I sit here writing on a Monday night with a beer in hand. Not because I enjoy the taste or deserve the day off, but because it’s the only way I know how to relax. My weekends are great, I’m back at the gym 3 days a week after almost 12 months away and yet I’m planning my life around the days I can get fucked up. Why? I have no idea. I’ll watch a comedian fuck up on stage and eventually apologize citing stress. I’ll see a YouTube channel sell out and say that they’re experiencing depression. I’ll disappoint myself on a daily basis and come out empty-handed. I have no excuses. Why did you do X, Mat? I’m not sure. Why did you do Y, Mat? Fucked if I know, I just did it.

You see, back in 2016 I saw alcohol as the common denominator. I fucked up X, and alcohol was the Y. I destroyed Y and booze was X. What I didn’t know was that X & Y weren’t the only letters we were dealing with, we were dealing with the entire fucking alphabet. Correlation does not imply causation. I cut out my X’s & Y’s without touching the A’s, B’s, C’s and so on. I had lost my way. I had blinkers on trying to narrow my focus when I should have been exploring all of the different leads. Basically I went at it alone, thought I knew everything & it all blew up in my face.

I talk to you as a group but please indulge me as I address you as a person. This year has been really tough. I’ve been distant & I’ve been still which I apologize for. I’ve had deadlines and countdowns that just haven’t worked even though I tried my hardest to keep them. I really enjoy talking with you. If you were here, I would drop everything I was doing and engage with you. I’ve fucked up time & time again in the past but I do believe there’s hope in the future.

Now I come back to you guys trying my hardest to give a positive update. I can’t say that I have a million different products and ideas.  I can’t say that it’s all smooth sailing from here on out. All I can say is that we’re still working on wacky waving man & we’re into some really deep R&D and I’m hoping that this year we can release something to the public. Wacky Waving Man is going to be the most over-engineered, fun, useless product on the market so please don’t miss out.

If you’re wanting to stay up to date with wacky waving man, click here.

I find honest reflection something that very few do. Why do we insist on living in the shadows of our truth? I mean, let’s just be honest, put all of our cards on the table and see where we’re at. If you’ve been one of the (very few) people following Dan & I’s progress over the past… 7 years you’ll know that the projects are slow, progress non-existent & blog posts imaginary. But alas, let’s take a peep at one of my larger projects Where’s MH370.

For those unaware, let’s recap Where’s MH370. Where’s MH370 is an illustrated search and find activity book. Remember Where’s Waldo? Pretty much that except instead of trying to find Waldo, you’re trying to find missing pieces of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. You can read more about the project here.

If we take a look at numbers for the launch you will see that things started off quite well with over 600 sales in the first few days. This was due to extensive media coverage, my own personal social media strategy and a successful Reddit AMA.

The truth is that no-one gives a shit about MH370 anymore. 239 people died on the flight & the only people that care are immediate friends and family & they’re still left questioning what the fuck happened. Obviously it’s not in Hell like the book suggests. Obviously it’s not in North Korea. Obviously not in Russia. In all likelihood it’s at the bottom of the fucking Ocean & yet we still can’t find it. Great for me, but terrible for the families. Look, when I found out that the search was cancelled & that the final resting place would never be found I was overjoyed. Great, my project will always be relevant. But c’mon… we have 239 peoples families that will never have closure. That’s pretty fucked up.

The plane never being found will result in what… 2/3 book sales a month organically? That’s like $45. $45 for one of the most intriguing mysteries to not have an end point. Is it really worth it? At this point it will take me around 27 years to sell out. Would I trade 27 years of passive income for 239 peoples families closure? And that’s where my moral compass comes into place. I get that I struggle to empathize with people, but I still wouldn’t mind getting rid of these boxes, even if it takes 30 years. Yeah, that’s quite fucked up.

Look, I get that dying in a fiery airplane crash would fucking suck, but have you tried living in a small apartment with 1,000 copies of a picture book?!  That shit is cramped as hell. But anyway, the next update you’ll get from me is to do with a new project. MH370 will live on in the background.

I’ve come to a realization that my expectations for this journey were incredibly naive. I thought that everything would be different at the end; that some great big change would wash over me and that I would be a better, stronger, person. That removing a substance from my life that had at times, caused me great pain would do the opposite if I simply erased it from my life. But that’s not how it works, you have to address the underlying issues and that’s not something I’ve done. The correct route would have been to see why I was a magnet for addiction; why did I seek the high, or, at times, the low that alcohol gave to me? Why do I continue to put myself in unwinnable positions with other forms of addiction such as gambling?

Despite how crushing it is to admit, going any longer than a year sober isn’t sustainable for me. I used alcohol as a coping mechanism, a way to relax and as an escape. For 12 months I have felt as though I haven’t experienced any of this. I struggle to cope, I cannot relax and I have no escape. Despite what I know sounds like a myriad of excuses, I did try my absolute hardest to find alternate means of managing but I forever came up empty. I feel now that at the end of the day, it’s less about drinking, and more about being able to give myself a time out. I don’t crave a drink, I crave a chance to close my eyes and relax my shoulders. What I want more than anything is to just de-stress with the people I care about. After 12 months of being constantly on, I just want to be off.

For years I’ve said that I build products that no-one wants or needs and yet somehow they find an audience. This couldn’t be more true if you take a look back at my past projects and see how they’ve taken off, and been embraced by people all around the world. From How Many Midgets Could You Eat – the first website I created back when I was a teenager that allowed users to take a quiz to figure out a score to an incredibly stupid question – to Ship Your Enemies Glitter and then to the more recent Hardcore Prawn Lawn.

All of these sites share a similar theme which is why it makes sense that Dan and I would eventually come to create UselessWeb.com, an aggregator of all the crazy, useless websites that people like us have created.

Acquiring UselessWeb.com

Let’s take a step back, as the process for acquiring the domain name was quite interesting. See this particular domain has a bit of value to it, it’s similar to the largest competitor and was already receiving hundreds of organic visitors a day – you would expect it to sell at auction for a decent amount. Late last year, I received an email from an individual from Sweden who was familiar with Random Useful Websites (now known as Discuvver) and was curious as to whether we could include his website (Anystart) in our collection of sites. Towards the end of the email was the line: “One funny thing is that i own the domain UselessWeb.com, and I’m redirecting the type in traffic to anystart.com”. My interest was piqued.

I enquired as to how much traffic the domain was receiving, and was told around 250 unique visitors a day. We went on to talk about strategy for Anystart and how forwarding the traffic from the UselessWeb.com domain wasn’t beneficial ,as he was essentially sending useless traffic to a website that specialized in useful websites.

After a bit of back and forth, and being told that when it was parked in the past, it was earning a substantial amount of money, I realised that we needed to own this domain. I’m not a fan of paying more than the registration costs, so I started doing what so few people do nowadays: bartering.

Bartering – Because Buying is Boring

In the past I’ve used bartering whenever I can instead of normal buying; mostly because I love my money too much to give it away, but also because I can offer services that have a perceived higher value than what I’m receiving. For example: I once built a website for a mechanic in exchange for car repair and maintenance work – sort of on a retainer. I hosted the website (cost to me: $0), built the website in less than 2 hours (cost to me: time) and the mechanic paid all the domain registration fees. In return, I received thousands of dollars worth of automotive work on my piece of shit car and both of us were happy.

The bartering for acquiring UselessWeb.com went as follows:

Dan and I would offer:

1. Inclusion into RandomUsefulWebsites.com database for AnyStart (guaranteed traffic, and the site is actually useful, so that all fits)
2. A shout-out in the Discuvver newsletter (3,500+ readers)

The owner came back to us with a few points:

1. He already had a cash offer for the domain from someone else
2. Coming from a domain flipping background, he mentioned that the domain earned on average $109/mo, and apparently he would have no issues selling it for close to $4,000
3. He wanted $400 thrown into the mix so he could purchase a premium promotional package on Killer Startups
4. He also wanted me to tweet out an image and link to the Anystart website

Alright, so we’re in the zone, we have a starting point. I take a look at what he’s after and I knew that I didn’t want to budge. I double down on not being able to offer any cash for the domain and I tell him about my experience with Killer Startups; that it’s an absolute waste of money. I used it years ago when it was semi-relevant and even then it didn’t yield any meaningful results. I finish by saying that the only thing I can offer is relevant, recurring traffic to his startup which is something he can’t buy and something the individual offering cash for the domain can’t give.

We Love Useless Websites

One week after conversations started, UselessWeb.com was transferred over to our domain registrar and we were the new owners. If you would like to see my 2 email pitches, you can check them out here and here. At the end, all of us were happy with the deal. We acquired an awesome domain name that we wanted to use as an alternative to Discuvver, and the previous owner now receives consistent, recurring traffic to his website every day. Which brings us to the website as you see it now.

What we’ve done isn’t new, it’s not a unique idea and it’s not going to make us a shit ton of money, however, it is something that’s a lot of fun. The user visits the website, clicks a link and is taken to a random, useless website. Websites range from Build Shruggie to Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue to even more ridiculous ideas. I’ve wanted to build an aggregator like this ever since Random Useful Websites gained traction and ever since I built Hardcore Prawn Lawn.

Hardcore Prawn Lawn wasn’t the only useless website I had built. A previous partner and I built a website called My Big Black Clock. As a play on words, the website compromised of a phallic shaped clock that took up the entire screen. When the website was posted online, people loved it. I was in Canada at the time and we were watching the realtime analytics shoot up to 1,000 concurrent visitors and people were sharing the site all over social media; we were pretty happy with how it was being perceived so we decided to submit it to TheUselessWeb.com.

A few days passed and we’d heard nothing. After some follow up emails, we discovered that it had been rejected. This sort of rubbed me the wrong way, here we have a website that aggregates useless websites and when a popular one is submitted, it wasn’t included. How could I fail at building something useless? What’s wrong with My Big Black Clock? I did a bit of digging and came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything wrong with it, it’s just that the owner doesn’t seem to be accepting any new submissions that he doesn’t benefit from. After some quick digging, I realised there were many, many websites that the developer owned in the rotation, including one that seemed to exist purely to earn commission via the Amazon Affiliate program. It’s like its only job now isn’t to serve useless websites, but to be a personal traffic referral system that makes money.

Truly Useless

Which is what got me thinking: are there other people out there spending time building useless sites that are unable to get an audience? That’s not cool. We want to help people build useless websites and get eyeballs in front of them; not leverage other peoples work to generate commissions for ourselves. I get that if you own an aggregator you would want to build products for it, but not when you turn down community submissions in favour of your own personal, revenue generating websites. Adverts on the launch page are fine, after all there are hosting bills to pay, but when you’re using other peoples creations to help get visits to shady affiliate sites, you’re no longer running the site for the right reason.

This may come across as me being salty, but truth be told I just want to see useless websites shared around the web again, that’s why we built UselessWeb.com. We both love the creativity and ingenuity people have when there are no limits or restrictions on what sort of website you can build. Minds go to weird places, brains unleash a flurry of outrageous ideas and beauty is eventually born.  Truly useless websites are a fun art.

We Want You!

This brings us to something we have planned in the near future: a competition that will have the makers and creators building the next best useless websites. The winner will receive a miscellaneous selection of weird and whacky prizes and we’ll have entries that are deemed useless included in the database where traffic will be sent to them, and we’ll hopefully have a new community of individuals that love building useless websites. That’s the plan anyway.

Who would have guessed that self-publishing a full color, illustrated search & find activity book would be so fucking complicated? Not only has it been a semi-expensive lesson in creating a physical product, but it has also led to death threats, legal threats and a shit ton of hate from people online. Listen, I’m not complaining, I’m just making an observation; I guess it was kind of expected when you create a book as controversial as Where’s MH370.

It was around March 2015 when Ship Your Enemies Glitter was starting to wind down & I was starting to seriously think about what I wanted to work on next. I had a few ideas floating around but I wanted to change things up and devote a bit of time into something that I could be proud of. This means no websites created in a couple of hours & no products put together over the weekend. So I opt for a search & find activity book. I remember the day the idea came to fruition when we were spitballing what the hardest thing to find in the world was.

“What about that missing Malaysian airplane?”

It was perfect, no-one could find this fucking plane & it instantly spurred on other cool ideas because of all of the conspiracy theories surrounding it. We could put the plane in all of these absurd locations, incorporate cameos by C-List celebrities, cause a bit of trouble & hopefully sell a few books.

So the first thing we did was plan this shit out & not rush the project which is something I used to always do. Granted it’s worked for me in the past but whatever. I got a bit of help from an old friend who helped me when I was drunk talking to the media for SYEG. We talked about potential scene locations such as Russia, North Korea & Hell and decided who we wanted to put in each. This part of the project was super fun, especially when a friend said that I needed to put myself where I belong… in Hell. So I did & there’s now a Sofa Moolah cameo in Where’s MH370. I also included celebrities, sports figures, politicians, CEO’s and more in each scene as well include little hidden Easter Eggs.

Along with the cameos, scene locations & Easter eggs, we needed to decide which parts of MH370 to include. At one point in time we weren’t ever going to even include the debris with the idea that MH370 is literally impossible to find however we decided to ditch that idea once we realized that we might cop too much backlash from customers who were purchasing a search & find activity book only to find out that there’s nothing to find. Bit of a dick move, no? So in the end we decided on 5 common items:

1. Travel luggage suitcase
2. Captains hat
3. Blackbox
4. Landing gear
5. Oxygen mask

All 5 can be found on every single commercial airliner so they were perfect fits for the scenes.

Alright, so the planning for inside the book is done, now I had to find someone to illustrate it. This sounds easy, pay some money & hire a company or freelancer to draw the scenes and you’re good to go. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

Finding good quality illustrators who didn’t charge a fuck ton of money was extremely hard.

Finding good quality illustrators who were available for months of work was even harder.

Finding good quality illustrators who would take on a project about a missing plane full of passengers & crew was next to impossible. A lot injected their own moral stance and wouldn’t include certain elements in scenes. Censoring is a massive turn off for a project like this.

Luckily for me a friend recommended an illustrator who had a set of balls and was keen to take on the project. We were introduced on April 14 and I sent through the full brief which included all of the cameos, scenes and whatnot. By April 19th, questions were asked & answered, samples were done, concerns were addressed, payment was sent & the contract was signed. The illustrator liked what they saw, we agreed on a price and a turnaround time of 3 weeks which turned out to not be very realistic but that was no-one’s fault in particular. I also gave them a lot of creative control, allowing them to pitch ideas, add objects into scenes and overall just be laid back with how some scenes are filled. I think doing this makes projects a lot more relaxed and you end up with a better end product.

By April 19th, sketching had started. Things were quiet for the next week as a massive storm wiped out my power and I was without the internet/electricity for the longest week of my life. So April 28 rocks around and I get initial sketches for a scene. It was tough to envision the finished product, I was a bit worried because of the lack of detail but the illustrator reassured me that once inking & coloring was done the scenes would be perfect. I put a lot of trust in the people I hire so we kept going.

Fast forward a full 10 days later & I realize I’ve fucked up. In what I can only refer to as me being a fucking idiot, I had the illustrations being drawn 9×6 whereas they should have been 6×9. Such a stupid mistake that cost us time & money. It also made me reevaluate whether or not I’m mentally retarded. That mistake did make me focus a lot harder on this project. I put a lot of things aside and knuckled down to getting it perfect and by July 22 I had the 1st proof copy in my hands. I had the printer publish both a hard & soft copy to see which would look better. Turns out the hard copy was 1,000 times better. Because the book only had 12 scenes, the soft copy looked like a fucking brochure, not like a book. No-one would pay $15 for a brochure. It wasn’t long after receiving the soft copy that I had already decided that I wanted the book to have a hard cover.

Whilst the illustrations were being created, I hired a friend of mine to design & code a website. I could have done this myself however my design skills are extremely limited so I forked out a few bucks for it to be professionally done. You can check out the website here: http://wheresmh370book.com. Creating the content for the website was again, really fun. We through in jokes, hidden Easter eggs in the source code, had MH370 fly across the page when you first visit the website only for it to never appear again & loads of other shit.

Alright, so a few tweaks were made after receiving the proof copy & eventually I decided to place a starting order of 50 books with the idea being that they will be sent to reviewers, press & people involved with the book as gifts. Those first 50 copies cost me a total of $941.95 which brings each book down to about $18.85 which is extremely expensive. At this cost, for the project to be worthwhile I’d have to sell each book for $25-$30 which isn’t something I was interested in. In my opinion the book just wouldn’t sell at that price point. So I now had to get this pricepoint down.

I had the first 50 copies & now had to get these in the hands of influential people. I paid a VA to scrape all of the journalists information who covered Ship Your Enemies Glitter & create a simple spreadsheet that included their contact details. I sent off emails to each of them that included a bit of information about Where’s MH370 & asking whether or not they wanted a free copy of the book to review. Majority accepted & now all I had to do was send the book out.

The review copies were sent out including an embargo date. Unfortunately Australia Post sucks dick & majority of the books didn’t make it to their destinations on time even though they were sent out 3 and a half weeks in advance. Heck, 1 copy didn’t make it to the Philippines for 6 weeks even though the Australia Post website states a delivery time of 2 weeks. Classic.

Moving back to getting the price per book down, I decided to take a gamble & invest a bit of money into purchasing the books in bulk. Using the same printer, I received a quote for 2,000 copies. The total price was $10,132.47 which is a cost per book of $5.06. This was so much better, it allowed me to charge a modest $15 per copy. When every book sells revenue will be close to $30,000 with a profit margin of around $20,000. Not too bad, especially considering I can reorder in the future & have this recurring income or even sell the entire project.

It’s now October & it’s time to launch this book. Vice was the first to write about the book & got the exclusive. On October 20th, this article went up. From there things snowballed with other media outlets picking it up including A LOT from within Malaysia. The orders started flooding in & a few other weird things happened including death threats & relatives of victims getting in touch with me. From October to the end of November things were HECTIC especially with Christmas around the corner.

As December hit I decided to do a Reddit AMA on the 12th of December. To my surprise, it went well… like really well. As of today, it’s sitting on over 4,000 upvotes & over 2,500 comments. I actually started on a Saturday night & didn’t stop answering questions until Sunday afternoon. I had a few drinks during the AMA so some answers were quite strange, but fuck, people liked them. I published a post earlier that detailed the analytics for the Reddit AMA in terms of book sales which you can view here which included over just under $10,000 in sales, 36,000 unique visitors to the website and over 600 copies sold. Pretty good for a Saturday night that I probably wont remember. You can view the AMA here.

As the orders were coming in, it was quite reminiscent of glitter. So many orders however now I was more organized with packing slips, padded bags etc. I’m so fucking glad that this project didn’t involve anything messy, all I had to do was put books in bags with an invoice & fill out addresses. They started piling up pretty quick.

But I mean, this project was so much funner than anything I’ve done before. I’m not sending shit to peoples enemies, I’m actually sending a book that people find fun & entertaining. The response, surprisingly has been overwhelmingly positive.

So where to from here for Where’s MH370?

• I maintain the Where’s MH370 official Facebook page where we post illustrations every week. I suggest you like the page, some of the stuff we post is pretty funny.
• I’m constantly thinking up fun, controversial ways of getting the book noticed.
• Every day we’re receiving orders from people who want their own copy of the book.

This post is sort of half finished, I’ll update it later on.

A few months later we had the idea of turning it into a fully functional website with a ton of new features and an updated database of useful websites. This is when Random Useful Websites was transitioning to Discuvver. I had an awesome looking website designed however over time the project stalled and it never got properly finished.

Not to dissuade us, we started capturing user email addresses on Random Useful Website’s, signed up for a MailChimp account and watched it grow over time. Today the account has around 2,800 email subscribers.

Not too bad, we’re always looking at growing it but for now it’ll do. So a couple of months ago we decided to pivot Discuvver to simply a newsletter. We’ll keep Random Useful Websites as is (we were going to 301 it to Discuvver) and focus on growing the newsletter organically. This does work out well, not having the Discuvver website live was a lot of weight on our shoulders so putting it aside for the indefinite future will de-stress both of us and allow us to build the email list and also work on other projects. It’s something I was a fan of doing; writing is something I really enjoy & being able to slide into 3,000 people’s inboxes every week is exciting.

An issue I was running into was the tone of the emails. From the very beginning I was keeping things pretty simple, everything was quite corporate feeling & I wasn’t too pleased with the engagement levels. Emails weren’t being opened and the click rate was pretty low. So 3 months ago I decided to let loose and write freely. Clicks then have jumped from a measly 6.1% up to 10.0%. I mean, I would like that higher but apparently the industry average is only 1.4% so we’re doing something right. Although, I guess a majority of people in the “Software & Web App” industry aren’t acting as giant referrers.

Anyway, quick funny story. When I’m in the zone and writing freely, profanity creeps in. A couple of the past emails have featured a few fucks & what-not. Cue the first complaint.

Check it out below:

A fucking joke, right? My reply:

So the time comes to write the newsletter. I send this out:

No profanity, that’s fine. I then get an email the next morning after the email goes out from our friend Ed. Here it is:

He’s happy. Thing is, he musn’t have read the email that closely. Look again, Ed:

Go fuck yourself, Ed.

So yeah, maybe not the best way to grow an email list by pissing off your subscribers, but it’s a free fucking newsletter & it takes us time to curate the content so I figure I can write them out however I want. I did ask the subscribers whether or not they cared about the profanity in them & the vast majority of the replies were positive. People just want the useful websites in their inbox every Monday morning, they don’t care about the content that’s surrounding it. If you’re interested in receiving the newsletter, drop your email here.

Lastly, I’ve found writing somewhat therapeutic lately so I’m going to try and blog more. We’ve got a lot of projects ongoing & in the works that we haven’t talked about, I mean, I’ve self-published Where’s MH370 and barely ever talked about that fucking thing. Which makes sense given that nobody gives a fuck about that plane anymore. Not even someone like me who has profited from it.

It’s not easy when time zones don’t match up or when an issue arises and the other person isn’t available for a face to face talk. The energy you feel when you’re in a room full of people who are all passionate about an idea is not there and when it comes to motivating yourself to put your head down and get shit done, some of the time it’s tough to do without your partner egging you on which is why I think a lot of remote based partnerships fail. Today I want to talk briefly about my personal experience working with individuals from different countries, what to avoid and how to make the partnership successful.

To me, I equate working with a partner from a different country to distance based education. If you’re not a self-motivated individual you’re simply not going to make it to the end. You need to be able to find that extra gear when things aren’t going your way and your partner isn’t available. I’ve found that whilst I have so many flaws, I’m able to motivate myself quite easily which I imagine is a throwback to my competitive & all or nothing type personality. I wanted to get into good shape last year, so I started going to the gym 5 days a week, eating healthy & doing meal prep. I begain in June last year and I’m still at it. Recently I decided I want to quit drinking and as of today it’s been over 2 months since my last drink. These are drastic examples of self-motivation however it’s a key character trait to being able to successfully work with a foreign partner. If somebody approaches me and talks about collaborating on a project, one of the first things I look for are signs that they’re a self-motivated person.

Now like most partnerships where you’re working side-by-side, both yourself and your partner need to have a complimenting skill set; I’ve realized that there isn’t really a point in being partners with someone who shares almost identical skills as me. I think this is ten times more important when you’re working with someone who doesn’t live near you. I’ve said before on Sofa Moolah and on Twitter, that I think my only skill is building shit nobody needs but eventually will want. This really summarizes what I’m best at: very limited web development & design, I can write & edit basic HTML/CSS/PHP and know my way around Photoshop and I can occasionally come up with a few good ideas and find an audience for them. There’s no point in partnering up with another ideas person; I guess that’s why Dan & I work well together. Dan, despite my unrivaled hatred for him as a person, has complimentary skills to mine. He can handle all the behind the scenes shit and when he’s focused can do pretty much everything I can’t. Know and define your roles! Don’t fall into the trap of partnering with a twin because eventually you’ll find yourself outsourcing huge parts of your project to other people which is when your vision can become distorted; you want to have full control over the outcome.

Further, if you find yourself partnering with someone whose timezones only just overlap with your own this does make things difficult but not impossible. When this happens, it’s important to have a centralized place where any & all information about your projects can be stored. Don’t rely simply on communication via Skype or Messenger, this sort of stuff gets too confusing and incredibly difficult to sort through. Have you ever tried searching through old Skype or Facebook messages? Shit’s impossible. Dan & I use Google Drive; Docs for to-do lists, any random notes or messages as well as Sheets for expenses and other shit like that. Other platforms you can check out: Slack, Basecamp, Trello. In the past partners & I have used nothing but instant messages and I would definitely not recommend it. It’s unorganized, chaotic and it’ll show when the end result looks like a pile of shit and is months overdue.

Additionally, I think it’s incredibly important to know what role this person has in your life. Dan & I are online friends, but would probably not get along when we’re not behind a monitor. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s something that both of us can acknowledge. So with that we’re not going to interject ourselves into each others personal lives.  I mean, the last thing our partnership needs is me travelling to England, staying with Dan & destroying his “relationship”, “career” & “life”. Now picture if Dan was Danielle (a thought that haunts my fucking dreams) & I visit England and things get complicated. You see where am I’m going right? Your project partners need to be just your project partners. Keep everything else out of it & focus on kicking goals.

And look, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Everyone has a life outside of projects, most have 9-5 jobs, families, relationships and other commitments that take up a lot of time and in the end working on any sort of project, let alone one where you don’t get to regularly meet with your partners & which requires a lot of dedicated time just isn’t something they can handle. It’s happened to me & I’ve also done it to other people. It’s like what I imagine Dan’s parents always say: it wasn’t planned, it just happened.

I had my last drink on Sunday, 7th of August, 2016. I didn’t know beforehand that it was going to be the last, it was just the next morning when I felt completely overwhelmed with everything in my life and knew that in order to get my life together I would need to cut out alcohol. For the past 3 years my life has been a bit of a mess with the last 18 months being the absolute worst in my life. I don’t know exactly how my life went down this road but I do know that I was out of control and needed to make a change. I was destroying my body, my relationships, my projects & my bank account. To give you an idea of how bad things have gotten:

• There were weekdays I was passed out before midday. I would start a bottle of bourbon in the morning, pass out before 1pm, wake up at 8pm & do it all over again.
• There were days I would be coming home early in the morning from a big night out and stopping at the liquor store just as they opened. I mixed up the liquor stores I went to to prevent seeing the same people everyday.
• When I was drinking I would always feel like shit which would persuade me to do some random acts of kindess; whether it was jumping on the Reddit /r/assistance subreddit and buying random people thousands of dollars worth of crap, or sending people I’ve hired in the past hundreds of dollars via PayPal for no specific reason.
• I was a really bad drunk messenger which has destroyed a lot of my relationships. It was only recently that I was told that someone no longer talked to me because I was always fucked up. That brings up the constant apologies the next day for whatever I said. The absolute worst however was recently being told by somebody I really liked that they “were used to” my drunk, sometimes abusive messages. They’re just 2 examples however I could fill up this entire blog post with more examples. Fucked up right?
• After too many drinks I would feel like I was wasting time, but would feel better if I was still making money which lead me back down to gambling. Gambling was something I thought I could do to earn quick money without doing any sort of work. In the past 3 years I wouldn’t hesitate to say I’ve lost over $100,000 gambling.

My benders would go on for days & I would eventually learn that I can’t do moderation; I’ve found that I have an all or nothing type personality. Good for some things, terrible for others. So I made the decision to stop & here is what I’ve learnt so far.

You can’t rush forward.

In August, 2015, Dan & I launched Random Useful Websites. The website went somewhat viral receiving over 500,000 clicks in the first 24 hours. It was popular on Reddit having gained over 2,700 upvotes and was also very popular on Product Hunt getting over 850 upvotes and topping Product Hunt for the day. It sounds like a dream launch however looking back at the project; it shouldn’t have been rushed. From beginning to launch, it took us maybe 2 days. That involved the extremely simple design & development, finding the useful websites & getting everything organised. Had we put the launch off, had the website properly designed & developed, added a few other features and went in with a plan the website could have been a lot bigger. We’re working on doing that now, but every day that passes the less relevant the site is becoming. We rushed and made mistakes, it’s that simple.

It’s the same situation for dealing with sobriety, the steps have to be slow and precise. I’m not sure how I’ll react just yet in social settings so I’ve avoided large social gatherings & places where alcohol is going to be consumed. It was only the first weekend of being sober that I was invited out with a group of friends & I was getting ready to leave I talked myself out of it, I didn’t think I would have the self-restraint to not drink. I can’t rush this part of my life.

You don’t get 2nd chances.

If you follow me on Twitter or even read Sofa Moolah, you’ll know that during the entire Ship Your Enemies Glitter saga I was pretty much intoxicated the entire time which ruined a lot of opportunities for me. For example:

• Being too drunk to realize that once removing the order form we should have added a subscription form. With a background in marketing & lead generation, this should have been my first thought. 3 days after the website went viral one finally went up & by the time the website sold had amassed over 10,000 email subscribers. Had I added this feature sooner, that number could have easily been past the 50,000 mark and the selling price could have been a lot higher.
• Turning down pretty much every media opportunity that wasn’t an email interview. Not only would this have increased traffic, sales & probably even the final selling price, it could have helped increase my own exposure that I could leverage for future projects.

Now this isn’t mean regretting the experience, it’s just reflection on something I would have done differently if I was thinking clearly.

I mean, this also applies to relationships that I thought would always be there & that I took for granted. There’s only so much a person can take from someone that is constantly intoxicated & it eventually gets too much & they rightly flee. This has happened way too many times for me; good people that I got along with fucking off because I was always fucked up. I wish I could go back in time and fix these things but I can’t; there are no 2nd chances here.

Time disappears very quickly.

I’m happiest when I’m working on a fun idea. Whether that’s something simple like a website that opens up a shitload of cat GIFs that eventually cause your browser to crash or a bigger project such as Where’s MH370 my self-published search & find activity book. In Where’s MH370’s case, the project was somewhat time sensitive. When I was working on the book it felt as if I had a deadline that was approaching extremely fast, the search was heating up and debris was starting to be found. The idea of the plane being found and the book not being launched put a lot of pressure on my shoulders and instead of focusing and getting shit done, I resorted to drinking to ease the stress. It’s such a stupid idea looking back at it however my head wasn’t in a good place and that’s how it went down.

When you head down this road time disappears extremely quickly. Drinking on a Monday destroys any progress for that day and erases basically any productivity for the next day, what with dealing with the hangover and motivating yourself to get out of bed and work on shit. What I’ve learnt the past month is how much more time I’ve had during the days to just get shit done. My productivity has gone through the roof, ideas are starting to come back naturally and I’m excited to be working on new projects.

Quick advice for other entrepreneurs struggling with addiction.

Having your back against the wall is something an entrepreneur has to deal with everyday. Addiction is just another brick wall we have to break down to move forward however you do have to acknowledge that it is a wall and it is something that needs to go. Without acknowledgement you’re going to keep running into it and eventually that wall will fall down on you. If you need help, hit me up.

On the 13^th of December at 3am I decided to do a Reddit AMA. An AMA if you’re not familiar is a chance for users on the social platform Reddit to ask questions & get answers from people in unusual professions, celebrities, sports stars, politicians etc.

I had been told earlier this year to do one for Ship Your Enemies Glitter however I thought the timing was off & wanted to first finish Where’s MH370? a project I had been working on for 8 months in order to give it a shout out. Basically, it’s a search and find activity book where readers have to find missing pieces of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in 12 full color, illustrated scenes. To show you how powerful Reddit AMA’s are in terms of marketing, I’ve included below a few statistics from the AMA.

Sales & Traffic Stats

• Number of Reddit upvotes: 4,184
• Number of Reddit comments: 2,549
• Unique Visitors: 36,133
• Number of books sold: 626
• Total sales: $9,390.00 AUD
• Twitter followers gained: 509
• Tweet impressions: 760,000

Random Thoughts:

• Use RedditLater to see when the best time to submit an AMA is. In my case it was 3am on a Sunday night.
• Reddit loves controversy and will upvote any comment/story that is negative about you, your past, your business etc. For instance, in my AMA some anonymous user accused me of not paying for freelance work that they apparently did for me. Despite the user offering zero proof whatsoever, even going as far as not revealing anything about themselves, not PMing or emailing me, the comment received over 500 upvotes. The claims are obvious bullshit. I guess the moral here is if you have done shady shit in the past, it will probably resurface here so don’t be a dick.
• If you’re there to promote something, do it in your opening post & that’s it. Don’t spam it in the comments section or you’ll end up like Woody Harrelson’s infamous AMA.
• Don’t promise to buy a Redditor a new computer if his comment gets 50 upvotes. The Reddit community will upvote that shit.
• Try and answer as many questions as possible. The whole idea of an AMA is for people to ask you anything, so don’t be afraid to answer the ridiculous ones that have nothing to do with you or what you’re trying to push such as “Who do you think would win in a fight? A bear or a shark.” or “Will you have my babies?”.
• To give with the above, be sure you’re ready to dedicate a few hours to answering questions. There’s nothing worse than having thousands of comments & questions with only 3-5 answered.
• Have fun with it. Fuck, I was drinking beers & making friends with strangers – it was a fun day.

Most entrepreneurs seem reluctant to talk about ideas for fear of someone stealing and implementing them. When they do share them, they ask potential partners to sign non-disclosure agreements and jump through hoop after hoop after hoop.

They protect their ideas so much that more of their time is spent guarding an idea than actually developing it.

I think this is a mistake. Whether your idea is revolutionary and incredible or just a simple idea for an effective business, it’s much better to talk about it than keep it to yourself.

Your idea isn’t as valuable as you think… yet

One of the biggest clichés in entrepreneurship is that ideas aren’t worth as much as people think, and that execution is worth much more.

It’s a cliché because it’s true. Short of insider stock tips, most ideas are worth almost nothing. No one pitches an idea to an investor – they pitch a demonstration of what they’ve already created, even if it’s just a basic prototype of the idea.

Until you develop your idea into something, it isn’t worth anything. So why be afraid of talking about it? If you discuss your idea with the right people, you can gain much more value than you put at risk by bringing your idea into the open.

Why people probably won’t steal your ideas

Here’s why people won’t steal your idea: it just isn’t worth that much without great execution.

Friendster, Myspace and Facebook are three different websites built around similar, if not identical, ideas: a place to interact with your friends.

Facebook is worth $266 billion. Myspace sold for $35 million in 2011. Friendster is, as of 2015, completely shut down.

What separated Facebook from its two competitors – sites that launched long before it did and had a significant first-mover advantage? It wasn’t an idea, but much better execution.

There are lots of reasons people won’t steal your idea, even if you make its value as obvious as possible:

• Most people won’t see the potential in your ideas the same way you will.
• Taking action is difficult. Even if an idea is good, most people will leave it alone instead of putting time and effort into developing it.
• Ideas don’t have a track record. People love to copy successful businesses, but few people will take a gamble on something that’s unproven.

Here’s the ultimate proof that your idea probably won’t get stolen: even the world’s most successful venture capitalists, with billions of dollars available, don’t sign non-disclosure agreements.

The reason is simple: ideas aren’t worth that much. What’s truly valuable is a great team that can turn the idea into something interesting.

You gain a lot more by talking about your ideas

Instead of keeping your idea to yourself and never talking about it, I recommend the opposite approach: talk about it as much you can, but only with the right people.

There are lots of benefits to sharing your ideas. The biggest is that you gain feedback on your idea before you get to work developing it.

Early stage feedback is valuable because it comes at the right time. Since your idea is undeveloped – or just partially developed, depending on the amount of time you’ve put into it so far – it’s easy to make changes that increase its value.

It’s easy to become so close to your ideas that you lose sight of their flaws. Talking about your idea with other people gives you a new perspective – a perspective that is often much better at spotting faults than your own.

By sharing your ideas with the right people, you can spot and solve problems with your idea before you invest in development. You can discover problems with your business model, usability issues and extra features you could easily add.

NDAs make getting early feedback impossible

After thinking of a great idea, some people rush to draft a non-disclosure agreement to make sure no one can steal it. They then search for designers and developers that are willing to jump through hoop after hoop, all for a chance to work on the project.

There are many downsides to NDAs, from your perspective and the perspective of the person you’re hiring:

• They expensive to prepare, especially if you hire a lawyer to write a custom NDA for your business.
• They make working with you a pain. Most designers, developers, business partners and contractors don’t want to sign a NDA unless they absolutely need to.
• They aren’t as iron-clad as you think. NDAs are notoriously hard to enforce, meaning you’ll spend a lot of time and money in court to protect your idea.
• NDAs repel talented, creative people. No one wants their professional life to be restricted because of a contract. With an NDA, talented people might look elsewhere instead of working with you.

It’s impossible to stop people from copying you

Some people spend a lot of time and energy protecting their ideas before they put them into action. It’s mostly wasted, since few undeveloped ideas get stolen in the first place.

Once you build and launch your idea, it’s a different story. If your idea is unique and interesting, lots of people will try to copy it. After ShipYourEnemiesGlitter started to get press earlier this year, dozens of copycat sites popped up within days.

Copying ideas is big business. Rocket Internet, a technology company from Berlin, has built a billion-dollar empire with more than 25,000 employees out of copying popular start-ups.

The difference between most people’s perception and reality is that the copying all starts after people can see your idea is a success. No one is interested in your idea – at least not in copying it – before it launches, but they might be afterwards.

Start working on your idea instead of protecting it

If your idea is good, get to work on it. Discuss it with people that can provide useful feedback and ideas, and don’t worry too much about NDAs. The feedback you’ll get is very valuable, especially when you’re preparing to put your idea into action.

Then, start protecting your idea after it launches. That’s when the copycats come out of the woodwork, and that’s when you’ll need to show your target audience that you have a better product than your competitors.