Drumroll……. This is the start of the blog about my adventures in internet entrepreneurship. I first got the dea for a web business back in 2003 when I read something about making a website and putting adsense on it. I was going to say it was Joel Comm’s Book , but looking at the publication date I got the idea way before that book was published. Adsense sounded like an easy way to big bucks, but I didn’t have the focus to seriously get into internet marketing stuff. I had just graduated from college and that anyone that has gone through that change knows (college -> real world) it has takes some time to settle in.

I do have some internet entrepreneurship experience. During one summer in college I needed a job and had just read a book about selling books on Amazon. I got my dad give me a small loan and I started a book selling business. At one point in time I was making a decent amount of money every week. I would wake up early on Saturday mornings and scour the yard sales for saleable books. During the week I would go to thrift stores and pour over their bookshelves for books that looked interesting. I had the bright idea one day to take my digital camera and film the spines of the books in the thrift store row by row. I would go home and look at the video, look up the book names on Amazon, and then go back to the thrift store later that day and buy the valuable books. This system worked well until school started back in session. I didn’t have the time to continue selling books full time, but I maintained a small inventory and bought books in my spare time. The extra cash was nice. About this time there was a change in technology that even one-uped my system. Scoutpal allowed people type in the ISBN number from a book into their cell phone and have it come back with the lowest used Amazon price. At big book sales there would hordes of people furiously entering ISBN’s into their cell phones. The market had become saturated; it was time to get out.

I miss a lot of aspects of that job. The excitement of waking up to see how many sales had happened overnight. Even through waking up early Saturday morning sucked, it was always an adventure speeding from yard sale to yard sale. A lot of times the same people would be at each yard sale looking for books and it was a race to see who picked through them first. I would spend Friday with a newspaper and a map placing a piece of tape on the map referencing each prospective sale. “Books” in the newspaper copy was a good sign, “baby clothes” was not. I loved the inventiveness of the job, coming up with a system to track inventory; finding a better way to discover saleable books.