People tell you that starting a business isn't easy-and then they sort of chuckle. So yeah, I expected my share of pitfalls, disappointments, and uphill battles on the way to my dream of being my own boss, running a successful company, and printing "CEO" on my business card in slightly raised type. What I didn't count on was that my quest would lead me to the "offices" of an escort service outside of Detroit with $1,000 cash stuffed in my sock and my little brother ready to call the cops if he didn't hear from me in 30 minutes. This is the dark underbelly of the start-up tale, the part they don't tell you about in the glossy magazine cover stories about smiling, happy e-millionaires.
I got the idea for changeaddress.com a little more than a year ago. I was in Munich on a business trip, walking through town after a meeting, when my mind somehow drifted to the subject of frequent-flier miles. I had just moved and I hadn't notified the airline, an oversight that, it occurred to me, could turn out to be a pain in the ass when I tried to collect the miles for the trip. The idea came to me that instant: Start a business that notifies airlines, magazines, credit card companies, schools, whatever, that you've moved, so you don't have to fill out 100 little cards by hand and mail them to 100 different places. I found an Internet café and ducked inside to check if anyone had beaten me to the punch. I did a quick search and didn't come across a single competitor.
Right off, I knew I had to get a good domain name. The perfect domain name. Everyone knows that in e-business-more than in bricks-and-mortar commerce, even-the right name is critical. Snag it, and you can pretty much start picking out what color Z-3 you want. But in the land-office rush for Web site addresses, good domain names have become a scarce resource. In the first 90 days of this year, 5 million URLs were registered. That's more than 55,500 a day. Basically, they're disappearing as quickly as people can dream them up.
When I got back to the States, I checked out the domain-name registries and, sure enough, the name I wanted-changeaddress.com-was taken. To be safe, I immediately bought changeaddress.net and the awkwardly plural changeaddresses.com, but neither was exactly right. And if you're going to ditch a good gig at a strategic consulting firm and stake your future on a dot-com start-up-precisely what I was prepared to do-you want everything from the name on down to be spot on. It had to be changeaddress.com.
On an online registry, I found out that the guy who owned changeaddress.com was one Thomas Byxbe and that he lived outside of Detroit. It turned out that he was a domain-name squatter-one of those people who buy names with no intention of using them, then sell the names for profit to people who want to build businesses around them. (Byxbe liked to tell people that at one point he was the fifth-largest owner of domain names in the country.)
I called him immediately, and after some haggling, he offered to sell me changeaddress.com for $3,000-two grand up front and the other thousand once he signed over the documentation, in front of a notary, within 48 hours of the initial payment.
Simple, right?
Considering the cutthroat market for URLs, $3,000 seemed like a good deal. I sent Byxbe the two grand, and my problem appeared to be all but solved. The only hitch was that I had to route the money to his former business partner because, Byxbe said, he didn't have a bank account himself. I suppose that should have been my first hint of trouble, but at the time I was just thinking about getting the name in the bag. Byxbe received the money on October 29, and should have signed the name over to me by the 31st. He did not. That's when the fun began.
Byxbe and I had been communicating regularly up to that point, but suddenly he started ducking my calls and e-mails. Then, on December 1-a month after I'd sent him the $2,000-all communication ceased. Good night. Game over. Thanks for playing. Now the guy had my domain name and my money, and I was pissed. Some small-time scammer was standing between me and my dream. I was doubly angry because everything else was going smoothly; I had written a business plan, and my funding prospects looked good. Things were going so well, in fact, that I'd quit my job to devote myself to changeaddress.com. Which meant I now had plenty of time to track down Thomas Byxbe.
After several fruitless weeks of trying to contact Byxbe, I decided to get on a plane to Detroit and hunt him down in person. I bought a cheap round-trip ticket and was in the air within two hours. Somewhere over South Carolina, it occurred to me that this mission might be a tad extreme. But I justified it in the name of commitment. I was being forced to release my inner start-up warrior. This is how great businesses are built, I told myself: Solve the problem. Yourself. Now. Besides, I restricted my quest to two days, scheduling my return flight to Atlanta for roughly 48 hours after I arrived in Detroit. I figured my chances of coming home with my domain name were no better than 10 percent, but I had to see what I could do.
Late that afternoon, I found myself in front of a small house in suburban Detroit owned by Thomas Byxbe. (Before I left home, I had collected three addresses for him-two from the domain-name registry and one from an online people-finder called Anywho.com.) With a cold, steady drizzle soaking the quiet neighborhood, I now stood on the doorstep of address number one.
A man answered the door, looked me up and down, and we quickly established that he was-the wrong Tom Byxbe.
"I've had more people than I can remember show up here saying I owe them money, and I keep telling everyone I'm the wrong guy," the wrong Tom Byxbe told me. "But good luck."
Next, I stopped off at a local police station to see if anybody knew my Byxbe, but no one did. As I drove away, the night rain started falling harder, and I was hungry. For the first time I started to worry. I was only a few hours into my quest, but I'd come up with precisely nothing.
Since it was beginning to get late, and because I needed a place to sleep, I again shifted into obsessed-start-up-warrior mode. Instead of splurging on a cheap motel (most dot-coms are poor before they're rich), I decided to spend the night in my rented Camry in the relative safety of a police station parking lot. I don't remember dreaming of anything.
It was still drizzling the next morning. I worked the kinks out of my neck, smoothed the wrinkles from the same pair of khakis I wore for the entire trip, and set out for the next address on my list. It turned out to be a dumpy, single-story house with an overgrown lawn. After speaking to a neighbor, I believed I had the right Tom Byxbe. The neighbor had heard that Byxbe had caused about $10,000 worth of damage to the place and had stuck the landlord with the bill. Byxbe, he said, was eventually evicted. The other address was for an apartment building, from which, I later found out, Byxbe had also been tossed.
So there I was, sitting in a rented car outside of Detroit in the pouring rain, and I didn't have squat. I had a little more than 24 hours before my flight home, and I had-I had the name of Byxbe's former business partner, Frank Winthrop,* to whom I had routed the initial $2,000! I called information, got his address, and was at his house in an hour.
Winthrop wasn't around, but I told his wife I was looking for Byxbe, and she promised to have her husband call me on my cell phone as soon as he got home.
"One thing you should know," she said. "I think Tom's been pretty down on his luck lately, since he got arrested."
"Arrested?"
"Yeah, he was driving with a suspended license, switching license plates, and carrying a concealed weapon."
Arrested? A weapon? This was definitely not in the business plan. Was I risking my life for a 13-character domain name? The whole escapade started to seem unreal-which, thinking back, was probably the only thing that allowed me to push on.
Several hours later I was driving around, regretting the Whopper I'd eaten for dinner, when my phone rang. It was Winthrop. The best he could do was an address for Byxbe's nephew who lived nearby.
I woke up the next morning to still more rain and headed to the suburban office of Byxbe's nephew, a man named Nathan Tompkins.* He was a cartoon of a computer guy-geeky, disheveled, and a little flaky, holed up in a drab office filled with mismatched furniture. Tompkins told me Byxbe was staying with a couple of women who were running an escort service (add that to his list of charms) out of an apartment building about 30 miles away, but he didn't know exactly where. Of course. But he said he might have Byxbe's number somewhere. After some mumbling and stumbling, he pulled a scrap of paper out of his briefcase, picked up the phone, and dialed.
"Tom," he said. "I've got Graham Balch here."
I knew I had to control my anger when I got on the phone (I kept reminding myself: concealed weapon, concealed weapon). But when Byxbe began to speak, my blood pressure jumped. There was no hint of guilt, no remorse at all in his voice. I bit my lip.
"Why don't we make this simple and I'll come to you," I suggested. Fine, he said, but he needed to get a photo ID in order to go before a notary. He asked if I would call the county probation office, track down his probation officer, and help him get an ID. Start-up warrior agreed. I made the call.
"If I brought you Tom Byxbe," I asked his probation officer, "could you give him a picture ID?"
"If you bring me Tom Byxbe, I'll have him arrested. We've been looking for him for two months. Do you know where he is? Because if you do and you don't tell me, I'll have you arrested."
"No, ma'am, I don't," I stammered. Fortunately, she believed me. Unfortunately, this was small consolation.
I hung up the phone. Tompkins mentioned that there was a notary in the office upstairs from his. I ran up and asked her about the photo ID requirement. No such requirement, she said.
I didn't know if Byxbe was stalling or trying to use me to get him an ID. I didn't care. All I knew was that I had to get Byxbe-wherever he was-in front of a notary before the workday ended. I bolted downstairs, got Byxbe's number from Tompkins, and left Byxbe a message to call me on my cell phone. It was 1:45 p.m.
At about four o'clock, Byxbe called and gave me directions to the apartment where he was staying. This was it. I jumped in the car and, keeping one hand on the wheel, stuffed the $1,000-10 hundreds-in my sock. Then I called my younger brother, in Georgia, to give him phone numbers for Tompkins's office and the local police, and the directions to Byxbe's place.
Half an hour later, I pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex-two stories of standard suburban white brick with mangy shrubs around the foundation. I called Byxbe and he said he'd be right down. After 20 minutes, a tall, thin man with thick-rimmed glasses and a tangle of brown hair shuffled out. I wanted to scream, "You bastard! I had to fly up here, freeze my ass off sleeping in my car, drive all over Detroit-" But of course I didn't. Making nice was the best hope I had for getting him in front of a notary on time. That, and I didn't know whether he had a gun. We shook hands, and he got in the car.
I blew through Detroit rush hour traffic, trying to act calm but silently panicking. What if I got pulled over with a wanted fugitive in my car? What if we didn't find a notary by five? What if Byxbe changed his mind and slipped away? The cash in my sock was soggy from sweat.
Time check: two minutes after five. We found a few banks and law firms nearby that would normally employ a notary, but they were already closed. My last chance was the woman upstairs from Tompkins's office.
I screeched into the parking lot and rushed Byxbe out of the car and up the stairs. The woman was still at work-a small miracle. We sat down, exchanged formalities, and I watched in disbelief as Byxbe actually signed the papers. As he did, I removed the wad of bills from my sock and slipped them into my pocket to dry a little. When I handed over the money, the guy actually gave me $100 "for my troubles." As we said our good-byes, I told him to hit the Web site the next time he moved.
Leaving Byxbe with his nephew, I raced to the airport, dropped off the car, and made it to the boarding area just minutes before my flight took off. On the plane, I rubbed the stubble on my face, and sank into my seat.
