Thanks for the interest in learning more about me I recently changed this site from a personal website, where I used posted photos and personal updates to a blog about my entrepreneurial life and all the different projects I’m currently working on and what I will be working on for the next year! Very exciting… 

I am an entrepreneur: everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I see, I think about how to make it into a business. I work hard, and have always worked hard in everything I’m passionate about… but I also have fun while at it.

I’m going to go through a brief history about everything (that I remember) I’ve tried or thought about. For the current ideas/projects, please follow my blog posts. I will not stop trying it. Even if I wanted to, it’s just not who I am…

So, I think the first business I’ve tried to start was related to travel. In 1997, my best friend’s parents owned a travel agency in Salvador - Brazil, and as a big traveler just had to get involved. We did a local hotel reservation system, which started to get some attention and a lot of leads, but since most of them wouldn’t follow through, my friend’s parents decided not to pursue it…

Then in 1998, I started a travel site about home State of Bahia, in Brazil. It was mainly informational and I played with some banner ads at the time. It got some attention too. I even got an email from the mayor of one of the cities, and as I search it today, there are still links to it (almost eight years after being offline). Other similar sites came along and I got distracted with other stuff, so I couldn’t keep the site updated. I do regret not keeping the domain name… (Update: The domain name might be available for purchase in a few months… Don’t tell anybody!)

The one thing I have always wanted to do is to sell something online (Hint, hint… a project in the pipeline). In 1999, my best friend and I decided to start an online CD store in Brazil. We bought the domain name, we talked our fathers to give us $2K each so we could hire some programmers/ designers to do the site (at the time, I didn’t know how to make it - and we wanted it done fast!), we signed a partnership with a local retailer, so we wouldn’t need to have inventory… And just when we were about to do it, a major Brazilian record label launched their own online store. Then mp3 came along and our retailer partner went out of business.

In 2000, my father bought a bar/fast-food kiosk at a new Mall in Salvador (Brazil). He didn’t have any time to do anything, so I was left to manage it. And I loved it! I was my own boss and decided everything: I designed/created menus, dealt with suppliers, employees, Mall administration, bank… I handled everything. People referred to my dad as the “owner’s father” whenever he’d show up there. One time, I actually had to sign an authorization for him to enter the Shopping Mall on after business hours (even though he actually owned the store, not me).

In 2001, I decided to move to the United States to finish my Computer Science degree. Pretty soon, I started developing websites and I think I made about five as contractor while in school.

In 2004, I started my first internet business: I-stats - a real-time web analytics application. You can track your website’s traffic for marketing purposes:

Audiences: latest visitors, domains, countries, browsers, screen resolution, operating systems.
Navigation: visitors path, path analysis, ideal path analysis, page analysis, visit length.
Content: popular pages, page segmentation, entry/exit pages.
Marketing: referring links, keywords, search engines, image searches.

In 2005, a friend from College and I joined forces to create a web design company, eWeb Productions. We were based in Atlanta, but I moved around a bit with my day time job (first to South Carolina and then to California), and went on a long vacation (Canada, Europe and Brazil). We still managed to work long distance, but after a couple of years, we had different plans and both of us got involved on other projects separetly. As of Jan 2008, Trey will keep eWeb Productions and we remain good friends.

My next venture was in 2007. I started working on YowTRIP in April and in September I launched the newest social platform for world travelers.

Since then, YowTRIP has been featured in several newspapers/ magazines/ TVs/ Bloggers around the world. I have also demoed it at the Silicon Valley NewTech meetup, SF Beta, SF NewTech meetup and Boulder/Denver NewTech meetup.

So, what’s next now? I’m already working on a couple of different projects. I’ll post more info when they’re ready!