THank you, someone actually is listening to me.
BTW, I never said I was smart for working my ass off... I didn't have a choice... There was X amount of work that had to be done, and only 2 people.
I was so happy when we got a staff and I could have a resembance of a life, I wanted to Live!
When we did get a staff, I would work from 7:30am to around 4:30pm, no lunch break, monday though thursday, and on fridays I would get off around 1:30. I worked from 9 to about 11:30am on Sundays as well. A far cry from the first 2 years.
And what I said is a fact... 99% of the people out there don't know how much dedication, sacrifice or will power it takes to do something along thoose lines.
That's not arrogance... that's real life experience.
And yes I did learn alot about the business in the 4 years, but most of the extra time I was working was stuff I had to hire people for... updating databases, building PC's, shipping PC's, customer service, etc... stuff that couldn't be concilidated, no matter how hard I tried.
as a matter of fact, I couldn't do anything to really push the company forward, like get cheaper prices on parts, get a more efficent merchant, until I was able to focus on it after we got the building.
lol, we had a line of credit with our vendor, one of the smart things we did when we started our company, so actually none of the money was for parts, we had 60 days to pay off any parts we got from our vendor.
The money was for the website, and the patten that accouted for at the time half of our projected sales (turned out to be more than that)
And $5,000 was cheaping it... if i had to do it again, it would have been closer to $30,000, because the database had a serious flaw in it, our webhosts were cheap and at times unrealiable and we didn't really have any money for marketing. AT the time we had to save another $2,000 to get a decent marketing online campaign going.
business licensing and crap is basically free.
Please, I am not flaming you, but don't talk about something you know nothign about.
In the end, our business lisense was around $3,000, because we had a license in Antiqua, so we can have an offshore merchant account (something I hit upon in another post last night)
then you have the paying for the merchant account (you would think that you do'nt have to pay for a merchant account).. The merchant we started off with, charged us $299 plus $50 for the software, when we got our offshore merchant account it was another $900
Then you had marketing.... which I hated more than anything, espically Cnet (computer shopper mag).. They charged us $39,000, for a 3 month ad, that from what I recall, sold like 4 computers! Every morning I got to work, I had a message from the sales rep at Cnet. He would send us "free" crap, like tee shirts and mags, like we were special, and I didn't want to sign the 3 month contract, but my business partner wanted to get some offline marketing going... I did too, but not them, but I decided what the hell, and thoose were the most expsnsive computers we ever sold.
Oh, and then I haven't even touched on VEnture Capital, something else we ventured into... no pun intended. It actually COSTS money to GET money from an Venture Capialist... tell me how messed up that is! The sad thing about it is, eventually one company wanted to invest some money in us, around $500,000, but wanted 70% of the company, and wanted to use their own executives... we said no thanks (this was in first two years)
Eventually the same company came back, once we got our own building with a lot better offer, but we didn't need it by then.
Anyway, we had a Venture Capitalist broker, or something like that, that we paid $400 per month.. sounds like a lot but when you are talking about getting triple digits, it's well worth it.
Like I said, when we started the company, $5,000 seemed like alot of money to start the company ... I mean, all you have to do is build a website right? If only it were that easy, I might have had an IPO by now.