The Incredible Secret Money Machine is a book by Don Lancaster. It was the first business book I was ever exposed to and it probably gave me the business bug. My older brother was in high school, and probably on his third or fourth business at the time. I was a skinny kid into Dungeons and Dragons who dreamed of writing video games for a living. I came across a dog-eared copy of TISMM underneath my brothers home-made workbench in a pile of sawdust and solder drippings. I immediately started thinking "scungy" (a sniglet coined by Don Lancaster that means, roughly "inventive and frugal"). Somewhere along the way, we lose sight of the fact that we like to sit under homemade desks in piles of sawdust and lab scrapings reading unusual books, and start thinking that what we really want is a pile of money.
This is why I must go to superhappydevhouse X on Jun 2-4. I'll be there most of the weekend. I have been there before and it's a lot of fun. This time, the contest is irresistable. You have to build a money-machine. That is, a website that is fully automated and accepts paypal. Once you have that in place, you have to not touch it for a month. No email, no nuthin'. If your site is crap, it's crap. If it goes down, it goes down. At the end of a month, all the money goes into a pot and most of it gets donated to charity, or something like that. If you win, you get to be a winner for a day. Then everyone goes their seperate ways with their incredible not-so-secret money machines. Pretty neat, huh? I can't wait.
I also started a team. We've got a few people in it. We're going to try to find a lab bench to park our asses under and write a really unusual website. At least that's the plan.
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