It was 1997, I was 12, and the most important tool in my bedroom in Montreal was a chat window. My family had moved there from New Delhi six years earlier. I had a professional wrestling news website, and I had mIRC open on the screen next to it, because that was where the wrestling fans were. I had spent the year before teaching myself web design, and now I had something to put it to work on.
I did not think of it as a business yet. I thought of it as a way to get people to read what I was publishing. That turned out to be the same thing.
Wrestling Fans Were My First Audience
Over the next few years I ran a series of wrestling sites, including Wrestler Zone, Wrestling Inc. and AWW Wrestling, along with several others. Wrestling was a good subject for a kid learning the internet. The fans wanted news all the time, they argued about it all the time, and they came back every day to see what had changed.
I had no marketing budget. I had IRC. The chat channels were where fans already gathered, so that is where I went. I joined the conversations, shared what the sites were publishing and gave people a reason to click through. When a channel liked what it saw, I could see it in my traffic. When it did not, I learned that just as quickly.
That was my first lesson in distribution. You do not wait for an audience to find you. You go to the place where it already gathers and earn your way in.
Turning Traffic Into a Company
For a while the sites were something I did because I loved wrestling and liked building things. Then I understood that the people reading them were worth something to advertisers. Every visit, every click and every minute a reader stayed on a page could be paid for.
At 14, in 1999, I turned that into my first company, Emblaze. It was an advertising business. I worked with multiple ad networks and had high-traffic sites under me, and the money came from visits, clicks and time on site.
Running Emblaze changed how I looked at my own sites. The goal was a reader who came back tomorrow, and a good article was only the way to get there. I started paying attention to what kept people on a page and what sent them away, because those numbers were my income. There was no boss to blame when traffic dipped. If it dipped, I earned less, and I had to work out why.
The content brings people in. The audience is the asset. Advertising is one way to be paid for it, and I have relied on that idea in almost every business since.
Knowing When to Let Go
From 2000 to 2002 I was also a partner and the lead technologist behind Best Player Casino and Best Player Sportsbook, among the early online casinos and sportsbooks. I was learning how much more there was to build than wrestling news.
By about 16 I was out of the wrestling sites. They were sold to CraveOnline. Letting them go was the right call. A site with a real, returning audience is something a buyer can understand and put a value on, and selling freed me to work on what came next.
By my late teens I had made more than a million dollars. I want to be precise about that word, made. Making money and keeping it are different skills, and I learned the second one later than the first.
What Still Carries Over
In 2013 I brought the Emblaze name back for Emblaze One, a 360-degree agency for web development, e-commerce and digital marketing. Reusing the name was a nod to where I started. The work was the same instinct at a larger scale: find where people already are, give them something worth their time, and watch closely what they do next.
The tools have changed since my mIRC days. The chat channels are group chats, forums and comment sections now. The principle has not changed at all. If you are a teenager trying to make money online today, here is what I would tell you, based on what worked for me:
- Pick a subject you would follow even if nobody paid you. You will need that interest on the days the numbers are bad.
- Go where your readers already talk, and be useful there before you ask for anything.
- Learn how the money actually moves. Know what you are paid for, whether that is a visit, a click or a minute of attention.
- Treat your audience as the thing you are building. Everything else can change around it.
I did not have a plan in 1997. I had a subject I loved, a chat window and enough curiosity to watch what happened when people clicked. That was enough to start. If you want the longer version of where it went from there, my About page tells it in order, and the wrestling news sites have their own page.
