This is the story of the first business + website I built.
The year was 2002-ish and my Dad was furious to discover what I had done to the brand new Xbox he and my Mom had worked so hard to buy me for Christmas. I remember very distinctly what the scene looked like; Brown carpet lightly sprinkled with dog hair (yellow lab), a small pile of T20, T15, and T10 torx screws, and what used to be my $299 Xbox in six pieces forming a semi-circle around me.
Let me back up - I've been a tinkerer for as long as I can remember because my Dad was always tinkering while I held the flashlight and fetched the tools. Brake pads? Yep. Rotors? Better hope they aren't rusted on. Calipers? Don't forget to bleed the lines! Snow tires? We do that ourselves. We were always a DIY household, which, in the days before the Internet, meant you either needed to buy a book or just figure it out.
I was a bit taken aback... I was just doing what he taught me! My 15 year old brain couldn't comprehend how much $299 actually meant to a single income, three child household in the immediate aftermath of the dot-com crash and 9/11 and I had begged for this.
Sensing his distraught, I apologized and immediately went back to work. Piece by piece, screw by screw, he watched me re-assemble the mess of computer parts that littered my bedroom floor. Five minutes later, I remember plugging that re-assembled Xbox first into the wall and then into the TV, pressing the dimpled gray power button and watching that green glob of goo bounce around on the screen. It worked!
*CLICK*
My Dad's entire demeanor changed. Suddenly it was clear to him that all those hours spent in the garage, days upon days in the woodshop, and countless "Polish ingenuity" lessons had taught me how to just figure it out. He immediately apologized and made sure I knew how impressed he was with what he just witnessed. I'll never forget that.
Months later...
I was browsing an online forum called "xbox-scene" where I stumbled across a tutorial somebody had posted about lighting up the Xbox "jewel" similar to the iconic backlit apple on the PowerBook G4. Welp, I thought, I need to have that. Off to RadioShack!
I picked myself up a soldering iron, a spool of solder, some flux paste, a 10 pack of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and a couple of resistors.
I enlisted my Dad, now on my side, to help me figure this out. For the first time, I actually needed to make cuts and splices into my $299 machine and I needed the help of an experienced DIYer who had danced with this dangerous devil before.
It... wasn't pretty. I wish I had a picture, but I don't, so I'll just have to describe it like those things called "books" used to do. We did manage to get it functioning and it did look okay from the outside, but inside was a rat's nest of LED legs poorly soldered together into an imperfect circle, covered in globs and globs of hot glue from my Mom's scrapbooking supplies.
I was happy with it, but my Dad, ever the perfectionist, called me into his workshop the next day to show me what he'd come up with. I was shocked! He had brought home a piece of PVC pipe from work, cut it down to size, and drilled holes equally spaced apart so we could just slide the LEDs in and solder them on to the two copper wires (positive + negative). This was a legit product!
After testing it out on my Xbox, I started selling my services to my LAN party friends IRL. It was a hit! Let's post about this on xbox-scene forums and see what people think. HUGE demand, I think we may have a business here.
My brother, a business major in college at the time, smartly suggested that we setup an LLC to protect ourselves. A short time later we were a legit businesss and we began building "xboxleds.com".
For your enjoyment, I paid $5 to photobucket so I could reclaim a handful of photos from that era.
We even invented a reversed ring to light up the limited edition crystal Xbox!
We sold hundreds of these rings during the year or two we were doing this. We bought bubble envelopes in bulk, sticker paper to print out shipping labels, and made daily trips to the post office to fulfill our customers' orders. We even started selling just the LEDs because we were sourcing them from China via Alibaba in a variety of colors + brightnesses that you weren't able to find at your local RadioShack.
Anyway, that's all for now. The moral of the story is:
Let kids cook... it may just be their forever meal ticket.