Have you ever taken on something you knew nothing about because you couldn’t afford to pay someone to do it? I have, it was the start of my career in web development. In 2008/2009 I built my first website selling lasers & vapes.

The vapes were pretty basic. The lasers had a green beam, the dopest ones. Word on the street was you could point them at the moon and they would actually hit the moon. Yeah how do you even test that? Maybe we could of asked Nasa to barrow the Hubble Telescope? My best friend and I had started our website (ad)venture.

Day Dreaming and Scheming

A little background. Prior to making the website, my friend and I were selling knock-offs from China on Ebay. What a headache! Ebay kept flagging and suspending our accounts. Now how would we make money? Aha! If we created  a new bank account and email address, we could fool Ebay. Yep, that worked… until it the new count got suspended. We repeated those steps about six times, it was exhausting.

I still have random bank accounts with a couple dollars in it somewhere. It’s funny how hard we worked to make sketchy money. It would have been so much easier to get a “normal” job.  I also want to add that anyone who asked for their money back got it.

We had enough and this website was our fresh start #nomorescheming.

Reality Check

Where do you have a meeting with a web developer? Starbucks seemed right. He heard our ideas and slapped a price on it, $500 to build our e-commerce website. Sounds low, but we were broke as a joke. I’m pretty sure we didn’t even buy coffee at this meeting. We thanked him and declined it on the spot. We felt defeated leaving that Starbucks. Lost on what steps to take next. I wonder what comes next?

Rollin’ up my sleeves

I spent hours, hours and more hours trying to figuring out how to build this super simple website. Finally, after (too) many hours I was finished. I’m still extremely proud of younger me for not giving up. I created a Frankenstein website. Built on Blogger.com’s platform, where I was inserting random PHP scripts. I used static Paypal’s Buy Now buttons to collect the moola. I was a proud parent. Finishing what I set out to do. Who’s with me? Nothing beats the feeling of completion.

Field of dreams

It was clear that if you build it they will not just come. We never thought that would be the case. Make site and make money. It seemed super simple. Well that business flopped pretty hard, but my desire to create websites did not.

My take away

Regardless of the fact that sales didn’t occur, I’m still extremely happy I did it. Who knew I would get my career out of scheming hard on Ebay.

If you got a random story about how you fell into your career, I’d like to hear it 🙂