Things have been really crazy lately. I’ve been working really long hours and the most satisfying about it is that everything is going almost unbelievably well. This will sound really boastful (our friends at DNForum will probably vomitt) but pretty much everything I have touched in the last 2.5 years has turned into gold. I’m almost afraid that a collosal fuckup lies somewhere ahead and everything is going to collapse :) .

It’s fun to look back at the beginnings. I started flirting around with business when I was 14-15. For the next 7 years or so everything I would touch would just screw up. I did have some minor successes that kept me going though. And then suddenly one day everything turned to the positive.

So if you’re still in the phase of taking shit, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve come to appreciate one quote from the movie Layer Cake, it goes something like this:

You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you’re up in the rarefied atmosphere and you’ve forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.

So, anyway, what’s going on…

My various domain holdings are still growing every day. I’m zooming very close to the $20k revenue/day level from parking and expect to hit that level in about two months. With a little luck I think I can hit $30k/day by the end of the year. It’s all about being aggressive with acquisitions, creative with financing etc. It will be a stretch, but I think I can do it.

Few weeks back I was talking about our lead generation business in the Czech Rep with us going over $100k revenue/month next month (March). As things are looking now we are likely to hit $130k in March, which is absolutely great. Our lead gen team is doing a fantastic job. I’m revising estimates upwards again and the target for december 2010 is $300k in revenue.

We started intenstive sales in early February to advertisers with our zero-click platform called Elephant Traffic. At the end of this week advertiser’s were spending about $2k/day with us for domain traffic. We plan to continue scaling that up. There is still a lot of work to be done. The system isn’t great, there are inventory challenges and there are sales challenges. We are tweaking them and we should fly eventually. Again, our ET team has done great work on this. I expect ET to break-even in about two months. That looked virtually impossible even a month ago but a lot of things have changed to the positive.

Our car insurance broker, which I am a partner in, is running fantastic. We have now 40 people fulltime there, most of them brokers on the phone. We are doing about 4,000 closed contracts a month now, which brings in about $160,000 in commissions every month. The real beauty of this business comes with the long term though – if the car owner stays on the contract for another year, you get the commission from the contract again – virtually with no costs associated with it.

Then there is a big potential splash on the horizon. We are in the process of selling our search business that I cannot disclose as of now. The buyer is just in the process of doing due dilligence and if it goes through, this will be a multimillion dollar sale for us. I’m hoping that this deal will close in two months, then I will be able to disclose a little bit more.

Our facebook developer called Viral Maniacs is just days away from launching our first social game. We are going to launch in the Czech Rep first and go international in the next two weeks. What’s new about this game is that it is in 3D and deals with designing the interior of your own apartment, renting it out etc. I am really curious how successful the game will be.

My ultrasound liposuction clinic is off to a great start, beating the business plan. We are in the process of expanding to another ultrasound machine in the coming weeks. I am actually flirting with the idea of opening a proper liposuction clinic with surgery (I always liked the prospect of sucking out somebody’s fat and later selling it to him as soap), so I’m meeting with various plastic surgeons next week etc.

Even our mobile marketing company Crazy Tomato is getting some traction lately. I started this company during University and am not involved with day to day operations for quite some time. Looks like we have a big Czech media company interested in buying it, so we’ll see how that goes.

All looking almost too well… I’ve even started to re-think my idea for a helicopter charter service in the Czech Rep, which I had to postpone. It was always a hobby business that stemmed from my wanting of a helicopter anyway…

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