A camera and a dream

[JaiDee]

Not sure if you guys can pull up this link, but if so it shows the second A-TS cover, from June of 2002. I worked hard with Andy to get this one right, it took us a couple days of designing and photoshop and we put up the hottest girls we had; top row, Som and Nancy from Kings 3, Golf and Emmy from Phuket lower left and Natalie and Ning from Kings 3 lower right.

No time to be modest; with only 3 sites on the web of this nature we had to make our claim as "the best" whether we really were or not.

Note the "Enter here" photos at bottom, which were clickable and lead into the free tour

http://web.archive.o...//asian-ts.com/

[seanbeag7]

That link takes a few seconds to work, but it still works. Thanks jaidee, for posting this early history about A-Ts and how it all started, please keep it going, i am finding it really interesting.

[SiamSam]

JaiDee, the link works fine for me.

Merci beaucoup.

[JaiDee]

Glad you guys like the way the story progresses......I won't go too much further, the story after all is about how I had an idea and ran with it, and by the time I am finished with my real job in late 2002 and a bit into early 2003 I think that will have been enough.

Someone else mentioned early on that something like this could not have been done today and that is quite true, there are just too many sites and too many free places for surfers to go to find their fix; but back then, not so. Since it seems like just about everyone wants to move to Thailand once they have gotten the bug, and most people choose either teaching or opening a bar to make that happen, I wanted to present one alternative way which I was fortunate enough to try out at the right time To be honest I still have no idea how it all worked but I'm not complaining. Last 2 or 3 chapters coming soon........

[strocube]

Great stuff JaiDee. Really enjoying your memoirs.

[dixon cox]

Being somewhat of a webmaster myself (on a limited scale operating numerous affiliation style websites in our niche) I found all this particularly interesting and am thoroughly enjoying it.

You have a knack of writing with an entertaining style JD, plus the subject matter is of interest to me on more than one level, so I definately look forward to more.

[JaiDee]

Being somewhat of a webmaster myself (on a limited scale operating numerous affiliation style websites in our niche) I found all this particularly interesting and am thoroughly enjoying it.

You have a knack of writing with an entertaining style JD, plus the subject matter is of interest to me on more than one level, so I definately look forward to more.

Much appreciated DC, 2 more installments left and this story will be over......still kinda shaking my head that it all worked but hey, you get lucky sometime!

---------------------------------------------------

By the time the new cover was added in late June of 2002, and once the name of the website had been secured with no hyphen, it seemed like the website had a real shot of actually making it, something I would have given a small shot in hell just 9 months earlier when I was lying close to death in that hospital room. Getting the free gallery on the famous website at that time was another huge coup, something that in reality you couldn't even put a price tag on; it sent us over a thousand customers who had already proven they would take out their credit card and pay for a shemale website.

Realizing that cross-promotion was a key element to being seen by people already willing to join adult websites, I reached out to as many sites as I could to do the same thing; some did and some didn't agree to do it, but in the end I was able to do trades with a few, most notably Foxy Angel out of Florida, a tall blonde bombshell with a huge cock, and the French/Vietnamese babe Saigon Lee out of Los Angeles who was an escort and also had her own pay website. She loved A-TS [she was an Asian-TS after all!] and told me if I was ever out in L.A. to give her a shout; by this time I had become a fairly decent photographer and she said that if I ever came to town she would work with me for free. Realizing that this was an extraordinary offer and since Andy also lived in L.A. I made a point of heading out there to get some galleries; we met, became good friends and I got 4 great shoots in the can; all these sets would be used on both AsianTS and SaigonLee.com. She also gave me the use of many more sets from the inside of her members area and I gave her some from mine; these kind of gallery trades were how sites in the early days optimized their content without having to actually pay for more shoots.

2 more matters to take care of and I would [hopefully] be on the way to freedom and the dream I had of living a transcontinental lifestyle; leaving my job, and coming up with a cover story for family and friends back home. I remember speaking with Andy in August of 2002, when I was in L.A., asking him about the future of this business and if he thought I could leave my full-time job soon. Still to this day I have never met anyone as intelligent as he was at driving traffic, optimizing sign-up potential, and his general knowledge of the burgeoning on-line porno biz, despite the fact that we unfortunately parted ways a few years down the road due to his ever-increasing drug use. He told me at that time:"in my experience, this business only goes up and not down" - and he turned out to be quite correct in that assessment all the way through the recession of 2008.

Family was important now, as was my ex-wife, and the fact I would now need to get private and personal health care and life insurance for myself and my little ones, not cheap by any means. But I had set a figure in my mind of how much we would need to make for me to live in 2 cities, the airfares to go back and forth a few times per year, to run the website and all associated costs, pay for health care for us 3 and keep up support payments, and by late summer the site had already surpassed that figure. I had a college friend in New York, a graphic design wiz who was much better than Andy in that department and who had his own firm with 30 people, and I paid him a minimal amount to add my photo and bio to the company staff page; I drove down for a long weekend and he taught me a huge glossary of tech words and terms I would need to know to explain to one and all that I was now employed with the XYZ company as a graphic artist, a semi-self-employed contractor who could now work from home [or, essentially, anywhere with an internet connection - like Thailand?]. It was believable; the internet was in a boom period and many people had gone that route so I was just one of thousands joining in on that new gold rush.

By October 1st I had given my notice at work; 30 days, leaving for good on the first of November. They were shocked to say the least; no one left this company, which was a good-paying job with good benefits and security and a pension, etc.... but the writing had actually been on the wall for well over a year, they just failed to see it. So much vacation time, frequent and unexplained trips to Asia, and the fact that I actually took a voluntary demotion 6 months earlier so I could cut back my hours and have more time to be with my kids and to work on the site [while still maintaining full insurance and benefits] were all signs that I would be leaving soon. I first started working nights in June of that year, the 4pm-10pm shift, and despite pleas from my old buddy Alan I was out the door on November 1st, 2002, with absolutely no regrets. In fact I was absolutely overjoyed. The last pieces of the puzzle were falling into place; now I just needed to get back to Thailand and find a place to live, and the dream first started a full 2 years earlier would become a reality.

[JaiDee]

In the apartment of Saigon Lee in the Valley just north of Los Angeles in late summer, 2002. Basically considered the hottest Asian Shemale in the states at the time, to me it was like having the Natalie of the USA and when she offered to pose for no charge I was out there in no time. At the time she worked only for her own website and A-TS - I especially like the photo of her posing next to the website photos of her in a hot lesbian scene.

When I got these pics back home to Andy that night for him to work with he knew they would go over like a bomb and said only one word; "bravo"

[JaiDee]

More Natalie from late in 2002.

I know it doesn't seem like much at the time; same as the Saigon pics there were shadows and the photography was still about 50% as good as it would be in the coming years, but having this amazing model exclusively on A-TS was a dream come true. Note the AsianTS logo had been modified by then to show the site with its new name by then, much easier to type into a browser.

[JaiDee]

More Nat......she made us famous and we made her famous; win-win

[JaiDee]

It was rare for me to work close to home, but Trina was a Cambodian I met in a disco in Boston when I was in recovery mode from my apprendectomy; I told her about the site and she quickly agreed to pose and was at my apartment a few days later with that radiant smile. Only 19 and very much a femboy, we had a few killer sessions in the sack as well during these shoots - she later became a high-priced, high-maintenance escort on the Boston scene getting upwards of 300 bucks an hour for her time.

[JaiDee]

If you guys can open this link you can see the site cover from early 2003 and well into that year

To me the cover was certainly the more important part of the free tour and we always spent a lot of time to get it right and used only the hottest and most diverse models.

From the top; Linly from Phuket, Anna the traffic-stopper from Bangkok and Nika from Jakarta

Bottom from Left; Ji had to make the cover despite her tiny cock, her face more than made up for it.....Pim from Obsessions next to her, and of course Natalie and Lek from Chiang Mai, who was well-hung

http://web.archive.org/web/20040321172823/http://www.asian-ts.com/

[JaiDee]

Lastly.......the mother lode of advertising.

If you guys have read this far have the desire to open any of these links, this is how the site became known in the early days before we had affiliates spreading the word for a 50% split.

I had paid a guy named Mike from England, later the moderator of the Tooned-Up forums, to make all of these killer galleries and spread them around the web. He, myself and the Digital God would post in Yahoo groups, AOL chat rooms, message boards, forums [including our own A-TS forum] newsgroups and anywhere else where surfers congregated. These galleries were seen by tens of thousands of men at the time, and since sign-up conversion rates were much higher back then they had a big impact on the website bottom line.

http://www.asianladyboysxxx.com/promobkk/

[JaiDee]

Lastly......and there will only be one more chapter to this story tomorrow which will bring it all to a close.....I found this promo gallery from early 2004 which shows how much the photography had improved by then compared to the shadowy trash I have been showing.

By then we had invested over 4 grand into lights, power supplies and fuse relay boxes, umbrellas and stands, strobe lights and of course a beautiful Nikon Pro Digital SLR camera; all told the gear weighed about 25 pounds and took up a helluva lot of room in my suitcase when I flew off to the Philippines in January of 2004 to work with eighty models in 25 days, a true marathon. But it was worth it; by then the site was doing well and people wanted to see more and more countries and more and more models - and we delivered.

http://asianladyboys...ppinespromo.htm

[JaiDee]

The last part of this story...............

It was never my desire to get into the business at all. If you had asked me in the early 90's if I could ever picture myself as a modern-day, albeit minor-league version of Larry Flint or Bob Guccione, those sleazy-type dudes with the open shirt and multiple gold chains taking photos of beautiful models for a living, I would have thought that was completely absurd. I was actually a shy kid from New England, an 8th -born Irish American from a large catholic family who was fully expected to just fall into lock-step with the rest of society; get a job and a wife, have a few kids and settle down, do the 30 years at my job, get the gold watch and then retire and die. And that most likely would have been the course had I not discovered Thailand in early 1999; that damn place sunk its hooks into me and like so many before and after me I just had, absolutely HAD to get myself over there for half of every year, so I needed to find an excuse to be there and a way to finance that. On-line porn was the best idea I could come up with, and as mentioned many times in this story despite the very flimsy chances of success it actually worked out somehow. Luck, good timing, some good moves at the right time, having a smart webmaster who knew the business, getting better and better at photography over time, and meeting the proper people in the biz all combined into a perfect storm and by January of 2003 I had a decent apartment on New Petchburi Road in Bangkok and was able to maintain my place in New England as well; my original goal a full 2 1/2 years earlier. I should also note that the lack of competition surely helped a lot; it wasn't until 2005-2006 that a few good, new sites came along, so during that first 5 year period only 3 websites were truly there to take care of the ever-growing hordes of people who wanted to view Ladyboys on the internet. To this day it still baffles me why no one else had come up with the same idea that us 3 did; it had seemed so obvious to me after that initial 'click'.

I had considered the teacher route, of course; I think almost everyone does when they first discover Thailand and decide they want to live there. I also had a marketing degree and even looked into some multi-national companies like Xerox and IBM, Microsoft, Coke and a few others, but that wasn't realistic at all; places like that promoted from within for international positions and in any case any of those companies as well as teaching would have taken me away from my kids for 12 months a year and I didn't want that. Opening a bar; same-same. And after visiting the country a few times I had seen the failure rates of those so it was never a serious option. I was also never really the type to own a bar; again, shy and introverted by nature, it just wasn't my style to be in a bar night after night chatting up customers and being around that whole scene too much; I have never been a big drinker either so the thought never really crossed my mind.

No, the answer was staring me right in the face in the form of my personal computer and once I saw a few porno websites on the internet and realized it wasn't really that far out of the question to make one of my own, that was my main and only goal. I remember when I got my very first P.C. in 1998, looking at that monstrous monitor on the desk in my cramped bedroom every day and saying to myself; "there has GOT to be a way to make some money off this foolish toy". It took 4 or 5 years from that point, but after a lot of reading, learning, networking, self-taught tutorials and even a bit of dreaming it somehow became a reality.

You'd be amazed how much running a website opens doors for you. I ended up getting a featured role in a movie called "The truth about Queen Raquella" about one of my models from the Philippines traveling to Paris, the part being played by a real actor but loosely based on me. Even people like Saigon or Foxy Angel or the webmasters from other websites never would have even replied to my letters had I just been a customer; but when you say "this is my website, wanna work together?" they always do. I remember one very large and famous porno operation out of the Valley contacting me in early 2005; they had seen AsianTS was ranked very high on the Alexa.com rankings, a great website which tracks internet traffic and ranks all sites on the web and gives them a most-hit number - Google and Facebook are always number 1 and number 2 - and we were under number 5000 at the time, extraordinary for any porno site, forget one in a small sub-niche like ours; which meant that Mike and the other advertisers and affiliates were doing their jobs properly.

These guys produced some of the best DVD's in the business; 3 or 4 glossy, well-produced straight and lesbian titles every week of 6 very hardcore scenes with some of the hottest L.A. and Vegas porno sluts, for which they would charge 20 bucks a title and they sold a ton of them all over the world. One of the co-owners contacted me through the site and asked if I would stop by for a chat the next time I was in L.A. and I agreed. The meeting was absolutely hilarious, in my mind; here is this guy from Boston, a nobody who talked with a funny accent and who just 2 years earlier was still a 9-5 schmuck, walking in with his young and brash L.A.-based webmaster, driving over to this huge warehouse/studio in Burbank; 2 guys who never would have even gotten the time of day from people like this in 2002. We show up there in shorts and tank tops, certainly high as a kite on some awesome Calfornia bud, and these guys have this big whiteboard sign with our names on it in the reception area and they had like 8 or 10 employees from accountants to warehouse workers and photographers/videographers lined up to meet us and shake our hands, and of course the 2 owners in suits who were millionaires with their black Escalades with the 22-inch rims out front in their VIP parking spots; and yet here they were kissing OUR asses, just dying to pick our brains about how the hell we were doing so well on the internet when they could hardly make a dent. It was surreal to say the least.

2 hours of this went on - "may we get you another Perrier, are you comfortable?" - while Andy and I could barely contain our laughter, them telling us the internet was probably just a fad and that we should really get into DVD distribution with them, while we just basically sat there thinking the complete opposite, that theirs was a dying market; we knew what we were making and we sure as fuck weren't giving away our secrets to them, which was basically a lot of fucking hard work and hours upon hours spent on the 'net spamming and sending out galleries to as many places on the web for eyeballs to see and paying the proper people to do that. These guys took us back into the warehouse, there must have been 50,000 DVD's back there, and told us to take whatever we wanted - Andy was much more into that shit than I was and filled his backpack with a few hundred bucks worth of dirty, erotic XXX porn; the owner even gave him the cell numbers of a few of the skanks featured on the box covers and he was in heaven.

On the drive back to his apartment in Hollywood we were laughing and saying "WTF was that all about?" and we both agreed right then and there that we were in the proper business after all; despite the fact we weren't wealthy like these guys, we also had no warehouse to maintain, no secretaries and accountants, no employees or payrolls, no 50/50 split or "partners" to answer to, we worked whenever we wanted to, and most importantly we had no physical product; we just charged credit cards and sold a product over a broadband line, no boxing, no shipping, no covers to make, no returns or complaints; no BULLSHIT -- just 2 guys working from their small apartments on opposite coasts and making a much larger dent in the techie part of the trade than this company could ever dream of despite their 10 years in the business.

I suppose this story all culminates in the Extortion story if you had the time to follow that, which happened just a few short years later in May of 2006. And by then I was admittedly already burned out, jaded, completely worn out from taking well over 200,000 photos of more than 500 shemale models in 5 countries, dealing with every conceivable type of prostitute, drug dealer or user, pimps, con-men, post-ops, pre-ops, thieves, lowlifes, beggars, addicts, scumbag ex-pats and other losers scraping at the very bottom of society's shit heap. I seriously worked very hard in those early days, with many marathon days holding down TWO jobs, and lots of stress due to the type of business I was in and dealing with the types of people mentioned above. But absolutely no regrets; by 2010 I was completely out of the business, I had sold off my majority stake in the site I had started, and by that time was living on a gorgeous tropical island in southeast Asia, my name and face totally forgotten in the Bangkok scene just as I had wanted. Not quite 50 yet, and certainly very far from 'rich' but comfortable enough, I suppose I am too young to be retired for good but fortunately I have options for myself now and will never have to go back to that old 9-5 lifestyle I lead in the 90's. I took a chance, a true gamble, it worked out against all possible odds, and totally changed the course of my life in the meantime. What a great ride these past 10 years have been; to be sure, everything you've read here has been true and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did telling it.

[SiamSam]

Congratulations mon ami. Truly remarkable.

[Guest Fiedollah]

Fantastic.

I need to get out of my job and start living.

Fie

[JaiDee]

heh heh, indeed you do Fie! I wish I had some idea's for you to get yer arse over here full-time, but the one idea I did come up with has already been used and abused

Cheers to you also Sam, I told you a bit about this story during our frequent and always-stimulating chats over all those smoked meat or Thai dinners in Montreal this past summer, but it takes a long-form telling of it like this to truly get just how it was all done. Happy you liked it, that means a lot to me and I hope we can cross paths again soon.

[rxpharm]

A great story JD, timing is everything, but also having the determination to seize the moment. Thanks for sharing, we don't often get a glimpse into how things progress and develop!

[dixon cox]

Gazing back at those webpages and images through the links you provided passed a very pleasant time reminiscing of years and models gone by and the progress of your site. Altogether another very interesting and enjoyable read indeed, as always JD.

"I tips me hat to you,Sir" ~ You legend!

[bumblebee]

You'd be amazed how much running a website opens doors for you. I ended up getting a featured role in a movie called "The truth about Queen Raquella" about one of my models from the Philippines traveling to Paris, the part being played by a real actor but loosely based on me.

Funny that you mention teaching as one of the options for staying long therm in Los. I was chatting to Minerva/Raquella just last week and she is actually in Bkk right now looking for teaching work, small world. She is on this forum also, always a valuable poster in the old days of ToonedUp and TLF, maybe she will start contributing sometime here..

This has been a really inspiring tale of determination, good timing and good fortune, thanks for sharing it with the guys here.

[JaiDee]

ahhhhh, you British and Irish guys are way too kind, but Thanks a lot and I'm very happy you stuck with the whole story........I know the way I tell my tales tends to be long-winded, but they always come to a point; eventually!

Raquella - if you are reading here or if BB can somehow put us in touch it would be great to see you again; believe it or not 8 whole years have passed since I met the most fashionable ladyboy in Cebu.

[JaiDee]

A great story JD, timing is everything, but also having the determination to seize the moment. Thanks for sharing, we don't often get a glimpse into how things progress and develop!

Thanks RX, you have been a true gentleman over the years.......same as the extortion story I had told bits and pieces of this one at various stages on the old TLF forums, but it took a while [and some serious boredom while working with the DR's here in Thailand!] to get it all down in one places; happy you liked it.

[Jimslim]

Surely a fascinating story as I said at the start I doubt this could happen again in this era .

What is evident is that it took a massive amount of enthusiasm and hard work on your part along with a fair element of luck but most importantly the guts to go and do it .

You came out the other side maybe a little more cynical which is inevitable , but you remained a nice guy in what is I imagine an industry with very few good guys around .

I'll put it down to the Irish genes

[JaiDee]

You came out the other side maybe a little more cynical which is inevitable , but you remained a nice guy in what is I imagine an industry with very few good guys around .

I'll put it down to the Irish genes

Thanks Mister Slim! Indeed there are a lot of weasels and lowlifes in the business, and it's oftentimes hard to not get sucked into that vortex. The extortion story was a good example of some shady no -good MFER's who just wanted to cut corners and there were a lot of people like that; by the time that nonsense all ended in late 2006 I was for all intents and purposes already out of the game, just doing customer service and rarely if ever meeting new people. Hard to believe that in only 5 or 6 years someone could become so burned out, but it's a rough business.

You are correct that a story like this could never happen now; in fact porn-for-money is a dying industry, certainly in DVD sales but even on the internet, where sales have gone nowhere but DOWN since 2008. Check this article a friend sent me just yesterday, it details it's demise pretty well;

http://www.theage.co...0606-1zv8h.html