How A Kid Earned $2 Mil Before He Could Legally Drink – And The Shocking Way He Lost It – with Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson quit high school and built a web site that helped MySpace users decorate their pages. He promoted it by being a “MySpace whore,” who amassed as many MySpace friends as he could and promoted his site to them, and by getting ranked high in Google search results. Then one evening he added some Yahoo ads to his site and BAM, everything changed. He says he couldn’t believe that with 12 hours, the site made him about $2,500.
As the site got more “Google juice,” it got more traffic. Pretty soon he was up to about $200,000 in revenues. At 18, he was a millionaire. He bought a house. And a car. And another car. And a truck. And presents for girlfriend. And pretty soon the money was running low. But he didn’t worry because the revenue kept coming in.
Then one day he did something that seemed like the right move, but it made it all go away. He improved his site. He improved it so much that Google considered it a whole new site — and dropped him in the rankings. That’s when it all went away. Listen to the interview to get the full story!
Andrew “Fashion” Thompson is the founder of beModel, a social network for artists. Previously, he ran sites including MySpaceSupport.com, which we talked about in this interview. For more about him, read his personal site’s about page: http://www.310andrewfashion.com/about
Andrew: Hey everyone, it’s Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious up-start. And one of the great things about the work that I do here on Mixergy is I get to find out stories of people that I never would have discovered otherwise. Because there’s really no magazine covering this, these kinds of stories. There’s really no television station that’s covering ambitious stories, ambitious entrepreneurs, like the conversations that I get to have here. And one of the people who I got to meet because of Mixergy is a guy who, before he was old enough to drink, and Andrew, correct me if this is untrue. But before Andrew Thompson was old enough to drink, he earned about 2 million dollars building a Myspace site. A site that helped people who were on Myspace. He earned it quickly, and then he lost it just as quickly. And we’re going to find out how he earned it, and I want to learn a lot from that. Then find out how you lost it, and...
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