face an obscenity proscution for our 900 phone sex later on down the road because we were so "highly visible" and in the public eye. We settled without getting prosecuted and decided to get into mainstream programming which was wide open virgin territory and ended up making more money with our mainstream 900 progs than even the phone sex because there was no competition in the market and we kept innovating all original program ideas and had the capital to do TV advertising which brought in enormous call volumes. Because we had unique programs we also were able to get our 900 numbers featured in articles in newspapers and magazines everywhere which created even more call volume with zero marketing cost.

Last time I tallied across the board it was over 40 Million calls our assorted companies brought in over the years.

There's no business like show business, that's for sure.
Entertaining people is the best way to make oodles of $$$$ that I've come across in all the different deals I've gotten into over the years. When the Net came along it made it possible to entertain people worldwide with even lower cost margins. Pretty damn amazing.

When you make a lot of money at a young age though you have to be very prudent and careful. I was wild and reckless the first few years and wasted tons of money. Got sucked into the frivolous Beverly Hills lifestyle, flying to Vegas on the weekends with wads of cash, dating expensive gorgeous Playboy model types, eating at the best restaurants for breakfast lunch and dinner, the 6 car garage bullshit, helping out down and out friends with loans, donating to every charity that sent requests, investing in all sorts of crazy startups, etc. So had I been smart I could have done even better, though luckily at that level even when you play hard you still come out smiling all the way to the bank.

When I was a kid, this wealthy friend of my fathers used to always preach, "Wake up early and be the first one at the fishing hole and you'll come home with the best catch".

So yes timing is everything in business. That's one of the reasons I love the Net so much. Its a research hound's dream come true. I spend a lot of time just searching for new trends and technologies to help get ideas for new things.

If you can be the first with something innovative you can usually get a 3 to 6 month ride before you're completely copied and knocked off. But those rides are usually pretty lucrative.

some people start with $100 investment and work 4hrs a day, other start with $30 investment and work 12 hrs a day so sometimes it's hard to compare such things...