Young & Stupid: How I Made 2.5 Million

This is by far the dumbest thing I've ever seen here.<p>I don't think I believe any of this, other than that he wants to make money off of the internet because everyone wants to make money off of the internet. For one, he claims to be writing a book, despite having an apparent 5th grade reading level. I hope he spent about $100k of that $2.5 million on a ghost writer before he lost it. Also I'd bet he's telling the truth about being a high school dropout.<p>For another, he claims to be running bemodel.com, but that site does nothing but display stock photos.<p>I also find it hard to believe that anyone who would point out "The Secret" (and not the book version either, but the movie based on it) as their inspiration could ever scale a website to enough traffic to make $100k+/mo. I'm skeptical he could even spell PHP let alone use it.<p>I have to say, it's VERY tempting for me to buy his ebook about making women chase me. That has to be a non-stop laugh riot.

There is so much I could write, but this sounds exactly like many lottery winner stories. The 30k blown in Vegas part, especially.<p>My personal philosophy is that you've got to get yourself correctly life-balanced. Adding money just amplifies your current habits. So if you're working 24x7 with no life balance, adding a lot of money will just amplify that out-of-control nature.<p>What's sad to me is that there was nobody in this guys life who could act as a mentor and provide advice.

Google Cache:<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6D9e6fs0_rMJ:www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/05/how-i-made-2-5-million/+http://www.andrewfashion.com/2009/12/05/how-i-made-2-5-million/&#38;hl=en&#38;client=firefox-a&#38;gl=us&#38;strip=1" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6D9e6fs...</a>

In his mixergy interview, Andrew Fashion shared his story in great detail about his rise and fall. With respect to the 301 redirect, I asked Andrew to ask him if he 301'd old urls to new ones. Andrew Fashion's response was that he didn't know at the time about 301 redirects and that after he launched his new site he deleted his local copy of the old site. When his traffic plummeted he couldn't go back.

I cringe every time he writes "could of" instead of "could have".

The author met the prerequisite for getting lucky, which is several tens of thousands of hours of failure and iteration. Sure, if he were more mature, or wrote more coherently than a fifth grader, or had any kind of formal training whatsoever, MAYBE he could've done better, kept his site going, created DuckDuckGo, etc.<p>But those things are all secondary. He, unlike 99% of anyone who attempts anything, put in those 10K, 20K, 30K hours, and through those countless iterations made his own luck.

I read this guy's story a year ago, and thought it was interesting. He worked really really hard at something, without any particular skill or talent, and made a bunch of money!<p>A year ago, he was launching a social network for models: <a href="http://www.andrewfashion.com/2010/08/16/whats-been-going-on-bemodel-and-more/" rel="nofollow">http://www.andrewfashion.com/2010/08/16/whats-been-going-on-...</a><p>Now he's leveraging his antics to get in with the HN crowd. He doesn't write great, he doesn't have any real insight to things, and yet he's on the front page of HN and will probably make some $ out of all of this. He'll probably land 2 or 3 more articles, establish himself in the community, and then launch bemodel with a HN/Reddit post that will get lots of free traffic.<p>I dunno? On some levels I think he's a twit, and on other levels he seems like a savant<p>So what's the moral?

As PG might say, the primary killer of start-ups is the start-ups themselves, not any other competing force.

His story proves that anyone can be successful on the internet. And that it's better to be lucky than good.

This is amazing. A good friend of mine was the dot com 1.0 version of this guy. He even had the same BMWs! It's eerie how similar the stories are...

There is a Mixergy interview with this guy: <a href="http://mixergy.com/andrew-fashion/" rel="nofollow">http://mixergy.com/andrew-fashion/</a>

He makes a huge deal about how he killed MySpaceSupport.com by rewiring the URLs, etc and how this eliminated all his revenue, permanently, so that he sold it off in 2008. I'm sure it was a major factor, but I think the changes in the economy, the popularity and demographics of MySpace, and the rise of more popular social networks may have also mattered.

If I had 2.5 million spare extra dollars, I would probably use it to live the way I live now, without having to work ever again.

I couldn't manage to get past the second or third "him and me". When I got to the "dropped out of high school" part, it all made sense.