An Internet Business Gone Wrong

My internet business went terribly wrong. Shall I tell you the story? Yes. Shall I speak to you in old English? No. Sorry about the "shalls".

It was an unfortunate mix of Alibaba.com, a scam artist in India, some flash drives, and China. But I think I am getting a bit ahead of myself. Let me back up.

I had a business class where we had the great opportunity to learn how to and actually start up an internet business. I was so excited! I went into hyper-business-obsession mode (much to my wife's dismay) and researched all sorts of stuff. Wedding rings, photography, blogs, i-pods, services, flash drives... wait, stop right there. Flash drives. That was it.

I had seen flash drives for super cheap on alibaba, and decided to look into buying them. Let me make a short story long by telling you that I found a great supplier from India who had connections with a factory in China to sell me some fantastic 32GB Kingston flash drives for only $15 a drive! Too good to be true, right? Right.

I bought them. 100 of them. If you struggle with math that's $1500. Now that I made the short part of my story long, I will make the long part of my story short. They were fake. The guy in India with great connections in China was a scam. I never saw my money again. The flash drives were faulty. China was still China. To sum it up, it stunk.

Lesson Learned: Dudes (especially outside the country dudes) that claim to be selling something or doing something that just seems too good to be true are. There is a reason they call it "too good to be true", it is.

The good news is I bought a few real flash drives just to get the business really running, and the business failed for real. At least this time it was legitimate failure.