From Poor and Jobless to Running My Own Business (part 1)

No, this isn't an infomercial or a step by step guide and it's most certainly not a rag to riches story =) This road begins about 4 years ago and it's still one I'm riding on this day. It's too much to cram into one post so I'll try to spread it out a little bit for you. It might seem like unimportant information in the beginning but I promise it ties into a bigger story in the end.

I was in my mid-thirties and working in retail. Now, the reason I was in retail was because I lost my previous job when the business I had worked at for 10 years just suddenly closed its doors. When you're an adult with adult bills that can be a pretty serious thing. I needed a paycheck because like most people I can't/won't save money.

After a month or two of looking for real work and failing I was ready to accept anyone that would hire me for anything at that point. And the answer came from a major retailer. Talking about working in retail itself I could write a book but I may save that for another time. This is about a specific road and that would be a sidetrack right now.

As you may or may not know, people who work retail don't get paid very much. Some pesky thing about being unskilled labor and payroll cutting into profits or something. I started looking into ways of supplementing that income. Trying to get some ideas from Google I run into some sites that are helpful with listing real ways of making extra income from home. No MLM or pyramid schemes or selling something door to door. One of those ideas was Amazon Mechanical Turk. Like many people you've probably never heard of it. One label to put on it would be to call it crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is basically employing a large number of people temporarily to perform a task you couldn't get done on your own. Usually this boils down to taking surveys for universities or performing virtual tasks. And yes, Amazon does have a platform that brings workers and requesters together.

Surprisingly, at least back then, you could actually make some decent spending money doing these tasks. If you were to try to stay productive you could make $10 or so per hour. And that is significant money to someone working retail. More importantly to the present me, it inserted a desire to try to make more. Not because of greed or anything like that but because I was treading water back then.

Once I started having dependable success with Mechanical Turk I started looking at branching out with something else. Now, MTurk was keeping me busy enough so I wanted something relatively passive. That had me hitting Google once again for passive income ideas. And finally I stumbled onto something that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. Perk.

Perk is an advertising platform on an app, I guess I could call it. Your job, as the customer, is to watch trailers for games, TV shows, movies...Etc, and then you would be presented with a commercial/ad. You got points for watching these commercials. Points that could be traded in for gift cards. Now you may be recalling that I said I would looking for passive income ideas and that this doesn't sound that passive. Well, it was back then. And it paid fairly well.

You could have 2 Perk accounts per house. Each account could use 5 phones. And back then there was no attention check of any kind. Meaning it ran 24/7 nonstop. Now you might be seeing where the potential for passive income comes in. I started with one account because I didn't have money to invest and ,at the time, this was an unproven method. I ended up sparing myself $40 for 4 cheap, used, android phones that could run Perk. The 5th phone was my personal phone. I downloaded the app to each and synced them to my account and let it rip.

Perk back then was generous. They've since clamped down on things but with my one account I was using my points to cash in for a $10 gift certificate every 2 days and it was totally passive. Keep in mind I'm working retail and can't pay my bills at this time so an extra $30 or so a week for nothing on my part is a big deal.

So I got some passive money coming in via gift cards. So I take that money and blow it all on hats. Just kidding! I take that money and....invest in 5 more phones. I open a second account with Perk and tie 5 phones to it as well. That's 10 phones totally running 24/7 and doubled my payouts. Now I'm making $60 a week. The bug inside of me that wanted to do more grew bigger. It pretty much ended up becoming my hobby even when I started making a decent salary once again.

I guess that's enough for round one. If you made it her thanks for reading. I'll pick back up where I left off soon. There's still a few more years to fill in to get to the present =) Follow me if you want.