The Life and Times of a Digital Hustler

QR Blender Tragedy

2013-08-20T09:22:00.002-07:00

I told you that I was bad at consistently blogging! It's been over a year since I made a blog post, a lot has changed and happened since then. I'll start with the changes that have affected my previous post about QR Blender.

We started QR Blender from seeing the need for branded QR codes that would scan and go to any site, not like the ItsMyURLs ones which scan and pull up your online presence (which are doing great btw!). So I reached out to the woman in charge of sending out internship and job board emails at MIT. I formatted the email with a subject line that read "In Need Of A SuperCoder". I only got 2 responses, one with a resume attached that had no experience and he was asking "how much are you going to pay me because I can get a lot, blah blah blah", so his got deleted immediately. The second email I got a day later, and he replied "I think I am a SuperCoder".....that's it, just from the way he wrote back, I could tell that I had found my "Neo". He ended up being a genius (who isn't from MIT you might say), but he was in the fraternity of the Genius' of Genius' and he was young and he was looking to make some freelance cash without a commitment, so it was a perfect match.

I asked the coder (let's call him Joe), when I first met up with him at a Boston area starbucks if he could crack the algorithm for certain sections of QR codes so that we could create a software that would enable anyone to create their own custom branded QR codes in just a few minutes....his response: "Sure". So he got to work, and it took him a few weeks but he had figured it out, I knew we had something big, and he had killed it, he made the whole site, design/coding, everything, he was awesome. So the next step was we needed an investor(s) in order to create a polished product and to market this beast, Harout immediately started thinking of people we knew (friends and family). We ended up pitching the idea to a friend of his and his father's, Ernie Bruno who owned a successful t-shirt embroidery business in Orange County CA, they did all of the polo's for the PGA Tour, etc. Ernie believed in us, and put his money behind us and gave us the initial $30k to create a polished product, office space in LA, and pay so we could test the app thoroughly. Things were moving great, but the one downside about the coder was that it took him a long time to complete the project, and this was mostly due to us overloading him with more iterations and adding things to the project as time went on, so it was mostly due to us giving more of a workload to him often.

We finished the product and it came out great, we had burned through the initial $30k and needed more to go to market. Ernie was ready to get us more money and start with another $30k when the tragedy happened. It's tough to even write this, but Ernie's eldest son had killed him in his own home one morning. This was the first man who believed in us enough to put his hard earned money behind us and knew that we were on to something great, and this is how he goes.....I never met his son or knew of his family relationships but myself and my partners were out of it for weeks/months. Ernie deserved much better than to go like this, and we all knew it, so did his community who wrote great things about him in the comments of all of the articles online about his death. Much respect to Ernie.

After this tragic event had happened and we started to come back to earth and see where we were at as a company, we really needed some capital to get this to market. Keep in mind that during all of this stuff, QR Blender was second priority to ItsMyURLs, which was growing tremendously on its own, but without revenues, that was one of the key things about QR Blender, that every user pays. So it would have helped fund ItsMyURLs efforts as well as make the QR Blender partners pretty rich.

So QR Blender as of right now, is not a company anymore, but maybe in the future we may see if we have any options if someone comes to the table with any ideas ;)

-E

Hustlers Background

2012-08-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

I have decided to make this blog an online diary of the journey of myself and my friends (co-founders), and our journey as self proclaimed "Hustlers" as we look to make an impact on the internet, and the world. (excuse my grammar, I am just writing whenever I have a few free minutes).

Background:

Born in Boston, MA in 1980, I grew up in a middle class family in a suburb of Boston, Woburn MA. Family-wise, I have 5 siblings, 2 brothers and 2 sisters, all younger except 1 sister. We had whatever we wanted when we were younger, our dad busted his ass to make a good living for us, my mom was a stay at home mom, which was a full time job with us 5 kids running around. All of this changed, on Christmas of 1998 when my parents decided to get a divorce. I immediately had a choice to make, do I try to go out and isolate myself from my family and go into the world on my own, or do I stick around for my brothers and younger sister who were at critical ages for when they needed some fatherly male influence? I chose the latter, and would make that same choice every single time, it worked out great.

Making that choice alone, changed my life, along with my families. I didn't know how to take care of a 2000sq foot house....paint, fix things when they broke....clean out the gutters....and all of the other things that come with home ownership, like BILLS. So I figured it out, over time, I would just try to do one thing at a time. You see the water dripping out of the gutters on to the top of the house, get a ladder, and clean em out! There are a million of those self taught lessons here, but this got me into the mentality of "if you don't know how to do something......FIGURE IT OUT!". This is a concept that few of my college degree holding friends can understand. It taught me to think outside of the herd mentality, and only deal with things that you know about. If you want to do something, even if you have no idea how to go about it, make the obvious steps in that direction, and you will figure it out. Simple, right?

Myself and my friends always had dreams of riches, the cars, the clothes, the homes, the women, the braggadocio attitude (well, we always had that I guess). We grew up with similar lives, families that seemed to be going great, and then something happened that changed things so that we each had large responsibilities thrown at us. We each embraced the challenge, in our individual instances of resilience in our personal lives. These things were the foundation of what was to come.

Most friends of mine at the time were starting college, getting ready for the next stage that most people did where I lived. This was another situation where I had to think, should I get my parents to co-sign a large student loan for me, head off to college without taking care of my younger brothers and sisters with my mom, or choose a different way? A lot of thoughts went through my head, I only had 2 parents, so that meant 2 co-signs for student loans. I had 3 younger siblings, would I be robbing them of their chance to succeed in life if I took the co-sign for the loan, tying up my parents credit, and debt for 10, 20, 30 years? I said "I'm the one who can go out and figure life out on my own, give my younger siblings a chance at success, just like their friends". I put the weight of the world (my world, at least) on my shoulders and tried to find my way in the world, while at the same time being there for my family.

Someway these lessons translate into how I became an entrepreneur, and am CEO of one of the most well known websites in the pop culture world, and soon to be the world http://ItsMyURLs.com (with over 3 million page views per month and growing).

I'm trying to figure out how to segway into the next stage, I'll write next time I get a chance! Stay tuned.

-E

QR Blender Screenshots

2012-06-12T08:54:00.002-07:00

Myself and my team have been working on this project for the last 6 months. You know those black and white barcodes that you see on marketing materials? Those are called QR codes. We are looking to rid the world of the plain black and white QR codes, and enable anyone to make their own customized QR codes within minutes. That's the solution that we've created at http://qrblender.com it's really cool, and is the future of QR codes. People are 60% more likely to scan a QR code with their mobile device that has an image or logo embedded in it, that has to do with the product or company.

Over the past 2 months, we have given access to a select few major companies and brands. They are ecstatic about our service, and have no complaints or suggestions for improvements yet....except to make it available for Internet Explorer. That is coming soon!

So if you want to give it a try, shoot me an email and I'll get you in on the beta invites, otherwise you can't wait till we open it up for everyone.

-E