Felix and I – Jacob Filipp

In my memory it’s always the same picture: He is young – twenty four – sitting at the black computer table by the wall of his living room. I’m looking at him side-on. He’s silhouetted by the huge window with a gorgeous view of the neighbourhood church. Green trees outside. The sun is shining brightly.It’s summer. Probably “The Hot Summer”, when our friends G and C came over to hang and see what he was working on. This was at the one-bedroom apartment where he lived on his own for the first time. There was a small fan struggling to hold back the 35 degree heat. It was 20cm in diameter so it was ineffective – it was phenomenally hot and still a good time. He was showing all of us something on the computer screen. When he built that desktop he used a mini-motherboard, aiming at a small form factor. But at the last step, when it came time to buy the case, only a comically-large one was available. He took it. This compromise grated on him but it was a pragmatic way to finish the build and move on to what he really wanted. Felix and I really wanted to be millionaires by 30. We were going to get there by starting a website empire. Many e-commerce businesses at the time had an “affiliate program”. The idea was that you joined and drove visitors to their website – by hook or by crook – and any money those visitors spent with the merchant generated an 8% commission for you. The typical affiliate would select just a few products to promote on their personal blog.Our business’ premise was more niche: as part of these affiliate programs, some merchants also shared their entire product selection as a “datafeed”. This would allow you to pull all their products and promote them en-masse. Back in 2010, programming skills were rare enough that you could successfully use this datafeed to generate your own e-commerce site, and have it outrank the original merchant on Google. Visitors would come to your “clone” site first, and when they clicked the “buy” button they’d be taken to the original merchant’s site. You’d collect your 8% for anything they bought there. If you think this business was lucrative then you are mistaken. A successful cloned site would only make $100 per year. But that could still be profitable if your costs for the site were less then that. Typically just the $10 for domain registration. If you could make 100 websites, 200 websites, 500 websites at scale – then we’re talking real money. This is where I came in. I had done a proof-of-concept for the idea. Then built a platform that allowed a single person to create the kind of vast network of sites necessary. The only hitch was that – despite the datafeeds giving us all product titles, photos and descriptions – building each site still took manual work. We’d start by finding an e-commerce merchant with a datafeed AND a site so badly coded that our own clone could outrank them on Google. We’d smooth out all the quirks in the datafeed (each datafeed had its own technical problems. That’s why few affiliates worked with datafeeds.) We’d then classify this list of products into categories – just like what you’d expect from a site’s navigation bar. Our days were spent in this loop of research, building, and in hustling for links to sites by writing articles for syndication. I took the year off to pursue this idea. I lived off savings from a job I got straight out of school, one at a digital ad network. The first challenge was psychology. Each site took a day to build – how could we keep motivated to build a hundred of them? The answer was a large Bristol Board with 100 circles drawn on. Each circle would become a website. As we completed one, Felix and I would place a funny sticker in the middle and write the site’s domain underneath. Slowly, we built out decorcurtains.com, scrapbookstarter.com, beddingforcribs.com and discountboatshoes.com. As we manually categorized products, Felix became an expert in different types of adhesive tape available on the market (did you know “gaffer’s tape” is the ultimate multi-purpose tape? Way better than duct tape?). I discovered the world of womenswear (if you’re a tall girl, try a “sun dress”. If you like layering, try a “bolero”). It was a beautiful summer in Toronto. Young and loving the downtown energy, I was going on dates and meeting a whole lot of disinterested women. And then my love life caught a lucky break. Her name was A. She was clever and beautiful – short, pale, black haired. A was a cool girl – a DJ at CIUT, a university radio station for which I had a soft spot. You see, CIUT solved a 6-year mystery for me. I was a 10 year-old growing up in the middle east, and one night I was secretly listening to the radio past my bedtime. An unforgettable tune came on. Like a transmission from a futuristic Egyptian civilization. Unfortunately, there was no way to discover the name for this type of music. Frustratingly, over the next years as an immigrant in Canada, I’d hear it often in TV commercials. So close and yet out of reach. Later on, now as a highschooler listening to CIUT in the small hours, they finally put a name to the style: Drum n’ Bass. This opened a door to the music that I loved and to finding my true self. But that’s another story. A and I kept going on dates. I’d take her to see Delorean. She’d treat me to a Black Angels concert where we hopped outside to share a joint with her coworkers. The Black Angels made sinister music and my heart beat fast (“oh, that weed was definitely laced with something”, A said).Despite living in a hip market district, A ate all her meals out. “It’s more affordable to do that than to cook your own food!”, was her logic. Felix and I laughed about it. He was shopping at that same market district once a week and knew it was way cheaper to cook at home. He’d rumble with his wire cart 20 minutes there, do a round at his favourite shops, clump that cart down the stairs of the cavernous basement supermarkets in Chinatown. He developed some mean stir-fry recipes. At night, Felix and I would go out drinking at one of the indie bars in his area. He was one of the early gentrifiers in the West Queen West neighbourhood, so we had a glut of hip hole-in-the-wall places to choose from. It was a time of good rock, good electro, and Cut Copy, Ladyhawke and Radio Dept. were the background music to our days. Walking home from the bar on humid nights – the smell of lilacs lingering in the air far longer than it does in daylight. I will always remember those songs when I think of Felix. The same way you associate a trip abroad with the albums you were obsessed with at the time. I couldn’t stop looking at A, I was infatuated. But the chemistry was just not there between us: when I asked if I could kiss her for the first time, she was taken aback. “Don’t ask me. Just do it.” Dear reader, I strongly believe in showing courtesy and giving a woman space. This makes me profoundly unsexy. Over the years I’ve come to understand that, if a woman is ok with this, then that’s a strong indicator of compatibility. A and I stopped dating. I suspected she’d be disappointed in the other men she’d find out there. Creating the websites every day was boring work. I would maintain our morale by celebrating made-up milestones. From “hey we finished our first website!”, to celebrating the fifth website (“we’re one twentieth of the way there!” to the 30th website being “almost a third of the way there!”. And – of course – the celebration of the 33rd website which marked the actual one-third mark. As summer turned into fall I was failing at online dating. You see, my problem was that I was 24. Younger women were looking for a much older man than them. With money and a cool lifestyle.. Say, a 27 year old. Women my age were looking for a moderately older guy. Someone who’s 27. Women older than me were definitely looking for someone their own age. A 27 year-old. There was only one thing for me to do if I ever wanted to find a partner. I had to become 27. So I lied. And after a few awkward dates with more mature women – “What do you do for a living?”, umm… I’m a Boy Genius? – I finagled a date with M. M and I met on the street where my old digital ad network job was. I shook her hand, and quickly followed with: “let’s get out of here, all my old coworkers hang around here and I don’t want to run into any of them.” We went for ‘po boy sandwiches and paid for our own meals. We then went for a walk that ended by lake Ontario. It was nice. M was pretty and quiet. I’ve always thought that the quietest person in a room is often the smartest. And I’ve been on enough bad dates at that point to know that “a nice date” is actually a way-above-average date. That’s why I asked her out again. And at that second date (lubricated by beer) the conversation flowed. We both loved Star Trek: TNG and had a similar taste in electronic music. She was a Fashion Design student and I imagined her making garish avant-garde nonsense. Like big balloon outfits that engulf a person’s body. Date number 3 was at Stones’ Place, dancing to some good music and chatting on the couches at this just-slightly-gungy bar. That’s the date when M put together my sisters’ age, the gap between us, and the fact that I was 27 – and smelled a liar liar pants on fire. I don’t know what went through M’s head when I told her that I was busy “being an entrepreneur” taking two years off work. It was September. We hit 50 websites. “That’s halfway there baybee”! Out with M and her friends at an “Asian Fusion” restaurant1, I got a text from A. She’d reconsidered and wanted to see me again. I thought about the alternative timeline here. A choice between someone who’s quiet and slow-burning versus seeing through an unfinished story with someone I was infatuated with. Maybe it wasn’t even a trade-off at all. M and I weren’t exclusive. I loved pursuing multiple options. I didn’t text back.