Alfred here (warning: wall of text)

[Fant]

Hello there! I am Alfred van Kuik, and as you might've guessed by the name, I'm from Europe. The Netherlands to be exact, which is a small country you probably only heard of in relation to drugs and hookers. We have those, although they're rare in this part. We mainly have farmers... My English might not be perfect, but at least you don't have to suffer from my terrible pronunciation. But yeah, keep in mind that I'm Dutch if you see any terrible mistakes.

Anyways, like I said, Alfred. Only twenty years old, but I suppose there's lots of young people here with great ambitions! I've never been a 9-5 guy really. When I finished school I decided to take a gap-year. Get a job, work half a year and then travel around Europe in my Mazda MX-5. That was the plan... First of all, getting a job was a pain in the a$$, but eventually I did find something. I had to drive around in a van and deliver car parts, which fitted great with my love of driving as well as my love of cars in general. But just like MJ said in TMF , when you "do what you love" as a job, it quickly loses it's fun. I was heavily underpaid (they only paid me while driving, and somedays when there wasn't a lot of parts to be delivered I sat on my a$$ half of the day, thus only getting paid a few hours :coco, and my boss was a terrible person. They gave me a crappy Volkswagen Caddy that wouldn't go over 2000RPM for fuel economy reasons, so even walking would've been faster. The boss was monitoring every move, and calling me, telling me to go faster and not fill the car up so often. I couldn't go faster in that crappy car, and driving without gas wasn't really an option either...

Not fun. I started to lose my joy in driving, and while I was sitting there in the dirty old Caddy, I was thinking how miserable this made me feel. I quit that job a month later, and continued doing nothing but playing videogames and watching family guy reruns. Then I got a great job-offer from some guy that read my blog, where I was bitching about work. The pay was great (4 times minimum wage for my age), but it was over an hour of driving to get there. Did it for two weeks before quitting that too and going back to videogames and family guy. I was thinking of how I would have to do this till my 67th, and I got heavily depressed. 9-5 jobs just make me feel as miserable as I can possibly get...

But then, one day, I got an idea! I thought it out a bit, but soon forgot about it due to personal issues in my life. A month or two later, when things had settled down, I decided to give that idea a shot. I sent a few friends an email, making my first BIG mistake... I didn't think about what they could have to offer to the project. I just mailed them cause they were my best friends. I got four positives, so we started out with five guys. One of them is a quite talented designer, another was great at talking, had great ideas to add and could very well become a good PR man (if he lays off the videogames a bit more), but the other two were worthless. I learned from my mistake, but I had to get rid of them! They were my friends though, so it wasn't an easy task. Fortunately, one of them quickly discovered himself he lacked the motivation and skills, and he quit. The other guy sticked around for far too long, adding nothing, actually distracting us three. I had to tell him, and I did. He promised to change, he didn't and we gave him a nod in the right direction. A few days later he too decided to quit.

Now we're left with three. The designer, the PR/hardware expert and me; the guy to guide everything, think of pretty much 80% of the ideas and do the financial stuff. None of us are over 21, so we're not exactly experienced. What we want to do is start a Social Network. No, I'm not trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, not at all. It's too late for that to ever happen I think. What we want to do is make a SN for the 'niche' (pretty damn big one I think) of (future) car owners! It's a lot more than a social network actually. We want to provide the social functions, but also a platform for support and sales. Our huge goals? Making Cardomain, Ebay motors and car forums obsolete. We want people to come to us for keeping track of their car history, sharing their ride, selling it, picking what car they want to buy, buying a new one, keeping it maintained, finding the nearest garage, find events, make events, join events etc etc.

Big plans! We've been at it for four months, but I've been fooling myself really. I told myself I was working hard, but actually we still don't have working concepts. Our designer made some great stuff, but nothing actually works. It just sits there and looks good. We need a coder/programmer, and I just sat there writing, thinking and reading about lots and lots of things. Sure, I spent 90% of my free time on the project, but I wasn't actually being productive. A week or two ago someone told me to go watch the movie "The Secret". It's the Law of Attraction crap, and they actually made me believe it in some way. I just wanted it to work so bad... Fortunately after a day or so, my common sense kicked back in and I remembered The Millionaire Fastlane , which was recommended to me a lot earlier. I got the first three chapters, read them and quickly got the real thing, reading it through in two days (I hadn't finished a book for months till that day! It really is a good read!).

It changed my perspective completely! It was the wake-up call I needed. If I was going to make it, it would take a bit more work than just reading and writing a bit. That night I decided I was going to learn myself to code websites. Now I've been at it for a day or two, and the basics were easy, but I'm very afraid that before I can make a fully functional social network it's going to be years. I'd love to outsource it so I can focus my attention on getting a lót more knowledge of economics and running businesses (taxes especially) in my country in general (Holland is a country of lots and lots of rules). We need money though! Now, we were planning a Crowdfunding campaign (you might be familiar with it? Kickstarter/IndieGoGo etc.), and that's still our plan. If we make our goal, we could outsource the coding and I could focus my full attention on teaching myself (business) economics, our whole tax system and a lót of marketing stuff. If not I'll have to learn to code, or find someone to do it for 2k or less, since that's about my budget (which is probably impossible). Any tips on this would be welcome. Should I continue trying to teach myself? It won't hurt of course, but maybe the time could be invested in better things.

TMF did make me feel like my idea was very fastlane-compatible! We have a revenue model with lots of different things (ads, leads to garages, percentages of parts-sales, cost for putting cars up for sale, promoted events, database that could be of value) that could very well become passive. While it was a slap in the face, the book made me feel great! I finally have the feeling of actually making progress again, and it feels wonderful. We will launch our Crowdfunding campaign tomorrow, and hopefully that will kick this project into a higher gear. Any tips, advice or comments (positive, or even better; negative!) are very welcome. I really respect you if you kept reading till here. When I make my first million you can come look me up, and I will buy you a beer as a thank you :smxF:

(oh yeah, the goals... Well, as you might've noticed, I'm a huge car nut! I now drive a 1992 Mazda MX-5, and I love it, but my ultimate dream is a Ferrari F355, sitting in the Garage between a Pagani Zonda and a Porsche Carrera GT. The F355 is what the Countach was for MJ. I once saw one as an 8 year old kid, and it hasn't left my mind since. It's actually not that unaffordable, but the other two are going to take a big bank account, so yeah, I have some stuff to work towards! I could easily list 50+ cars I want, so there's really no limit :smug2

 

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