Wow. That’s all I have to say about this weekend. Not necessarily “wow” in a good way… just… wow.

Let me start from the beginning. N decided a couple months ago that he wanted to start a T-shirt screen printing business. I volunteered to be his investor and partner in exchange for 50% of the new business. He is the salesperson and general “plant manager”, and I handle vendor relations, accounting, and marketing.

Well, being the excellent salesperson that he is, N went out a few weeks ago and got our first order: an order for a fraternity that he belonged to while he was in college. The shirts were due yesterday (Sunday) night for rush today.

As soon as he signed the order, I started ordering parts. I found a “COMPLETE T-SHIRT BUSINESS!!!!1111” on eBay for $2495.95. After corresponding with the seller, Steve, who promised me that this was the be-all, end-all of T-shirt business kits (including the press, dryer, and everything else we would need), I purchased it.

I paid with a check drawn off one of my credit card accounts since they were offering a low interest rate for purchases if you used the checks. Unfortunately, Steve, having been burned in the past with checks, needed to hold it for 10 days to make sure it cleared. I understood the policy, but also understood that we definitely weren’t going to get the machines in time with 10 days for the check to clear plus 7 days for ground shipping from the east coast to California. I asked Steve for another option, and finally he decided to charge another credit card of mine and reverse the charge after the check cleared. After doing that, he shipped the equipment, along with an instruction manual on how to use it.

The equipment was shipped UPS and arrived in Simpli’s office (where we had decided to set it up) on Thursday. N went to work setting up the equipment. We quickly noticed that the instruction manual and video was missing. I placed a call to Steve, who said it had been shipped separately via USPS. Thursday and Friday passed, and we had everything (including our T-shirts, which I had ordered from another vendor) except that darn instruction manual.

Saturday morning, we realized we had a problem. We had several machines and absolutely no idea how to use them. Since neither N nor I had ever even seen T-shirts printed, we were flying completely blind.

The how-tos on the Internet were maddeningly sparse. (Business idea: Someone needs to make a downloadable/purchasable e-book or video that shows this sort of stuff for a nominal fee.) Most had text or pictures (not both), or showed a slightly different way of doing things.

We spent most of Saturday trying to get the emulsion on the screen (which is the first step in the T-shirt printing business.) After quickly going through 2 screens and an entire bottle of emulsion, we found another how-to and realized we were doing it completely wrong. Not only that, but we’d just used all of the emulsion we had.

It was Saturday at 5:50PM when we realized this. We knew we had to find a local store that sold photo emulsion. After digging around on the Internet, I found that Utrecht, a local art supply store, had it. I called their Berkeley store. They had 3 emulsion kits in stock, and they were still open. The problem? It was 6PM, they closed at 7, and they were an hour north of San Jose.

We raced out of the office, jumped into the car, and motored it to Berkeley. The clock hit 7PM just as I was crossing the Oakland/Berkeley border on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. We called the store again and begged for mercy. Finally, at 7:05, we arrived. They unlocked the door for us and were good sports about the whole thing. We bought two emulsion kits ($40) and jumped back in the car.

I knew then it was going to be a late night, but we still needed more supplies, so we stopped at Lowe’s in Fremont on the way home. We bought a few more supplies and headed back to start what was going to be a very long night.

We got the emulsion on correctly and got the screens “burned” on Saturday night. We made so many more mistakes that I’m not even going to go into details here, but at 2AM, we had finally gotten to the last stage in T-shirt printing — squeegeeing the ink onto the shirt. (Thank God our client only wanted a single color, as all the colors must be done separately.) Of course, the ink did not go onto the shirt properly, so we called it a night and went home.

This morning, we grabbled lunch and got into the office around noon. Both of us were grumpy and tired. We scrapped everything we had done Saturday night, cleaned the screens, and started over. We got the emulsion on correctly (after starting into our third and final bottle of emulsion), and several hours later, were ready to print again. During that time, we figured out what we had done wrong previously on the printing stage, and at about 10PM, we finally printed our first shirt.

I remember that moment well — we pulled the press up, and there was a perfect T-shirt print. We stared at it unbelievingly for a few minutes. We then realized we had actually printed a T-shirt, and celebrated with loud shouts and cheers.

After that, it was just manual labor… we printed the front of the 70 shirts the fraternity had ordered, then dried them, then printed the back and dried that. It was 4AM when we finally had folded all the T-shirts and stuck them into a box to be delivered to the frat. (We’d called them and asked for an extension to this morning.) We went to bed exhausted but proud. We’d completed our order!

We made about $300 on the sale after accounting for the T-shirt cost. Of course, we are still out some $2700 or so on supplies. But now that we know how to do the T-shirts properly, it should go a lot faster. Steve told us that a run of 70 T-shirts shouldn’t take longer than a couple hours to go through once we knew what we were doing. For 2-3 hours of work, a $300 profit wouldn’t be bad at all (and will make this company a great weekend/side project!)

All told, we spent 30 hours this weekend bumping into walls and “flying blind” until all of the T-shirts were successfully printed. It is indeed a miracle that we pulled the whole thing off by piecing together how-tos on the Internet. This is one of the most satisfying checks I will ever receive.

UPDATE: Brandon just told me that the instruction manual and video finally arrived. Doh!

Well, it’s been three weeks and no update from me.

As a brief run-down, a couple weeks ago I got sick with a nasty stomach flu (as in, couldn’t hold any food down for about 2 days.) I had to cancel a bunch of appointments.

I recovered and immediately took off to LA for my third IBI. Spent 7 intense days there. I got so little sleep over the course of the week that on Sunday I couldn’t take it any more and crawled into bed sometime in the afternoon (skipping lunch) and slept for about 3 hours. I staffed this time, which meant that I was either 1) at class 2) working for IBI or 3) doing capital team presentations for my company.

Speaking of capital team, we should have our current round of investment capital raised before the end of the month. (If you’re interested in investing in Simpli, drop me a line and I’ll explain the deal to you… it doesn’t require much capital.) People at IBI were excited about investing in a cash-flow-positive, profitable business. This round of investments should take us to the $450,000 mark in revenue this year. From there, the next big target is $1 million, which I’m looking forward to hitting in 2006 or 2007.

I’ve received my first patent (an idea I had for another IBI-based company), which I am excited about. It’s the first of many patents I’ll hold. The patent gained me 1% of the company, which is worth nothing right now, but the company has a chance to make it very big. Definitely worth it for 1 day of work.

We re-incorporated as Simpli Hosting, Inc. I’m going to send out an email notifying everyone of the change soon. The state of California required us to re-incorporate since there is already a Simply, Inc. here and they don’t allow phonetic equivalents. A slight pain in the rear (to change all of our documents), but not a show-stopper.

Cal is still going strong as our COO, and we’re getting ready to hire at least 2 and possibly 3 more people this year (mostly support people, but my goal is to hire a full-time salesperson as well.) We are also about to undergo a profitability analysis, which will help us see where to best spend our marketing dollars. I’m looking forward to that.

I’m exhausted. Hopefully I will have time to write again soon!

So I’m doing the Landmark advanced forum, which is going to be pretty intense. If you’ve done Landmark, you know that it involves a change in your perspective. That’s the best that I can explain it, since the actual changes vary from person to person.

It took me two Landmark forums to realize that I am a powerful person and that I’m hiding that because I think that no one wants to hear it.

A long time ago, my dad told me a saying that was meant to impart the wisdom to not brag about your achievements. He said, “Nobody wants to hear that you’re successful, Erica.” Of course, I took this very personally and have carried it around for some 10 years or so. Every time I opened my mouth to say who I was, that annoying voice in my head stopped me with the words, “Erica, nobody wants to hear it.”

Now that’s silly. But don’t we all do that in a way? We talk ourselves out of the things that matter most to us because we believe that no one cares about us, or that it couldn’t possibly work out well.

I got up in front of 84 people today. The instructor asked who I was, and I opened my mouth, not knowing quite what would come out. What came out of my mouth was the following (word for word):

“Who I really am is a passionate, motivated, kick-butt entrepreneur who is already successful at the age of 23.”

After I said it, I just stood there for a minute with my mouth slightly open, as I heard cheers from the audience. And, for the first time in my life, I knew it was true. I AM a passionate, powerful entrepreneur — running an amazingly successful business that a lot of people could only dream of. And all this at an age when most people are struggling to find jobs that pay more than $10 an hour.

All of the rest of what I portray — my supposed lack of self-confidence; my “aw, shucks” attitude when other people praise me; my “I don’t need anybody” routine — it’s all an act. It’s an act that’s meant to cover up who I really am, all because of that one silly voice in my head that I let stop me from being the amazing person I always knew I was.

Tonight, I am creating the possibility of being an inspiration to others. I am not too young to inspire and motivate other people. I am not too young to get up in front of an audience and motivate the crowd. I am not too young, too naive, or too inexperienced to do anything that I set my mind to and work hard at.

I hope that tonight, reading this inspires and motivates you to do something that you haven’t had the courage to do. Until tonight, I haven’t had the courage to drop my act and be strong and powerful. Until tonight, I thought I needed to hide behind “I don’t need any help” or “Nobody wants to hear that I’m successful.”

I don’t.

The act stops here.

Go out and be that strong and powerful person. The world needs more people who are willing to be independent, motivated, and outgoing. Don’t be afraid to be who you really are. It’s the only way that you will truly shine in this life.

Mooneer and I were talking on AIM and he told me how to correctly hard-reset my Treo (I was doing it wrong, or something.) I Hotsynced it again and all seems to be well. Yay!

My first Treo 650 is officially dead after just less than 3 months as an active and much-loved member of my family.

I’m still not quite sure why it died. One minute it was Hotsyncing, and then the next minute it had disconnected from the computer. As I went to push the Hotsync button again, I noticed it was rebooting. And rebooting. And rebooting. And rebooting…

Unfortunately, it doesn’t even get far enough into the boot process to perform a hard reset (yes, I said hard reset, as in the “performing convoluted button presses while holding down the Reset button, which is very inconveniently located as far away from the keyboard as possible.”) So it’s officially kaput, and will be replaced for free at a Sprint store tomorrow (unless they have some previously-unknown miracle tool to fix it, which I highly doubt.)

Ah, well. Treo 650, it was fun while I knew ye. Bring on the new 650!

By the way, for those of you who have a 650, don’t forget your free 128MB SD card. I ordered mine today.

It’s also worth noting that even with this minor setback, I still think the Treo 650 is by far the best phone on the market for people like me (that is, people who like to play silly games, talk on wireless headsets, check email, and instant message from a cell phone.) In fact, the reason that I Hotsynced tonight was because I was getting ready to install $65 worth of games onto my Treo, including Bejeweled, Shape Shifter, and Text Twist. I don’t buy too many video games in general, but I’ll sure as heck pay $65 to have something fun to do on planes and while standing in line. 🙂