The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions (6 page)

By the end of the evening, realizing he had no money for the hotel, I invited him to stay at my parents’ house. My brother and I moved into the living room and let him have
our room, and in the morning he got up and had breakfast with my family. It was pretty strange. “Who is this white boy?” my mother asked in Punjabi.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m going to make a deal with him. I am trying to do something on the Internet that’s even better than those printers I was selling on eBay. Don’t worry about it. He won’t stay long.”

After breakfast, everyone left the house, to go to his or her respective job, but I was on my winter break and I stayed behind with the visitor to talk business. Back in London, he had created a few Web sites, and he was trying to sell ads, though not too successfully. The software was serviceable, but it needed changes, and we talked about how he might rewrite the program. I didn’t know anything about programming, mind you; all I knew is what
I wanted the program to do
. So, again, I was thinking like a businessman—thinking about my needs. Still, I knew enough to know that it would never be a great program. In talking to him, it was clear it had its limitations, especially regarding the amount of traffic it could handle—but with some modifications I also knew it would be good enough for my needs. And while I couldn’t program it myself, I was certainly able to describe what I needed. At the end of the day, I didn’t mind the fact that the program was a long way from state of the art, because that meant I could get it for a reasonable price.

He had dinner with my family the two nights he was there, listening to them speak Punjabi, saying nothing, and on the third day my brother and I took him to the airport. I said I would wait for the changes to the program and sent him on his way.

After he returned to London, we talked on the phone almost every day, and he got busy tinkering with the software. After I took a look at the finished version, I agreed to take the tracking system off his hands for $30,000. I sat down and wrote a simple agreement in which I outlined the general terms and conditions. I am not a lawyer, of course, but I thought I’d done a pretty good job of writing my first contract. And the way I did it was simplicity itself. I went online and did my homework. I looked at dozens of sample contracts, to try to get a handle on the way these things were written, and found everything I needed on the Web. (It’s even easier today; you can get a variety of contracts from various sites, at no charge.) The agreement stipulated that I would pay him in ninety days, once I had tested the program, but I already knew that it was working fine. The fact is, I needed those ninety days to generate enough income to pay him—though he didn’t need to know that.

I also told him that if things worked out, I might want to hire him to run the software for me, on a month-to-month basis, when the company was up and running, and I mentioned
the possibility of paying him $10,000 a month. I know that sounds like a huge number, and it was certainly a huge number to me, but I had been looking closely at my competition and at the staggering amounts of money that were being generated, and I knew that all I needed was one little deal to get my business off the ground.

“Great,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said.

Suddenly I was in business. I didn’t know anything about computers—not about programming, not about security, nothing—but I didn’t have to. I was a salesman, remember? A broker. I had the software; all I had to do now was make it work for me; all I needed were the advertisers and the publishers. If I could get an advertiser to commit to one ad, and if I could get a Web site owner to put up that ad, there’d be no stopping me.

The week the deal was signed, I figured out how to incorporate online, and I spent $99 to do it. I called my company Click Agents, and I made myself the marketing director, but I put the company in my brother’s name. I was a minor, and I didn’t want to be breaking the law, and my brother was willing to take the financial risk—which I appreciated. (I certainly didn’t want my parents taking any risks!) Then I began calling advertising agencies, as I had done during the research-and-information phase, but this time I was dead serious. I needed
someone to take a chance on me—
anyone
. And it was
hard
. Getting people on the phone was a piece of cake, but finding the person who made the decisions was almost impossible. I would leave one voice-mail, no more—because I didn’t want to sound desperate—then follow it up with an e-mail. If I didn’t have an e-mail address, I’d guess, which really isn’t that complicated. First initial, last name, @whatevercompany.com. And whenever someone actually responded, I was ready. “I have a company called Click Agents,” I would say. “We have a consortium of Web sites. I can get your ads on those sites, and I will price them on a per-click basis.”

I didn’t have a
consortium
of Web sites—I had no real connection to any legitimate Web sites—but they didn’t need to know that, and that wasn’t the point, anyway. I was a simple salesman. I just had to convince the guy on the other end of the line that I was an effective one. It was the basic theory of supply and demand.

Two days into it, I struck gold. I found myself on the phone with a gentleman at the LeftField Advertising Agency, in San Francisco. LeftField had a client, Infoseek, a search engine, like Google, that was looking to increase traffic to its Web site. “If you put up a $30,000 order, I can deliver traffic at a dollar a click,” I told the agency. In plain English, I was telling him that I could deliver at least 30,000 clicks.

“We’ll get back to you,” I was told.

The following morning, they contacted me with an “insertion order.” Suddenly I was in business. That’s how fast things moved. In a matter of days, I had a contract for $30,000, which called for me to deliver 30,000 clicks within six weeks. I immediately began to contact every Web site that carried advertising, and I gave them the other part of my pitch: “If you make room for my ads for Infoseek, I will share my revenues with you, fifty-fifty.” Most of them accepted—it was a good deal—but there were some that remained unconvinced, and I had to offer them a larger piece of the pie to make it happen. Still, in a matter of days the ads went up, people started clicking, and InfoSeek was getting exactly what it wanted: more traffic. A
lot
more traffic.

Later, as things rolled along, I was able to scale things back to a fifty-fifty split. The Web site owners were making money. I had done my job. Everyone was happy.

“Great delivery, Gary,” the guy at LeftField told me. “What do you think you might be able to do for us next month?”

“I can double it.”

“Okay. Good. I’ll talk to Infoseek and get back to you in a couple of days.”

The door was open, and it was up to me to keep it open. I had made a good first impression—which was critical—but I had to keep them impressed.

Did I have a certain skill that made this happen? No, I don’t think so. At the end of the day, I was polite, professional, and confident, and that certainly helped. But LeftField had orders to fill—it was in the business of spending money—and I was in the right place at the right time. With the right pitch.

A few days later, that first check arrived. Thirty thousand dollars. I couldn’t believe it. I ran to get my brother. “I need you to help me open a bank account,” I said.

“Why do you need a bank account?”

“This,” I said, showing him the check.

“Wow,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Wow.”

We went to the nearest Bank of America branch and Taj signed for the account, my very first bank account. It was my company, yes, but I was too young to write checks, so I would be relying on Taj to handle the unimaginable sums that were about to begin pouring in.

“Don’t tell Dad,” I said.

“This isn’t illegal, is it?”

“No, of course not. But that’s exactly what he’d think.”

My brother had total control of the bank account. But who could I trust if not my own brother?

The next day, I hired someone to overhaul my company Web site. I wanted it to look like the portal to a very serious corporation. I needed to impress people. Perception was key.
And the guy did a great job. Anyone looking at the flashy graphics and the 3-D logos must have thought they were dealing with a major player. Most of them probably never even looked at my Web site, of course, which was fine with me. All they knew was that Gary Singh delivered, and that’s all they cared about. They had no idea they were dealing with a sixteen-year-old kid because I presented myself as a serious professional. Once again, perception is reality.
That’s not a kid on the other end of the line. It’s a guy who delivers on his promises
.

Before long, business was booming, and I learned another valuable lesson: People tend to think that in order to start a new business they have to come up with something new and dazzling, but that’s a myth—and it’s often propagated by venture capitalists. Usually the first question those guys ask you is “What makes you different? Tell me why your company is unlike anything that’s out there. If you want our money, you’re going to have to show us what makes you so special.” What they fail to understand, however—and what most people fail to understand—is that a company can be similar to the competition as long as it has the right people and the right leadership, and as long as it is
committed to being better than all the other players
. In starting Click Agents, I knew I was a small fish in a big pond. After all, I didn’t invent performance-based advertising. But as I evolved, I was able to transform my company so that it stood
out from the pack—in terms of performance, delivery, professionalism—and that’s what got me noticed. My attitude was simple: I knew I could do it, and I knew I could do it better, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to be the best coming out of the gate. I would begin by catching up with the other guys, the guys who got there first, and then I’d leave them in the dust. And that’s what I did: I overexecuted the competition.

So let me repeat: You don’t have to start with a completely new idea. In fact, if you start with something that’s
too
different, people might have doubts about your untested model. It might be a brilliant idea, and your model could very well be ahead of its time, but if the investors can’t relate to it there’s a good chance you’re not going to get funded. My advice is to work with something they understand, then turn it into the model you envisioned in the first place. It’s a mistake to try to reinvent the wheel when you’re coming out of the gate. Start slow and steady, get to parity, then innovate.

Another thing that really helped is that I had a healthy attitude about money. I didn’t have to get rich overnight. I was in it for the long haul, and I was looking to build relationships that lasted. The size of the account really didn’t matter. What mattered was the way I handled it. If I treated every customer equally, and to the best of my abilities, I knew it would open
doors, and that those doors would lead to other, bigger doors. It was one thing to deliver on your promises and another thing to deliver
more
than you promised; I made it a point to try to do the latter. And I generally managed it. At the end of the day, people were looking for results. That’s what mattered: results. Results were key. Results inspired confidence, and confidence led to lucrative, long-term relationships.

The lesson here is clear: Never do anything for money—or, at least,
solely
for money. Of course you want to make money, but if that’s the only goal, it will adversely affect all of your decisions. They will be colored by greed. So don’t let money define the beginning of the journey; make money the rainbow that comes at the end.

This isn’t rocket science. If I walk into a store to purchase something, and the clerk is dull and unhelpful, I see a person who has a long, difficult climb ahead of him. But if I get someone who is energetic—who treats me with respect, who takes the job seriously (even if it’s a supremely uninspiring job)—I see a person who has the potential to go places. It might not happen that day or that week or that month, but attitude gets you noticed, and the right attitude reaps rewards. It’s a simple lesson but an important one. Never relax. Never rest on your laurels. And always look for a way to deliver more than is expected of you. And even when you’re doing well, don’t get complacent. Stay hungry. And work harder
than the competition. In order to stand out in an increasingly crowded field, I had to be better than the rest of them.

Every morning, before I left for school, I would start my day by reviewing a checklist—all the things I needed to do to keep the business running smoothly. Much later, I learned that most businesses do this and that they have a name for that list: key performance indicators (KPIs). This is a simple system they use to measure their progress. It looks at all the variables—customer base, turnover, profitability, debt, and so on—to help determine if there are any weaknesses that need to be addressed. I was doing it by instinct. Then I would look at the daily revenue reports and at the forecasts for the day, the week, the month, and the quarter (hoping I might last an entire quarter!). And when I was done with that, I’d spend a little time looking at what my competitors were up to (new clients, announcements, etc.). Finally, I would roll up my sleeves and begin making calls to potential new advertisers and new publishers.

Before long, I was getting more and more accounts and generating significant amounts of money. I would get a $50,000 order, fill it in record time, and double it the following month. And this was happening over and over again.

But I was still a one-man operation, and that worried me. I had a snazzy Web site, yes, but there were plenty of areas where I felt I was coming up short. I was writing checks by
hand, for example, and that looked unprofessional. So I fixed it: I got a simple computer program that generated slick looking checks. Then there was my answering machine. It was cheap and tinny sounding, so I sprang for my own phone line and a professional voice-mail system. These might seem like minor details, but they are significant: A company that looks good and sounds good inspires confidence. And when a client has confidence in you, he will have no qualms about recommending you to friends and colleagues.