Throwback Thursday: My First Job, Midnight Solutions
I don’t know why I haven’t thought about doing this - a throwback thursday post - earlier. It’s a great opportunity to write about how I remember the past and what I learned from it.Â
Today, I want to go way back to when I was 13 and I had my first job at Midnight Solutions. I was the only employe. It seems silly to say that it was my company, because all I was doing was making custom computers and websites for people I knew, and I never made that much money, but it was a job.Â
How Midnight Solutions started
When I was 13 I started to play video-games very seriously. In fact, it was the first time I played video-games at home. Before then, in place of video-games I had the pleasure of spending time with math workbooks and playing the piano.Â
The first video-game I got serious with was Counter-Strike. Like long-term five years serious relationship serious. You know how athletes use specific shoes or equipment to get better, well for gamers it was all about the hardware in your computer.Â
At the time, there were very few companies that offered customization for their PCs, and Dell was one of them. A very good custom built PC from Dell could range between $3,000 and up.Â
As I kept going deeper into the gaming community I also started to meet people who knew a lot more about computers than I did, and I learned from them. I learned what RAM, CPU, and GPU were and how everything came together to build a personal computer. Most importantly I learned that you could buy these parts off the shelf, and put together a computer yourself. And here’s the best part about it, if you did that you could build yourself a custom personal computer that would cost you $4,000 at Dell for roughly $2500.Â
I presented this to my family as a total bargain, and assured them that I knew what I was doing and for the holidays that year I built my own computer. After a holiday break crammed of playing Counter-Strike I thought that other kids (people I knew through Counter-Strike) might be interested in buying custom built personal computers from me rather than Dell.Â
Using my network as my target market
I had a very niche network. That’s another way of saying I was a nerd that played a lot if video-games. I’d hang out on IRC with other Counter-Strike players, we’d meet up at LANs in NYC, it was a small core group of people. Kind of like the hackers from Hackers the movie, except we weren’t doing anything illegal, we didn’t rollerblade, and we never looked cool.Â
The needs of my nerdy network were simple. Great computers that played the latest video-games, and everyone had that need. Even better, their friends had that need also. I didn’t have to find my target audience, because I was a part of my own target audience.Â
My first sale and product
I had built my own computer beforehand, but I had never built a computer for someone else for money. When I made my first sale, I was excited, confident, but also nervous.Â
Things didn’t go as smoothly as they should have gone. Somehow between installing the CPU and delivering the PC to my customer the CPU got fried. Personally delivering the PC, turning it on, and hearing three system beeps (indicating that something had failed) was a nerve wracking experience. I apologized, tried a few things, and finally had to let my customer (and his mom) know that I would have to go back home, diagnose the issue and that I’d let them know as soon as I figured it out.Â
Somehow his mom didn’t ask for their money back right away - which I was thankful for. I got back home and did everything I could to diagnose the issue. I eventually figured out it was the CPU, got a new CPU from the manufacturer, installed it and the computer worked out great.Â
After I installed it I gave the customer back some of their money since the PC was a week and a half late in being delivered. He - the teenage kid - was really bummed and his mom I’m sure was a bit worried but she handled it well. I wanted them to know that I appreciated this and that they were important to me as customers.Â
I ended up making short of $100 in profit for that job, but I had an extremely satisfied customer who was boasting about my personal computers to other people.Â
Thinking back on this and writing out this experience, I realize that what was true when I was a teenager trying to sell personal computers is not far off from what’s true today as a product manager at a tech company. I’m grateful for learning these basic but important business and product principles early on when I did.Â