Warning: this post has nothing to do with the iPhone, but it has everything to do with ME and YOU!
My blog is over a year and half old now and it’s doing pretty well. On average, 20,000 of you come and read my rants and thoughts every days. I want to thank you all for that.
Within the past year, I have noticed a few people commenting on the blog on a regular basis. These people are what I call the “loyal readers”. They are the one emailing me to ask if I’m ok when I don’t post an article on time. They are also the one challenging my thoughts either on the blog, the forum, or on Twitter.
There are also the casual readers who come visit the blog from time to time. Chances are if you left over 10 comments on this blog, I recognize your name and I pay attention to what you say and in most cases, I leave a reply if necessary.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to personally reply to all comments (between 100 and 300 per day) but it doesn’t mean I don’t read you. I read every single comment posted on this blog. I have been slacking a bit lately though because my fiancee and I are traveling around the world and I don’t have much Internet time. Anyways.
You make the effort of coming to my blog and read what I have to say, and that’s a great thing. By now, we have developed some sort of “online friendship” but I realize that I don’t know anything about you, and you don’t know anything about me (unless you’ve been following me on my personal blog as well).
In this post, I’d like to tell you more about me, who I am, etc… It would be great if you could leave a comment and tell us a bit about you too. I understand that not everyone will bother sharing here, but I assume that loyal readers will be happy to tell us more about themselves.
So here I go. My name is Sebastien Page. I am French. I was born in France on November 17, 1980 (yes, it was my birthday this week). When I was younger I wanted to be an English teacher. Then I changed my mind and decided to go to a business school. I got a masters in marketing from a French business school and started to work for an advertising agency in Paris.
The problem was that my feet were in France but my heart was in California. For some reason, I had always been attracted to the California way of life since I was a kid. I sometimes joke that Bay Watch made me want to move to California. I don’t how much of this is true but when I first came to the States in 2001, I instantly fell in love with the country. I was in Santa Cruz with 2 of my friends for 3 months (on a business school internship), and we had the time of our life. I remember having tears drop from my eyes when I landed in France because I didn’t want to be there.
Luckily, a few months after starting my job as an ad man (which I loved), I got a job offer to move to California and get a job there. Flight and visa were paid for, I had nothing to lose! So I flew to San Diego and started working for a French man, in his tiny little company. This guy was really nice but I hated my job. I was a subcontractor for the Department of Defense. Not the ideal job for someone like me who always disliked wars and the military industry as a whole. I also was paid nothing. I made $1,100/month and I had a $600 rent. That left me $500/month to pay for my food, drinks, and the bad smoking habit I had at the time. Oh yes, I also had to pay for my other smoking habit… this one is not as bad though, if you know what I mean.
I quickly met some of my best friends and I learned how to surf, which in some ways changed my life. There is nothing like being on a surfboard and ride a nice wave all the way to the shore.
I had this job for about a year and got laid off because it was clear I didn’t like my job. For 2 months, I survived thanks to my parents sending me money while I was looking for a job. Then I finally got a job at Franchise.com, as a sales guy. Basically, I was selling ads on the site. I made a bit more money and after a few months I got promoted to a marketing position, which was what I really wanted.
My boss at the time loved me and mentored me. She introduced me to the key players in the industry and took me to every convention out there. I was actually pretty famous in the industry. You know, I was the token French guy with the cute French accent, haha.
In July 2007, my friend guy got an iPhone. He showed it to me and it I liked it. After playing with it for 5 minutes, I told Guy I had to go get one. I went to the AT&T store and bought my first iPhone that day.
My ex-girlfriend introduced me to “The Secret” around that time. I downloaded the audiobook and started playing it at night on my iPhone. I was not a really spiritual person at all. I’ve always been against the whole god idea. I always thought that only we can dictate our destiny. The secret was recomforting me in this idea and I started applying some of the “techniques”, which can be summed up by: ask, believe, and visualize.
I started asking, believing and visualizing a job where I could work from home and make more money. Within weeks, I got a new job. I was making much more money but I also had much more responsibilities. I was working from home for the first time and it became quite challenging because it’s easy to be distracted when you’re in your house.
Around that time, I started looking into “making money online”. I created an iPod softwares site and made a tiny bit of money from it. It was motivating, but definitely not enough financially rewarding. I also started looking into affiliate marketing and made a few bucks here and there. Still nothing really good.
I had always been attracted to women but I would never commit. I also didn’t have much experience in “dating”. We don’t “date” in France. Here in the States, the “dating process” makes it feel like work and I think it puts a lot of pressure on you. At any rates, I didn’t have experience dating women. I had experience in going to bars and do a random pick up, but I was really tired of that.
So I signed up on Match.com and started meeting about 4-5 women per week for a period of about 2 months. That was great. By the end, I had developed a dating routine and it allowed me to really understand how dating worked. Unfortunately, I trapped myself into the “random hookups” again.
After seeing how efficiently “the secret” worked getting me a new job, I started asking for a real girlfriend, not a one-night stand. Then I met my fiancee Tina. I met her online on Match.com. I fell in love with her in a matter of minutes. We met in Del Mar, on the beach. We walked and talked for 3.5 hours. Everything seemed so natural. We shared our past and how we wanted our future to be. We had so much in common! We became serious very quickly.
In the entrum, I bought a domain name for a new site: https://www.idownloadblog.com/. I initially wanted to make money out of it selling softwares for iPhones, the same way I was selling softwares for iPods. The difference is that I really got caught into the blogging thing. I started jailbreaking my iPhone and sharing my experience with other people about it.
Not many people would come to the site but I really liked sharing stuff with others. Then more and more people started to come. Blogging about the iPhone took a lot of my time and I didn’t make much at all from this site, but it was ok because I was having fun doing it.
After dating for 5 months, Tina moved in my apartment in Encinitas. The goal was she’d move there for a while and then we’d be looking for our own place.
I was getting tired and really stressed out about my job and I didn’t feel good doing this anymore. Once again, I applied “the secret” and asked for being my own boss, by making money online. In a few weeks, I created a website and an ebook. I started selling the ebook and on the first day, I remember making as much money as I was at my job. That was amazing! I called Tina at work and told her how great my new site was doing and I joked that I was going to leave my job.
I kept applying the secret. I also kept being miserable with my current job. My new money-making site was doing ok. Two weeks before Christmas, I asked Tina what she thought about me leaving my job. She didn’t hesitate one second and said “do it, if there is a problem, I can always support you”. That was very nice of her. Kinda risky though because as a mental health therapist, she doesn’t make much and I doubt she would have been able to support the both of us.
I called my boss and told him how I felt and that I needed to quit. He was bummed out to lose one of his best employees, but he understood and actually supported me in my desire to get my own business running.
Great, the secret worked again! The secret got me a new job, a woman I love, and finally, it allowed me to get my own gig. Call me a hippie or whatever you want, but this Secret thing really works. I am the living proof. Anyways.
So I was making money through this one ebook I was selling and decided to create 2 more. To this date, they don’t sell as well as the first one but all of them combined sell well enough to allow Tina and I to do what we always wanted to do: traveling.
We decided to take a few months off. Tina quit her job. I can’t really quit mine and I have to be online for at least a couple hours every day but we are traveling.
We are currently in Australia. This country is very expensive and the internet here sucks! Most places have caps on internet plans. For example, we’re in these cabins in Byron Bay where I am allowed 2 hours of free internet everyday, capped at 50MB. That means I can’t download anything really. Oh well.
So we are in Australia for probably another month. Then we are going to surf and live like kings in Bali for a few months. We also have plans to go to India and Thailand. Finally, our trip will take us to France.
I proposed to Tina a month before taking off for our trip, on October 5 but we don’t know yet when and where we will get married. To me the marriage is a formality, but Tina thinks otherwise.
This blog does make money now. I couldn’t live off of it but it’s nice to have a revenue stream from something I really enjoy doing. As I said, I love blogging about the iPhone. There are some days when I don’t feel like writing though and I wish I had a few other writers to join me on this blog.
Our next goals are to go back to California, get married, buy a house and make babies. We want 2 kids.
That’s my story! If you read this far, congratulations for not falling asleep, haha.
Now it’s your turn. Tell me/us who you are, where you are from and what you do. You don’t have to be as detailed as I am but maybe you can share your name, location, family status, what you like to do on your time off, etc…
I really look forward reading about you!