Finished my last final yesterday, graduating this Sunday. Feels awesome to be done with school, although I'm going to miss a lot about the college life. Finally have some time so I figured I'd write the next installment of my business story.
This is a continuation from my last blog post about how I got into e-commerce. If you didn't read my last blog, I basically sold coupons on eBay, made some decent money, then my account became suspended. I'll pick up where I left off.
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When I received the suspension, my account had almost 16k feedback and was worth $1k - $5k on the internet black market (yes, it exists). However, the value of my account doesn't even compare to the fact that there was still so much money to be made from the coupons and I was basically excluded from the market. I purchased AuctionStealth and joined AskPin to learn how to make a new account on eBay after being suspended. eBay actually has some very impressive multi-account detection methods. For example, if you open an email sent by eBay, there is always a hidden picture somewhere in the email that your email client has to download off the eBay servers. By doing this, eBay is able to track which IP address you are downloading the picture from and essentially they will know which IP address you are using to read the email. So if I opened an eBay email sent to my new account while using the same IP as my suspended account, eBay will know that both accounts are under the same IP address and that I created a new account. So to get around this I created a completely new identity. New bank account, new PayPal account, new credit cards, new address, new IP, new name, the works. It worked for about a month and then my new account became suspended again, I have no idea how they figured me out. I made a third account but this time I was suspended in less than two weeks. I was pretty devastated at this point.
Nothing happens for a couple months. I'm making some money here and there with blackhat methods, but nothing concrete and nothing that gave returns nearly as high as my coupons did. September rolled around and with midterms looming in the upcoming weeks I was focusing more and more on my studies. As the first semester of my junior year came to an end, edzwoo made a decision that completely changed his life and mine. He bought a $1 Airsoft gun (cue dramatic music). Even though edzwoo had been much more involved with poker than he was with e-commerce, there were still a few wholesalers that he had accounts with. One of them sold really cheap Airsoft guns. We had talked about getting some Airsoft guns for fun and since they were only a dollar each, there really wasn't a reason not to get them. So edzwoo spends something like $5 on two Airsoft guns, when they arrived we could tell that these guns were complete crap. They weighed as much as a plastic fork and were so inaccurate that you'd have a better chance of hitting the target if you just threw the BB pellet instead of shooting it. Regardless, we set up some coke cans in the living room to shoot. Our third roommate joined in and surprisingly, we had a LOOOOOT of fun shooting random things in the apartment. Right away, I decide that I have to get my own Airsoft gun (and of course show Ed up by buying something that's a million times more awesome than his guns).
actual gun I bought
+ Show Spoiler +
After doing some research I decided to go with the UHC M1911, which is an amazing pistol and for anyone that was interested in purchasing an Airsoft gun for the first time, this is the one I would recommend. The gun is nice and heavy, extremely accurate and a 1:1 scale replica of the M1911. For about a month, everytime my roommates and I were in the kitchen heating up food, while we waited we would just pick up a gun and shoot some cans. Our floor was covered with BBs and we had to tape cardboard over the drywall because everytime we missed and hit the wall instead, the BB would leave a nasty little dent. We had a dartboard target with an adhesive covering on the front that would stick to the BB and keep it in place after each shot. This way you can tell where your shots land and we became increasingly better at sniping the bulls-eye with my pistol. We were having a lot of fun with my gun. Little did I know that buying the pistol would be the most +ev decision I had ever made in my business life.
November rolled around and edzwoo was talking about how it'd be pretty cool if we sold Airsoft guns on eBay. We threw around a few ideas but I wasn't very interested at the time. Shortly after Thanksgiving, edzwoo and I were walking on the quad when talk about selling the Arisoft guns came up again. Again, edzwoo talked about how we should try and enter the Airsoft market. We had done some research by this time so our discussion was a little more organized than back when we were just tossing ideas around. I definitely thought Airsoft was a good product to sell, but I had a lot of concerns about partnering with edzwoo. However, we've been friends for close to seven years by then and if I was going to go into business with anyone it would probably be him.
I didn't intend to stop writing here but I'm really tired and need to get some sleep. I'll try and finish this up next week.
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