What's with the URL Joyride.ca?

In one word: Blunder

To be more specific, it was about a $40,000 blunder when the dust finally settled.

If it were not for that blond Australian broad Rhonda Byrne and her stupid fucking movie 'The Secret' I would still have a high paying job at Nova Chemicals and an extra $40k in the bank. I slaved away at SAIT for two and a half years to get that job only to piss it all away on a whim. I am kidding of course, I know that I have to take responsibility for my actions but it feels good to blame someone else for my idiocy.

Before we get started a little background is probably necessary. You will recall the Mt. Vesuvius proportions of the Calgary real-estate market summer of '05. The giant bubble was growing larger by the day and my wife and I managed to ching ching ching cash in on that incident right before it popped. Times were so good we literally hung a $4 'for sale' sign in the window of our townhouse and the phone rang off the hook. No need for shiesty slime ball realtors with their 5 figure fees but I digress. We ended up selling the place within 5 days of 'listing' for the asking that we pulled out of our asses. Needless to say, the large proceeds of our home, in the incapable hands of a couple of our age and life experience were in great jeopardy.

To our credit we didn't buy brand new sports cars or go on month long coke binges like some people our age who come into easy money. Instead we let the cash sit in our bank account accruing interest.

Unfortunately shortly after this windfall we happened upon the movie "The Secret". Even more so than my wife, I wanted to believe so badly in what those flaky motivators were preaching that I watched the thing almost every day to memorize it. I wanted to get rich and tell the man to suck it. I wanted a lambo and a mansion, as did my wife. At the time that movie made me believe all that I desired was possible through nothing more than belief and positive expectation. It didn't help matters that we had come into easy money in a way that could be construed as concurrent with the tenets put forth in that cleverly crafted work of deceptive fictional non-fiction.

Then in 2007, at the height of the whole "Law of Attraction" fad I hatched the mother of all ideas while sitting on the john. We (my wife and I) would start a website where everyday people could list their second hand vehicles for sale at no cost. I dreamed of a used car utopia where people didn't have to pay the evil cocksucking Auto Trader a king's ransom just to be rid of their old ride. This was before Kijiji or Craigslist were popular in Alberta, and people thought I was nuts for wanting to have it free. I knew that we, like Kijiji does now, would make all our money off of corporate advertising or better yet by selling the website, instead of from the working Joe who just needed to unload his beater. Pumped and primed by "The Secret" I had the worst case of "if you build it they will come fever" on record. But I, like Jesus, would be hung out to dry by the very people I was trying to help. Joe six pack became my Judas, a monumental piss off betrayal I have yet to forget.

The whole thing started out innocently and affordably enough. Mat Pridham of Web Diligence helped me realize my virtual wet dream, and for under $2500 we had a website that kicked the absolute shit out of Trader.ca. Using our service anyone could list their car online for free in less than a few minutes even if they were a bumbling moron with zero computer skills.

We began as albertasuperseller.com. Our initial advertising efforts consisted only of telephoning every used car ad we could find to offer them free listings on our website. I figured that because I was offering my services for free that there was no way anyone with a brain would object. To my astonishment most people told me to fuck off! This was hard for me because I absolutely loathe telemarketers. Our problem was that at the time there were a few other other upstarts with shittier websites and big fees that were doing the same thing. They claimed absurd traffic numbers to get listings, burning customers for hundreds in the process. For this reason people generally thought ours was a scam too even though our fee was $0. At this point in my life I wrongly assumed that the majority of people were intelligent, I am no longer so naive. If someone offered me something like a free car listing without requiring any personal information I would have heartily devoured that free lunch.
 
To compliment my telemarketing efforts we ramped up advertising by organizing a successful food drive for the Central Alberta Women's Outreach, simultaneously ran radio and TV commercials, and gave away free vinyl 'for sale' stickers to our lister's. Frustrated by our slow progress (we were only getting about 70 unique visits per day in our fourth week) I picked up a dozen books on web business and marketing from chapters and whipped through them inside a week. One in particular "The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding" hit home and I instantly knew our URL albertasuperseller.com was an unoriginal lame ass piece of shit that couldn't take us where we wanted to go.

In a conference call brainstorming session Mat Pridham had a stroke of genius and suggested we call ourselves Joyride. That he would gift that name to me is a testament to his brilliance and character. I instantly knew it was perfect. There was one problem, the URL was being squatted on by a wealthy Frenchmen with a large "domain portfolio" who wasn't inclined to answer emails or return calls. After pestering the poor bastard to death for a month he finally relinquished the domain to me for $1500. Unfortunately this on the fly name change required us to revise the homepage, stickers, business cards, and t shirts which was tedious and expensive. Other than costs spiraling out of control, with the new domain secured it felt like everything was 'just falling into place' as The Secret had promised.

The website was beginning to catch on but some people still hesitated to place their ads with us because our service was online only. To remedy this we began to offer a region specific full color pocket size magazine of published listings for $10/month in addition to the free online service. This simple economic miscalculation was to be our undoing. Because we charged a 6th of auto traders price with twice the run time the income from listings did not even come close to covering the expense of the magazine. In order to justify the cost we dropped all other advertising campaigns and relied solely on the magazine. It was a win win because customers were getting their listings printed in the magazine, and while being very expensive to produce, it was the best advertising tool we utilized doubling traffic within days of its inception. Getting the magazine to the public was another challenge. We bought plastic cases and drove around to grocery stores and gas stations all over Red Deer placing our publication at just over 50 locations. Despite the conflict of interest store owners were actually pretty cool about it, seeing as how our free magazine was always parked right beside at $4.00 auto trader. Probably for that reason we had trouble keeping them full.

With the magazines we were up to 5 new paid listings and around 125 unique IP visitors a day. As you can imagine, two people running a business like this one required enormous amounts of time and energy. My brain, freshly filled with delusions of grandeur at having made any money at our "business" at all, reasoned it was time to quit my job in favor of passing the days making hundreds of cold calls and driving around to stock the magazine containers. Due to the workload soon thereafter we made the decision that my wife should also join me in pro-bono self "employment". Unfortunately for us though this was right at the time that the website hit its traffic high mark, the point where the digital wave broke and began to recede. As costs approached the $40k mark the money we were willing to spend on it started to near its end. To this day I believe if we had had $500,000 to spend on marketing we would be living on a sugar plantation in Barbados and lighting cigars with $100 bills instead of grinding out thankless 8-5 jobs. Kijiji wouldn't have had a chance with autos, not only do they have the stupidest god damn name on the internet but their site layout is more disorganized than a monkey shit fight. Kijiji, like eBay, is a cyber dumping grounds that is painful to navigate and saturated with worthless crap.

We finally cut the umbilical cord at $40k to let the site sink or swim. Like a senior with rectal cancer it died a slow and quiet death. Predictably new web traffic and listings petered out; the representative line graph ironically mirrored the current state of my johnson, withering and flaccid in the face of reality. In the end sadly all we had left was this domain name, which although sweet, is like a naked picture of Rosie O'Donnell; virtually worthless. I got the idea to tell this story on a blog but then figured, what the fuck, I should start my own website with the old domain. I guess I just have a hard time letting go. That and Blogging is for losers.

I know this story makes me sound like a fickle mush-head, but cut me some slack...I was young. It could have been worse I guess, I could have invested in pumpkin stocks expecting them to peak around January.