I’m one of those people who’s done like 100 jobs. I started working at around 13 years old, part-time jobs to save up to buy a drum-kit and then working as helper at green grocer and cleaning factories to help raise part of the money for my study trip to Japan at 15yo (parents paid for the remainder).

Since then, there’s been a slew of various roles (waiter, teacher, entertainer, underground casino croupier, and more..), but my core competencies have always been in Information Technology.

Here are some of my small successes to date:

2011

Sold a website I’d made for ~US$12,000. The site, http://top50chinadropshippers.com, filled a niche I’d found, while working with one of my freelance clients. Basically a resource/authority site, it served as a directory of online drop-shipping companies from China.

It was developed overnight as I’d had an idea of how to better promote my client’s site. The client wasn’t ready to pay me to develop the idea as other things took priority, so I kind of did it out of motivation to prove that it would work. I’ve never really been business-minded/wise enough to be motivated purely by profit. This project did, however, generate revenues for about 6 months through premium listings and a bit of paid advertising, but I listed it on Flippa.com when I was down on cash and thought it could help pay the bills while I was living in China.

Interest in the site came from a few big players in the e-commerce/dropshipping industry online, but again, my business-sense short-comings had me list the auction with an end date during the Chinese New Year holidays, when all the prospective buyers where on holidays! The auction ended up being awarded to a friend of an existing client of mine, who then later hired me to build a large scale B2B web system for him.

That was the second time someone who bought one of my produced websites became a long-term client for further development work.

2010

Sold a website for ~US$2,500. The inspiration for the website came when I was out of money, wondering why with such l33t web development skills I was still struggling to pay the rent and feed my kids. I stumbled upon Flippa.com, an online marketplace for buying and selling websites. From my experience in “flipping” used computers on a Japanese auction site for a living, I tried to reverse-engineer the success of websites which had recently sold for decent prices. I found one site, which looked uber-simple, ugly design but had just sold for US$7,500.

Again, motivated more by proving my abilities, but also with a need for financial gains, I took their idea and did it better! Being an experienced developer, designer and guerilla marketer, I improved upon their idea, which was a site with embeddable Twitter icons containing a link back to the main site to increase its PageRank. I rapidly built the site with more content a nicer design and usability, then marketed the pants off of it.

As websites then sold for more money with this higher PageRank value, I didn’t touch the site much after the initial build, but did expectantly monitor the site’s PageRank almost daily. About 3 months from building, Google rolled out a PageRank update, which gave it a “PR5″, which interested a particular buyer. After the the sale was complete and website transferred to the new owner, he then became my biggest client and helped keep food on my kids’ table for well over a year.

20??

Was (IMHO), the second person to ever have created a truly 3D cylindrical rotating Flash image carousel. Others at the time were all using tricks with trapezoids, but I used an external 3D rendering library and imported a long ribbon, which flew into the screen then wrapped around to form a cylindrical carousel. This was half of a project for a Japanese client, who unfortunately was unhappy with the graphics performance other the half of the project (a particle effects engine, creating sparkles across the screen, so the whole project was scrapped!).

20??

**This page is a work in progress, just wanted to get it up and out there while the thought struck me!