The Last 100 Dollars

June 21, 2014. I had $100 and no company. Four weeks earlier I had been a partner in something doing $200K in a month, and now I had $100 and a laptop.

So I built JMJK Sports Collectibles in two weeks. Sports memorabilia, the kind of thing a fan buys on an impulse at eleven at night. I did the store, the products, the photos, the copy, the ads. Nobody helped me and nobody was going to. I had been building things on the internet since I was eleven, and by then I could stand a store up faster than most people could pick a name for one.

Day one I spent $50 on ads. I lost all of it. Every dollar, nothing back, on the first fifty of the only hundred I had. Most people stop there and I understand why, because the rational move with $50 left is to keep the $50.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because it gets told as a brave story and it was not brave. I was terrified. I sat there with $50 between me and telling my parents I was starting over from nothing again, and I did not feel like a founder. I felt like somebody about to gamble the last of what he had.

I spent it. Day two, the last $50 into ads, and $200 came back. Then I did the only thing I know how to do with a number that works. I fed every dollar of it straight back into the machine. Not a dinner. Not a new phone. Not one dollar off the table. Everything people call the empire started with $50 that did not work and $50 that did.