Millionaire Quest: Internet Business, a First Attempt (Part 1)

The main problem in getting to be a millionaire, is that first million. Just that first million. That's my obstacle right now, and has been for a little while.

As I have related in a previous entry, in my quest so far to be a millionaire, I have tried several things, which all seemed to fail to varying degrees. I've started recounting the sad tale of my involvement in the stock market. I shall say more on that issue another time. For now, I want to reflect on a different attempt to reach that first million.

Some years ago, I worked for a software company that started to aggressively reduce its workforce. The company went from about 400 people to less than 100 in about the space of a month. That is an interesting story by itself, so I won't get into that here (watch the movie Office Space for further reference). I barely escaped losing my job, but one of my friends wasn't so lucky. Now being an expatriate ( we both were), it was difficult for him to readily find another job, unless he decided to move back home. So weeks went by and no luck.

It was at this time, that I came up with a brilliant way that both of us could become rich. My friend was looking for a job, and I wanted to have options at my finger tips, just in case they decided to give me the letter and the pink slip too. The solution became obvious- start a job site! We could generate income by charging folks to post jobs, search resumes and/or to post advertisements. And of course it should make finding a job easier for us.

Now even back then, there were enough job sites around to make getting into this business difficult. However, as you would expect, my idea had something unique to it. The job site wouldn't be just another one, but it would be for a particular niche.

My friend and I discussed it, and naturally we were excited. It was a winning idea! I had numerous visions of being interviewed on TV shows, for us to relate how we achieved such success, how we turned a sour situation around in our favour. So we started the planning and working together on the Big Idea. Although we were programmers, it was our first experience in website development, so there was a learning curve for us. Nevertheless, as we could see the $$$ at the end, we persevered. We went through many toils and tribulations. Once when we were nearing the completion of the site, the hosting company goofed, and lost all our files forever. As luck would have it, the computer that I kept the backups on, was tampered with at about the same time, and the files were totally gone. We basically had to start from scratch. Nevertheless, more than a year later after we started this project, we produced a nice looking little site. Ah! It was finished. Now to just start making money.

I will continue the story in the next entry soon to come...