My "Internet career" humorously enough started on eBay. I was selling antique art prints until the eBay market got flooded. This left me with around 5K prints that are still floating around the house. As I was starting to go broke from that drought, I hastily purchased a "membership" type site what was related to the wholesale business. Laugh if you will...but in it's hay-day, it made some pretty fair revenue. Funds from that helped my start Wholesale411.com, which I later sold in 2005 to a company that was going public.
Wholesale411 was a niche pay-per-click (PPC) search engine whereas users searched for wholesale products, and our advertisers were ranked by their bid amount. It was amazing to see revenues of over $150K month based on pennies per click.
The sale was both a blessing and a curse! On the plus side...the sales process gave me a chance to really learn a lot about due diligence. It also allowed me some financial freedoms. On the downside, it thrust both my business partner and I into three lawsuits simultaneously. Two of the suits were related to contractual poison pills built into the contract (basically sour grapes by the buyer). The third and most difficult was a suit by a previous "potential" buyer who was just looking for a money grab. He was a scumbag with no money and a greedy lawyer. A year and a half later...and $400k in legal bills, it finally ended.
After the sale of W411 and a brief hand-off period, my partner (Anthony Colan) and I purchased the domain Blogster.com for $100,000 and began to build a blogging platform there. We had that site for just over a year before we sold it. For whatever reason, the new owner decided to rewrite and remove our software platform which allowed us retain 100% original code.
Another simultaneous project we were involved with at the time was Adimpact.com. We purchased the code from a programmer in Sweden for a fair amount of money. I just thought it was cool! We did a compete overhaul on the code and graphics and it remains a pretty decent project for me.
In late 2007, I bought out Tony's equity in the company. In early 2008, i was twitching to find a new home for the Social Blogging code we had originally written for Blogster. Back in the late 90's I purchased the domain Greasy.com and never really knew what to do with it. So, that's where it went!
Greasy is a blogging platform who's users skew to be a bit older. I have a few other web projects that I am currently involved with...but they come and go so fast that I dare not mention them.
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