My name is Craig Anthony Grant. I moved from Jamaica to USA in 1988. I was 14 and my mom bought me my first computer. It was a Commodore 64. Within 1 year I had a summer computer job making $15 per hour. All my life I have wanted to be in the entertainment business, and computers was my “back up plan”. After high school I was accepted to University of Central Florida to pursue a degree in computer science, but I decided not to go. I wanted to become a rap star or an actor. I spent about 5 years trying to break into the entertainment business. Those years were allot of fun, although I did not make it, I would not change anything.
July 1999 – Faced with the reality of going back to school I decided I would use my computer skills to make some $$. I broke up with my girlfriend at the time, and I got rid of ALL my “music business” friends. I locked myself in my mothers den for 5 months and only left to go work delivering pizza. I got into free stuff web sites and made a web site called free4women.com. Then I was making $$ online. I eventually built tshirtnews.com, refer 3 friends to join our newsletter and get a free t-shirt. I made over 3 million dollars in 1 year. I bought a condo for 1 million and spent the rest living life to the fullest. The tshirtnews.com newsletter grew to 6 million subscribers. When I started doing newsletters in June 2000, I could make $15,000 per month with 80,000 subscribers. The biggest month was $380,000 in July 2000 with 2.2 million subscribers. In 2001 many web sites started doing newsletters, but only for the $$, and SPAM was born.
February 2001 – We started VickysJokes.com to help build our subscriber list, it was one of several web sites I built to collect email addresses. In 2002 the SPAM war started, and our income was severely affected.
November 2002 – I convinced Vicky to start writing her life story in the VickysJokes newsletter to separate our newsletter. Our subscribers got very interested in our story, so we kept on with it.
January 2003 – Our newsletter generated only $80,000 this month, that was just enough to pay the bills. We had over 50 servers, web hosting contracts, and about 11 employees, plus the Miami Beach lifestyle. 1 year prior I was doing the same business by myself and only working about 3 days a week. Every week the war on SPAM and spammers would take more $$ out of our income. I had 2 new born babies, 2 women, our newsletter business was falling apart fast, and the war with Iraq was about to start. February 2003 we moved to Jamaica.