TGP Tutorials & Articles

TGPFactory.com: A (Not-So) Brief History

by Patrick Moore, September 26, 2006

In November 2003, upon turning 18, I made my grand entrance to the adult industry when a friend referred me to GoFuckYourself.com and Epic Cash's new "Bring Your Own Tour" concept. I had already been designing mainstream web sites for years, but the lucrative potential earnings from the BYOT concept lured me away from the mainstream world almost immediately. After several failed attempts at paysite tours, I began advertising my design services on the forums and accepting free or low-paid jobs in order to build a portfolio and client base.

I built up both and created DynamiXXX Adult Design, offering gallery templates, reciprocal buttons, logos, and of course – TGPs. Still in high school, I devoted much of my free time to design jobs. I stayed up until all hours of the night designing, skipping my morning classes the following day. The Paypal payments from design work were doubling if not tripling my earnings as a cook and waiter.

Several months later I realized TGP design was where I excelled, and focused my attention away from DynamiXXX and onto developing a second design firm, one offering just TGPs. By graduation in 2004 I had developed TGP Factory and was building an increasing number of TGP sites every week. I brought on long-time friend Mike Carlsen, who handled almost all customer contact for me. Business boomed that summer, and by the time I started college in fall I had quit my job and was designing full time. I redesigned TGPFactory.com, upped my prices, and added basic installation services.

But the money got the best of me and I quickly spent what I earned, ignoring bills and eventually calls from creditors. I had maxed out four credit cards and defaulted on an auto loan, all the while filling my dorm room with new purchases. I designed more and more, trying to get out of debt, and as I did so I skipped more and more of my classes. I completed the semester with no car, a zero-balance bank account, and a 1.5 GPA. And I was still indebted to four credit cards.

By the end of the school year I had failed 5 out of 8 classes due to attendance and was kicked out of college with a 1.05 GPA. With no day job, and school loans to start paying back in addition to my credit cards and bills, I needed money – lots of it, and quickly. I came up with a brilliant (or so I thought) idea: design as much as I could for ten days and pay off all my debt. I setup a special at DynamiXXX.com entitled "100 Projects in 10 Days." My goal was to design 100 projects at $20 a pop, building ten a day for ten days, for a total of $2,000 – enough to pay off my credit cards and other bills. Then I could focus on my regular design projects and work my way completely out of debt.

What a pipe dream. The special caught on, and I soon had most of my spots filled. I was ready to start production and make my $2,000. Then everything around me began to crumble. I was forced to move which cut out Days 1 through 3. When I had finally moved in, the internet still wasn't activated. This meant I would have to check my daily work in the morning from an internet cafe, design all day with no client contact, and return in the evening to deliver the projects. This proved a logistical nightmare, and days passed without completed projects. Days turned into weeks and as I lost ambition, people lost faith – and rightfully so. I was flamed on the boards and finding regular projects was nearly impossible with my tarnished reputation.

I finally got back on track and completed or refunded every project in the special. I worked to repair my reputation and finally began picking up new design jobs. I made several invaluable friendships with people in high places, and met more and more repeat clients. I redesigned TGPFactory.com once again, offered more and more services, and began writing tutorials to help new webmasters start TGPs.

Fall of 2005 brought the by-then stagnant Mike into town for school and by winter the two of us had rekindled our business partnership. We created our Blowout Package, a design option that offered installation services to clients and meant an extra hundred bucks in our pockets. We were selling 40 to 50 sites a month, working every spare minute we had and grossing nearly $1,000 a week. Business increased steadily into 2006, and we could barely keep up. New services and design options were added at an exponential rate, and our backlog was growing almost as quickly.

By the time we were building 2-3 sites a day, Mike had come up with a plan. I should code a program in Visual Basic to do all of the work for us. While far-fetched, it was actually an ingenious idea. Rather than do all of the work for us, it could at least do the menial tasks. I wrote a program we called AutoTGP that would code an entire site based solely on the images in a folder. The program can name the site, prepare a bookmark script, and write all necessary HTML code with the click of a button. Furthermore it analyzes each image to identify color and size properties, and even computes text and link colors and prepares a CSS stylesheet.

This technological advancement made it possible for us to cut down production time by more than fifty percent. Building a site meant slicing images and clicking a button, removing the grueling process of writing HTML code. We were able to build two sites in under 60 minutes rather than two or three hours. Not only did this allow us to increase our workload, but it meant spending less time working each day and at the same time fulfilling more orders.

Most recently we've added a massive FAQ section to our site, hired an illustrator to provide cartoon mascots, and are continuing to beef up our services. We are writing tutorials for TGP webmasters at a weekly rate.

More to come soon...