JaiDee Posted May 29, 2012 Author Share Posted May 29, 2012 Bankruptcy laws in the United States in the 1990's were completely different than they are right now. At that time, a person could just declare himself unable to meet his commitments to credit card companies and some other lenders such as Sears or Macy's, etc, get a lawyer and for 600 bucks declare bankruptcy. Pretty painless save for the humiliation in court and the 7 years afterward for which your credit rating would be absolute shit, it was a common thing to do and I had done it myself in 1998, a few years after my divorce when there was a lot more money going out than there was coming in. 5 cards were taken from me by the judge and cut up; no problem as they were pretty much maxed out anyway. The credit card companies would be notified, the debt forgiven, your account closed, and your credit score would head right into the crapper. By this time, and throughout 1998 and 1999 and 2000, I was using cash for everything anyway; there was no way in hell any bank would issue me a new card now and all the ones I had before had been taken from me and destroyed. Or so I had thought. One day around the time Andy and myself were working with the shitty photos and trying to get idea's for the website name and design, I was looking for something in the back of my sock drawer. Unexpectedly I grabbed onto a small, plastic card and pulled it out; what the hell was THIS? It was gold, it had a huge Citibank logo on it, and the expiration date was still a few months off; it had been sitting in there in the back of my drawer unused for 3 years. I couldn't believe my luck and called the 1-800 number on the back right away; "could you please tell me if this card is valid, and what the credit line is?" The reply; 5000 dollars. Because the card had never been used, it was not confiscated and destroyed during the bankruptcy deal and was good to go; amazing. The first thing I did was book a flight back to Thailand, which was around 1000 dollars. The next plan of action was to find a way to get better-quality photos. Laptops were extremely expensive at the time, 2500 or more for a good one, and digital camera's were as well; all told for both I would need to spend well more than 3 grand, and in any case I wasn't comfortable coming back through customs with thousands of ladyboy images on my laptop. The solution to this was a new camera which Sony had just put out, the first [and probably the last] of its kind; it burned digital photos directly to a mini-disc and the quality was really good for the time, with a 1.2 megapixel capability and a great built-in flash. Total cost; $999.00, plus maybe 100 bucks for 20 mini-discs, with enough space to get 2 girls in high-quality images on each disc. That would leave me close to 3K I could run up on my new-found gold card for hotels, spending, model fees and food, etc.....Once again I would be going back, and this time with a better camera, and more money for a better hotel room and some decent lighting. Investing the whole 5K was a no-brainer; without that card I would have barely had enough to go back and still would have been taking low-quality photos barely good enough for public consumption. I had seen June briefly before I flew off in January; coming back up from Phuket after working with the models there for 25 days, I had one night in Bangkok before I flew home and so I called her. She said she was broken-hearted and had missed me a lot, so sorry she lied to me, etc.....and could we please get together? We did, talked things through without any sex or tension, and remained friendly, although I would never have the same feelings I had for her before. So when I knew I was going to be returning in May to work with some new models, I called her and asked if she could help me out. Did she know any girls who would pose for me, and could she help me by bringing them over and getting them ready, picking up some sexy outfits, etc....? Eager to please and make me happy once again she agreed, and would be my model finder when I returned for a quick 2 week stay in May, which was all I could get off from my real job. The other major thing going on during this time was website design by Andy, and the naming of the site. Of course this was extremely important, and unlike today where nothing good is available, at that time there were hundreds of good names out there to be used. But I didn't want anything with "Ladyboy" in it, to distance myself from the one site already out there who was using the word not once but twice in their name! I thought of Jon's site, the guy in Boston who was making decent money from ModelTS.com. TS= Transsexual, very appropriate for his models who were all Shemales; since we dealt only with Asian Shemales, how about AsianTS? It wasn't available without the hyphen, yet, so we got it with the hyphen; it was short, directly related to the content inside, and so the name of the new website would be Asian-TS.com and would be sent out live to the world as soon as I returned from Asia with some decent stuff. We also had to set ourselves up with a billing processor; these are people who can run credit cards for a business, and there were a few who did it for porno sites. Their percentage was high, around 12% of every transaction, but they did all the billing work and even sent the new customers their user name and password after they had joined. We chose iBill.com out of Florida, which turned out to be a mistake as they jacked us over later; regardless, by that point in April of 2001 we had everything set in place to open a new website. Now it was up to me to take the new Sony camera, fly to the other side of the world yet again, and take some higher-quality photographs which would make my partner and any potential members happy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 29, 2012 Author Share Posted May 29, 2012 The camera which [literally] launched a hundred thousand ladyboy images on an unsuspecting world. It was a tank, weighed a ton, and burned the images to a mini-CD, something you would never even hear of today; but the quality of the photos was good and getting the images home was relatively simple and safe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azza33 Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 more sir... i need my fix! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
williethepimp Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 great read jai dee-keep it coming Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 29, 2012 Author Share Posted May 29, 2012 May, 2001; I have exactly 12 days to get 30 more models on film, 15 days total which includes 3 days of travel getting to and from Thailand. Thankfully June would be helping with model-finding so I wouldn't have to do that part, I could just set up shop in a hotel and get to work; and that is exactly what I did. The Ruamchitt Hotel was a decent place on Soi 13-15 Sukhimvit Road, just above the Thermea coffee shop and close by to the now-defunct Crackhouse go-go bar, which was in Clinton Plaza, also now razed to the ground. Many of the models would come from in there, and many others were June's friends who did not work in bars but preferred to "walk around", and I also did one trip to Kings Castle 3 in Patpong to find some more girls. All told about 35 more girls would be photographed in that 2-week span, a marathon of work which started every day at around 2pm [we all know how LB's love to sleep in] and went well into the night. 3 or 4 per day, with short breaks only for food and then right to bed to prepare for the next day; a vacation it certainly was not. June had picked up a bunch of sexy lingerie and schoolgirl outfits with some money I gave her, all really cheap to buy in the Pratunam section of Bangkok. I would re-use them on the models, each wearing a different combination of virtually the same clothes. Finding girls willing to pose was no problem; Ladyboys and transvestites tend to be natural exhibitionists, and besides they were getting paid decently and they also liked the fact they would get exposure on a brand new website. Many of the girls knew a guy named "Seanchai", a westerner who took photos in Bangkok and who ran Ladyboy-Ladyboy and used that as his screen name on his forum; we had been in contact a few times via e-mail and ended up meeting one night inside the Crackhouse while I was there in May. Very nice guy, cordial and quite pleasant, he remembered my missive about wanting to be a photographer and was surprised that I was now actually there doing it all on my own. He suggested that I would have an uphill climb breaking into the market, but by this point there was no turning back; I had 7 or 8000 dollars invested by now and I wasn't about to just throw that away. Arriving back in New England, Andy now had what he was waiting for; some good-quality photos of better-looking models, and in sexier outfits; who knows, this crazy idea just may be able to fly. We agreed that the site should have a base, a members area of about 35-40 models which would impress any new joinee's. Since we had about 70 girls all told, we would keep the rest as a bank and send them up 4 or 5 at a time each month as "updates"; we did the math perfectly so we wouldn't be running out until I was due to go back in January, and the photo shoots done at that time would hold us over from then and well into 2002. The official launch day was June 12th, 2001. I was at work per usual when Andy flipped the proper switch and the website was live; I could barely contain my excitement when I got home and actually saw it live on my P.C. screen. Of course by today's standards it wasn't much, just a crappy-looking website with a small tour and some photos of Ladyboys, but we did have one big advantage; we were only the 2nd website of its kind in the whole universe. Andy had inserted a bunch of important keywords behind the scenes, so people doing a Yahoo search for ladyboys would likely be lead there eventually; remember how small the internet was at this time. The members area was equally average; about 40 models for a base, with 25 of those on crappy 35mm film. Anyone who joined surely wasn't getting much, but for the very reasonable price of $14.95 they shouldn't really have expected much either. We would then send up one new girl every friday, our math figuring out that at that pace we would be out of models by late January, just in time for me to return with a whole new set of girls for February and beyond. We saved most of the "good" photo galleries taken with the new Sony for the newer updates as much as possible, hoping to retain the new people we would get to join up by showing them the higher-quality galleries as updates. I remember calling Andy from the road one day, about a week after the launch. I had stopped at a pay phone to call him up, and he told me we had made 2 sales that day, our first ever and netting us about 25 dollars. I could barely contain myself; "You mean this is actually working?" He said yups, that he had told me if we could just get some kind of a website up on the web it would make sales, and now sure enough they were coming in, about 5 or 6 per week all through that summer. Again, I was amazed, especially once I started seeing where the people were coming from; world wide web indeed, we had people from the U.K., Sweden, Ireland, Canada and of course every U.S. state. By late August we had even started receiving checks from iBill.com; very small to be sure, they were nonetheless some sort of revenue and enough of an incentive for us to keep going and to pay the bandwidth bills. Andy was doing his job well, I was handling customer support, and we had even started a small forum similar to this one, which was on the tour for free and where people could chat about the ladyboys and where they lived and worked, etc....Andy had absolutely no interest in the topic, he was married with kids and never left New England, but I did so I ran that forum myself and did the majority of the posting; from extremely humble beginnings that ugly little message board would later morph into The Ladyboy Forums, the most popular forum for this topic in the past decade. Everything was going so well, we were making some decent money, and the site was getting a presence on the web; it seemed like nothing could go wrong for us. Then, just as summer was about to turn to fall, disaster struck and just as quickly as it had all started this new website was almost off-line; for good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 29, 2012 Author Share Posted May 29, 2012 The very first ATS cover, June of 2001 As mentioned, nothing special to look at; my favorite model at the time, Ying from Kings Castle 3, made it as a schoolgirl, top left. She was a real cutie.....Emmy was a Phuket cabaret girl, far right; she looked much better in person than she did in this horrible 35mm photo. Yours truly working 'hard' with 2 models lower right, Pun on the left of that and Andie [schoolgirl] and Eye [traditional Thai girl] above that. It wasn't much but at least it was all starting to come together. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 29, 2012 Author Share Posted May 29, 2012 BB or PD can you please delete the pic above? this one should fit better, thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bumblebee Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 Like yourself JaiDee I am a bit of a history buff. It's fascinating to read the background story about Asian TS finally going live. I remember saving photos from the site during those early years and then finally seeing those same girls in Nana was quite an experience. I also recall Nick down in C&D showing me a laminated, well I think it was laminated... promotional sheet of the site back in '03. Your site was instrumental in keeping many of us guys going between visits back in those days, cheers for that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azza33 Posted May 29, 2012 Share Posted May 29, 2012 how long did it take to get your initial investment back from sales? i pretty sure i had 2 annual memberships over the years with asiants :) Around 2003 or 4 i think i finally found the site. my transition to Asian ladyboys was incremental and came from checking out Brazilian and other types until i finally stumbled on Asian girls and could now never turn back!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 30, 2012 Author Share Posted May 30, 2012 how long did it take to get your initial investment back from sales? i pretty sure i had 2 annual memberships over the years with asiants :) Around 2003 or 4 i think i finally found the site. my transition to Asian ladyboys was incremental and came from checking out Brazilian and other types until i finally stumbled on Asian girls and could now never turn back!! Thanks for the membership azza! Soon I will get into how the idea of that annual membership separated us from the rest of the pack, who were only offering monthly recurring memberships. I think a lot of people were like you over the years; maybe found the generic or brazillian or white girls first, and then migrated to Asians.....although some guys never liked 'em at all, too skinny, not enough meat on their bones. I won't get into exact financial numbers in this story, but it took a long while before we were actually making a living at it; in fact, I couldn't even leave my real full-time job until a year and a half after the launch! As mentioned, the odds of this fiasco even working at all were slim to none, and slim was walking out the door in the next installment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 30, 2012 Author Share Posted May 30, 2012 I also recall Nick down in C&D showing me a laminated, well I think it was laminated... promotional sheet of the site back in '03. Originally opposed to allowing his girls to work for the site and appear on the internet, Nick banned all his bar girls from posing for the site in the early days. He came around when he finally realized the cross-promotion was a lot better for HIS end; we had a helluva lot more traffic than he did, and once we ran a few promo galleries for the bar it blew up as expected. But, fair trade overall; we got those laminated place mats at his bar and Banana worked there; getting her for the site was a genuine coup as I knew it would be. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katoeylover Posted May 30, 2012 Share Posted May 30, 2012 Banana! the shoot that made me buy a subscription back in 02 - the waterfall shoot is still the best! great story Jaidee! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 30, 2012 Author Share Posted May 30, 2012 Thanks a lot, KL.....I appreciate all the kind words from anyone bored enough to read this far along into this story heh heh, but coming from people I have met personally like you it resonates even more; I still remember driving out in the lovely English countryside in your fancy sports car, that was a grand time and something I will always remember. New installment coming tonight - the author almost takes the big dirt nap! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Catastrophe - and a near-death experience strikes..... It was a saturday night in late August when the first bit of pain started. I had some friends staying with me from Montreal, a couple I knew from when I used to hang out up there in my 20's, and we were playing cribbage and drinking beer at my kitchen table when I had a pain in my abdomen which felt like I had been kicked in the gut; times 10. It wasn't going away so I told them to take me to a clinic, that I needed to talk to a doctor right away. We went to one near my house and I was checked out, but nothing untoward was found; he game me a handful or percocets for the pain and sent me on my way. All those pills did overnight was mask the pain; when I awoke in the morning it was back with a vengeance and I could barely stand or walk without being doubled over. Now it was time for a professional, namely my mother who was a registered nurse, to take over; she came over and drove me directly to the emergency room of the local hospital. Once there I was seen by a REAL Doctor, not some quack-in-a-box. He drew some blood, looked at the results, and told his nurses "get this guy into the operating room right away". Within the hour I was being prepped and operated on for a ruptured appendix, the only operation of my life up to that point. It wasn't painful at all once they knocked me out of course, and I woke up 10 or 12 hours later in a comfortable room on the 8th floor overlooking the east side. It was at this point that everything went drastically wrong. Seemingly unable to vacuum out all the bile and other disgusting crap out of my abdominal cavity during the surgery, I was now getting much sicker rather than getting much better. They told me when I woke up "you will be out of here in 3 days"; I ended up staying for 15. Now, had I been a normal 9-5 guy that would have been OK with me, an extended vacation from work and all that, but I now had a live website to run, passwords to re-set, customer service to take care of for the 20 or 30 members we had by then, and I had to work with Andy to get more models up on the site, the Updates which are essential to every website staying in business. I had no internet access in the hospital of course, and felt completely out of the loop. By day 3 or 4 I was able to call him and fill him in with what was wrong, but because he only had a 25% split in the site [and hadn't received anything in the way of remuneration by this time] he couldn't be bothered to deal with the e-mails and other jobs I had to do, so the website just sat there. By day 7 or 8 I was close to death, no kidding; my temperature was around 105 and I could only sit at the end of my bed like an old man or lie down, walking was impossible. A girl I knew from work came by to visit me at this time, but I was asleep; later on she told me me that she went screaming from the room because when she walked in my mouth was agape, I was white as a sheet and had tubes running in every direction in and out of me and I appeared to her to have passed on from this mortal coil. They brought in a new Doctor who aggressively changed my whole treatment, stuffed a huge 2-foot tube down my nose and into my stomach, and started pumping out all the crap. It's a long story but suffice to say this guy reversed the whole prognosis and literally saved my life. I would end up seeing him at a hockey game a couple years later and told him so, with tears welling up in my eyes, and he calmly told me "don't worry about it" LOL. No wonder we pay these guys so well. In mid September I was ready to go home; I had lost 25 pounds after being on a diet solely consisting of ice chips and water for 2 weeks, and I was weak and unsteady. But at least I was HOME, and could get back in front of the P.C. again. Once I did I faced a nightmare of customer service complaints, non-working passwords, no one posting on the nearly-dead forum, questions from potential members, and no new models on the website; it was a complete disaster and being as sick as I was it was just about time to say "fuck it" and just let it all close down. In fact Andy did exactly that soon afterwards; not getting paid much, and then putting up with my bad mood and bitchiness at him for letting the site go to hell while I was away in the hospital, he finally told me goodbye in early October; now I didn't even have anyone to run the site. Same as me, Asian-TS was on life-support at that time, with yet again about a 10% chance of staying on the internet. It took another Andy, this one from the complete opposite side of the country, to come to my rescue and bring the site back to life. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted May 31, 2012 Author Share Posted May 31, 2012 One of the dozens of letters awaiting me when I returned from the hospital was from a guy in California, also named Andy. He had written me because he had seen Asian-TS on the internet and was wondering if we could somehow work together; he had a small website of his own, now defunct, and needed some new content to boost up his members area. Content was the one thing I had, over 70 girls all told, and I was indeed willing to trade with this guy; but what could he do for me? Same as me he really didn't have any cash, so he couldn't really "buy" the sets of photos outright, but he explained to me that he was very good at driving traffic to his website and that he knew a lot about the inner workings of the internet and search engines, something which was still a deep mystery to myself and most of the world at this point. Basically, he explained that if I worked with him my site could make a lot more than it was now, and would have expanded traffic and a much more visible presence on the web. I wrote him back right away, and we started regular correspondence, and since I now had a lot of free time in recovery mode I eventually got around to calling him and chatting. I told him what had happened with my local webmaster and that I was pretty much screwed right now, that the site was dead in the water and would be off-line all together within a month or two. His response; "I am a webmaster, why don't you let me start doing the updates for you?" This would prove to be a very lucky break, and for the price of 10 of my model galleries, [non-exclusive, which meant I could use them also], no cash on the table, plus a promise of the very reasonable 300 bucks per month, he would assume all tech duties for the site; amazingly, we were back in business. Through October and November of that year we became good friends, chatting almost daily and making new plans for the site; he loved the fact that I had so much material, and because I couldn't work my real job because of my appendectomy recovery process [10 weeks all told] we were able to make a lot of cosmetic changes and to plan ahead for 2002. I was able to gain control of the customer service problem, was able to keep the 40 or so members happy with the regular friday updates, and since the iBill.com checks were coming every week I was even able to pay off the original Andy for his much-appreciated time and effort. He was never really comfortable working with shemales anyway, so his departure, although dangerously close to closing down the site at the time, was probably a blessing in disguise. The rest of the income from those small checks went back into the site 100%; bandwidth costs, saving for upcoming travel costs, and now paying the new Andy the $300 a month he wanted for running the site; there was literally nothing left at the end of every month when all was said and done. By late November and into December of that year I was back at my real job, and those guys were seriously pissed off at me. No one can predict an illness like the one I had, in which I missed nearly 3 months of work time, but between that and the 8 weeks holiday I had taken earlier in the year I had had about 5 months off in 2001, and that was not appreciated one bit by upper management. And yet, because our vacation schedules ran from January 1st until December 31st, I would rightfully have a whole new batch of paid vacation time coming up soon and of course my plan was to go back to Thailand and get more models on film. As January of 2002 turned on the calendar, I was once again heading back to Thailand with my big tank of a camera, my 3rd trip in 12 months, and this time I had the resources and the time needed to get some seriously high-quality material 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 1, 2012 Author Share Posted June 1, 2012 Only 4 or 5 installments left to go in this story, lads..... -------------------------------------------- The website would run out of models by the end of January, 2002. Without a new batch of girls we would surely go under, so once again I was under the gun when I landed at the old Don Muang airport just after new years day. I had the camera and I had money; most of the revenue we made between the day the site was launched on June 12th right up until then was in my pocket, whatever wasn't spent on bandwidth and webmaster fee's. The gold card I had run up in 2001 was maxed out and I was only making the minimum payments on that, so everything had to be done with cash derived from the website up to that point. I once again rented a room at the Ruamchitt for the duration. Not the best rooms in the world, but only 800 Baht per night and very discreet; by now the doorman, the maintenance guy and all the front desk girls knew me and just waved the models through to my room, even if there were 3 or 4 in one day. My plan was to get 50 girls in 25 days; I had a month all told and would use every day as much as possible. In the back of my mind I knew this was go-for-broke time; the website was on life-support and updating one girl per week was simply not enough and the few members we did have were complaining. Starting with my return in February I had decided we would start adding 10 girls per month rather than 4, getting aggressive, and this would burn through the 50 models in 5 months, in which case I would have to come back and get 50 more to last the year. It was a gamble to be sure, 50 girls could have lasted the whole year with the old update frequency, but with that schedule we would always just tread water and never really "make" it. By now a 3rd Ladyboy website had entered the fray. Named AsianShemalesXXX.com, it is still around to this day and at the time was very similar to Asian-TS; not quite as good as Ladyboy-Ladyboy, but good enough to make it on the web, where once again quantity mattered more than quality. So now we had 2 websites to compete with, but frankly I was surprised there weren't even more by that time. I hunkered down and got to work, again not much of a vacation by any means. New models who had seen the site on the internet wanted to work for us now, and friends of friends who had posed for us on the first go-round were willing and ready to come work for us now. This meant better quality control; only the "A" list of Ladyboys from Nana Plaza and Patpong and the Crackhouse would be working for us this time, and we got some serious future superstars. June was still bringing friends by as well, and the hottest of last years models were set up for re-shoots. At one point she told me 'the girl coming today at 4pm is special, the best one I have sent you yet". I was skeptical, as pretty much ALL her friends were sexy and hot, so why would this one be any different? Even when she walked though the door I didn't think much; I was impressed, but again, all the girls I was working with by this time were extremely hot in my mind. But Natalie was somehow different, and she had clothes of her own in a brown shopping bag, as well as 5 inch high heels and some sexy-as-hell makeup. It took her about 30 minutes to get ready and once we started I could see what June was talking about; extremely camera-friendly, she looked excellent through the viewfinder and my wheels were already spinning as to how happy the current and future members would be with this new hottie. Natalie explained to me that she had done one photo shoot a year or 2 earlier for Ladyboy-Ladyboy, didn't like the results, and had asked them not to show the gallery but they did not comply so she wouldn't work for them again. She told me that if she liked her photos on our site, she would work for us only from now on, which at the time was very important; exclusivity on a superstar model was important in those very early days. Seeing the future potential right there in front of me, I did my best to make her look good and to please her and sure enough she kept her word; Natalie would only work for Asian-TS from then on, and over time that partnership would prove to be equally beneficial to both sides. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 1, 2012 Author Share Posted June 1, 2012 Natalie looking her usual hot self in her first-ever gallery for A-TS .... taken in January, 2002 at the Ruamchitt Hotel Keep in mind the lighting back in those days was so-so at best......she was much hotter than these photos really portray and was easily the most popular girl in KC3 and probably all of Thailand at that time Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 1, 2012 Author Share Posted June 1, 2012 -------- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dixon cox Posted June 1, 2012 Share Posted June 1, 2012 Thoroughly enjoying each update JD and I remember Natalie well, a stunner for sure, unfortunately not from my own personal experience but from your website. Sorry to butt-in with a question, but: Did you ask the girls to sign a document of any kind to confirm their age or for any other reason, such as exclusivity? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azza33 Posted June 2, 2012 Share Posted June 2, 2012 Have to laugh, i've joined all the websites you've mentioned so far Probably goes for most of the lads in here. That Natalie is super sexy... Never got the chance to meet here... my first "superstar" was the porcelain princess Chompoo.... fair to say my excitement was a little too much and it wasn't the most memorable of times I wonder was it your website that introdcued me to her? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 3, 2012 Author Share Posted June 3, 2012 : Did you ask the girls to sign a document of any kind to confirm their age or for any other reason, such as exclusivity? Exclusivity, no....in fact, that was a big no-no in the LB webmaster community, to try and coax one girl into working for your site only. But Natalie told ME that, I never asked her at all. She told me she liked her photos when taken by me [even better 2 years later later when I got light stands and strobes and a 2000 dollar Nikon camera] and that she would only work for my site and she stuck by that. It was a mutually beneficial agreement after that; she made the site more popular and we made her famous and kinda wealthy, more on that soon. Age confirmation - check. Each girl had to show ID card or passport [which I photographed] and I learned early on how to read the Thai calendar to prove they were at least 18 or older; they then had to sign and date a release form allowing their photos to appear on the web. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 3, 2012 Author Share Posted June 3, 2012 Have to laugh, i've joined all the websites you've mentioned so far Probably goes for most of the lads in here. my first "superstar" was the porcelain princess Chompoo.... fair to say my excitement was a little too much and it wasn't the most memorable of times I wonder was it your website that introdcued me to her? Most likely.....before A-TS she only appeared in one other place, which is where I saw her, and her name was Rose. That site was a "feeder site", a non-pay site which fed people to other websites, in which the owner would get a half of a sale. The name of that site was LadyboyLovers.com and the owner/webmaster later become one of my best buddies in Thailand. She may have worked for another website or 2 over the years but the majority of her pics were with A-TS; we were and remain to this day very good friends. Photos below of Chompoo which I took by the pool of my first BKK apartment in 2003, she was just 18....note the lack of silicone in any part of her body, everything at that time was 100% natural; we had a few bedroom sessions back then which almost stopped my heart. Not surprising that you joined all 3 websites at some point, Azza; before 2005 we were the only 3 in the game at all!. It kept surprising me that for 4 years there was no more competition, that no one else had the same idea that Seanchai and myself and YinYang from ASMXXX did. LadyboyCock.com, a revolting site featring dirty ol' bald Nigel and the hairy guy with the bad wig, came along somewhere in there but they didn't count; they were hardcore only and made the girls look like shit, something our 3 sites did the exact opposite of. I would like to tell the last 3 or 4 installments of this story and also finish the Extortion story off but I can't stay logged on here for more than 3 or 4 posts worth, I really have no idea why. I will try and make a new one tomorrow and will wrap up this whole story as 2002 came and went and I was able to leave my real job for good and make a decent living in the biz. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SiamSam Posted June 3, 2012 Share Posted June 3, 2012 She was very sweet back then JaiDee. A real honey. Great smile. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 5, 2012 Author Share Posted June 5, 2012 Yes indeed Sam, a true gem......one of the cutest ever, but then again there are so many who were this cute! 2 or 3 chapters more and this story ends, or more accurately for me anyway; begins. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Although Natalie was the cream of the crop to be sure, she wasn't the only new model who would turn the website around in February of 2002. As mentioned, it was now possible to work with only the 'A' list of Bangkok Ladyboys, the hottest girls who had heard there was a new website which their friends were appearing on, and who wanted to appear on there also. On one visit to Kings Castle 3 I spotted an unbelievable blonde-haired beauty; knowing she was too good to be true, in other words already a post-op, I nonetheless asked my new pal Natalie to chat her up and see if she would take a photo gallery with me. I saw her nod a "yes" off in the distance and a few days later I was working with Som, which means 'Orange' in Thai. She was literally the most beautiful person I had ever worked with up to that point, and I remember my hands trembling as I looked down the camera lens. She and Natalie and the other 8 girls shown below all appeared in February and it was by far the best update we had offered in our eight months on-line up to that point. I had come back with 50 models, enough to last a whole year with the old update process, but I knew it was now time to gamble, a kind of "all in" bet which would either make the site sink or swim. Andy was against it, but he really didn't have any say; I told him that rather than adding one new girl every Friday like before, we would now add 5 girls on the first and 5 girls on the 15th, and we would start with 10 of the hottest models we had. Pattaya May was included in this batch, a girl who would become a well-established superstar later on but who at this point was still just a little-known ladyboy from the Limmatquai Bar {now defunct}. Bangkok May, Natalie, Som, Art and the other girls below rounded out the star line-up. And so in February we added 10 girls, and the same again in March and April, and by May I was heading back to Thailand to get 50 more girls. We were competing with YinYang at AsianShemalesXXX by now, as well as Seanchai and his deep pockets and well-established camera crew over at Ladyboy-Ladyboy, so we had no choice but to go in heavy with the updates and the best talent we could find. Another way I optimized what little money we had was to get 2 galleries out of every model who came over; one gallery would be taken in their street clothes and one in an outfit I would give to them, either schoolgirl or sexy lingerie, or traditional Thai girl, etc....so, essentially, 50 models meant 100 galleries, and the 2nd gallery always included the cum shot, the money shot which the customers really wanted to see. Every dime made by the website during this time went right back into the site, either for models, travel, hotels, equipment, webmaster fees, computers and monitors, bandwidth or advertising. This was well before the days of "Affiliates", who are people who get a 50% split of any traffic they send to a website, which started in late 2003 and 2004; all the advertising back then had to be done by myself and Andy, with photos like the ones below marked with the Asian-TS logo. The hope being that once a surfer landed on a photo like this, they would type that name into their browser, visit the site and then join up. After doing my full-time job, I'd come home and spam as many places as possible with these photos; Newsgroups, Yahoo groups, MSN groups, AOL chat rooms and message boards; anywhere people congregated on the web to look for porno. Again, remember the size and scope of the web in spring, 2002; it was about 5% of what it is today so seeing photos of Ladyboys like this was not all that common. A guy I knew in Boston during this time was an advertising guru, a kind of idiot savant of the Ladyboy circuit who lived with his parents and absolutely lived for this kind of shit, spending all week on his P.C. and weekends at the Shemale cabaret shows in Boston. Famous in the underground world of Ladyboys and newsgroups, he went by the handle "Digital God" and his posts were never deleted or marked as Spam as many of mine would have been just because he was so well-known. Because he posted for so many different websites, people just assumed he was an admirer and not a paid spammer, so his posts were left alone. I contracted him to post stamped photos for me as much as possible for 300 dollars a month, well worth it at the time. The last 2 parts of the puzzle came together in June of that year, 2002. A very famous website at the time, which I will not name but which was one of the first Shemale websites EVER, had agreed to show a gallery of mine with the Asian-TS banner above it for the very reasonable price of 10 galleries, again non-exclusive meaning I could use them as well. I really had to work hard to get my gallery shown with the banner above it, and he really didn't want to do it but I was persistent, paying him compliments and basically kissing this guys ass in every conceivable way for about 4 months. But it was well worth it; he had over 1000 paying members compared to our 100 or so, and now all of those eyeballs [and credit cards] would be coming to our website as well. On the day that gallery went live on his famous website, Asian-TS blew up with traffic and our sign-ups went through the roof; we had finally made it. Andy called me later on in the week with some even better news; he had been sitting and waiting on the name AsianTS.com, without the hyphen, for weeks and weeks, knowing that it would become available on July 1st. The current owner had not been using it, Lord knows why he had even registered it, and he just let it expire and we grabbed it a day later. Although it looked funny in the browser as just asiants.com, it looked great and very concise and to-the-point when you viewed it as AsianTS.com. No one likes using hyphens, and starting on July 2nd and from that point on no one had to use one ever again. Somehow, and against every conceivable chance, it began to look more and more likely this crazy dream I had had almost 2 years earlier actually had a chance to work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 5, 2012 Author Share Posted June 5, 2012 Some of the February, 2002 models; Som first, yummmm 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaiDee Posted June 5, 2012 Author Share Posted June 5, 2012 The updates page which put A-TS on the map Som in the black dress Cutie ing in white outside on the roof of the Ruamchitt hotel May in Pattaya Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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