After sitting at home for a while, unemployed and with no regular income, I started to fully explore
my options.

I didn't want to go back to the old days, of finding
a miserable sales job that I couldn't care less
about. This time, I had a real passion, the Internet, and I didn't want to burn my life in a dead end job.

But on the other hand, the Internet industry was bruised and beaten by the burst of the Dot Com bubble and almost nobody recruited new people.

That left me with one option: starting my own business.
But what was I gonna do?
I knew that it had to be Internet related, but I had no significant start up money, which was required for serious web entrepreneurship back then.

After doing a lot of thinking, I decided to try and become a freelance Internet business consultant.

I thought that all the knowledge that I'd accumulated could be very useful to a lot of companies, Internet start-ups or well-financed web entrepreneurs, who might need an unbiased professional consultant, someone who could advise them on Internet-related issues.

Boy, was I wrong!

The first thing that I did after starting my business was hire a web designer who created a professional site that described me, my services and included a few articles that I wrote.
But I didn't wait for clients to enter my website and contact me.

I started to surf the net and contacted various companies, from all business sectors, that had poorly designed sites and offered my consulting services to them.
I invested my greatest efforts, but all in vain.

Nobody even wanted to meet me.

After endless tries to make the business work, I came to realize that it won't fly.
Once again, I opened a business that failed.
But this time, I didn't lose a lot of money, like on my first try.

This time, I was working from home, so there was no office rent to pay.
My website also didn't cost that much, so it wasn't a huge financial loss.
There was no inventory, no logistics and no big expenses of any sort.

It could have been an ideal business had it actually worked… but it didn't.
However, it did teach me a lot about the great potential of having a home-based business.

This was a very difficult time for me, since I understood that I had no choice, but to return to the notorious "non-Internet" work world and find another crappy day job, something that I tried to run away from.

Next Chapter:
How I went back to work at a crappy day job
(but for the VERY LAST TIME…).

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