Asian-Filipino Millionaire: Ian Del Carmen

Rags to Riches internet business success story.

The internet has spawned its fair share of millionaires, and Ian Del Carmen, CEO of Fireball Planet (http://www.fireballplanet.com) can count himself amongst the rank of success stories. Ian learnt early on how to make money online and work from home and is now a bona fide internet business success!

From a broken family, Ian’s mother had to work as a street vendor just to buy him milk while they lived with his grandparents – moving on one occasion to avoid a typhoon! Ian was a dedicated student and studied hard to make the honor rolls, as he knew the value a good education would bring him later in life.

Ian’s first brush with a computer had him in awe as he asked a good friend “how the texts on the monitor got printed” as he thought bond paper had been held so close to a screen until the words got transferred there. This still embarrasses Ian until this day.

Ian worked hard to pay his own way through college, starting out at the local McDonalds restaurant, then branching out on his own into network marketing. Building up his skills and confidence, he had a limited success at starting his own line of clothing, however that was short lived due to a lack of working capital. Ian even worked as an actor for $4 per hour, which sparked his enthusiasm for writing for which he was paid handsomely at the time.

Life was progressing for Ian, and he was soon married to his lively wife Iza, and they had a baby boy Ruiz Christian together. After selling Caesar’s pizza coupons to supplement his scriptwriting wage, Ian landed one of only 40 spots in a nation-wide search for new TV writers. After training in the US, and being signed up by one of the networks, Ian’s biggest break came when he was asked to write, direct, and produce different segments for the local version of the reality show ’Big Brother’ where he was paid more than $600 a month as a writer-slash-segment director. At that time, $600 a month was enough for him and his family and he could afford to buy a big can of milk for his kid.

It was during his spare time when not writing for the networks that Ian would surf the net in the local internet café and discovered the ebook phenomenon. He realized he could package his own writing digitally and sell it online for a profit. Ian soon fell in love with Adobe.

With a new found enthusiasm, Ian bought a second-hand PC and started investing all his spare funds into duplicating his ebooks onto CDs for distribution in stores all around Manila. However, they were not the best sellers he had hoped for. The problem was the cost of duplication and distribution, and the fact that his market was limited. Ian applied himself to studying how the American’s distributed their ebooks, and soon realized that digital delivery was the way to go. So once an affordable internet connection became available, Ian signed up, got a free hosting account and listed his ebooks online.

It was around this time that Ian found out about resell rights, so he got an ebook package and used this to build his first email list. Once Paypal became available in the Philippines, Ian repackaged all his ebooks and priced them at $27 and made his first sale! With the future in sight and his aim to sell one $27 product a day, Ian registered www.IanDelCarmen.com to start branding himself online and stand out from the crowd.

Ian also learnt about affiliate marketing and membership sites. With his passion for mobile technology, he created his very first membership site supplying ebooks that are read on mobile devices. MobileEbooks.net was born. Subsequently, Ian launched over 20 membership sites and was then able to afford his very own laptop worth nearly $3000!

With his workload increasing at a greater rate than ever, Ian decided to hire a virtual assistant to help out. One night, a huge idea hit him. He thought of packaging all his 20+ membership sites to sell with resell rights. Merging two profitable business models, Ian had a feeling it would be a blast! This could be his first big ticket venture. Ian planned to sell the package for $197 to $297 per license.

The next day, he followed his gut feeling. He thought the big idea should be released as soon as possible. He started setting up everything that he would need and got the domain name MembershipWholesaler.com which was luckily available. There was no one doing what Ian had in mind at that time! Wholesaling membership sites were not yet saturated in the marketplace!

Being online for less than a year, Ian had managed to gain friends from the Internet business industry. So when he launched MembershipWholesaler.com, he had some affiliates who helped in getting the word out to the online buyers for 50% commissions.

In less than a week after the launch, the project was approaching the five figure mark. Ian had earned about $20,000! That’s ONE MILLION in Philippine pesos!

In less than a year, Ian had become an Internet millionaire!
Being sick and tired of forking out for cab fares all the time, Ian inquired from his bank how he could get an auto loan. There were a lot of requirements. So he decided to just get a Toyota Forunner and paid P1.4 Million or about $22,000.

Indeed… life is now good for Ian!

As Ian continued running his virtual empire, he thought he should formalize the business as a separate entity. Together with some friends and his wife, Ian established Fireball Planet Corporation and it was incorporated in May 2007.

As of this time of writing, Ian has lost count of how many websites he is running. The main site became FireballPlanet.com and some of his major sites include FireballBooks.com, FireballSoftware.com, FireballMultimedia.com, and his flagship membership sites FireballInternetMarketing.com and MembershipWholesaler.com. With almost 20 employees and more than 50,000 regular clients worldwide, FireballPlanet.com branches out in Singapore and China in April 2008 and has immediate plans to open in India, Canada, Australia, and Indonesia. Fireball planet is a true internet business success. Ian has also started venturing into outsourcing services to give jobs to talented Filipinos so they can make money online and work from home. Brace yourself for some more success stories and home business stories.

And this… is only the beginning…




Quoted from Ian Del Carmen;

Difficulty:
“Most people think that the Philippines is a place where a lot of scams take place online, so I had to overcome that by building good relationships with my clients.”

Opportunity:
“People go to the net to surf for whatever information they may need or look for certain talent or skills that they can use. If you can offer that, why not sell it online?”

Good advise from a man who struck gold in the virtual landscape.

Sources: WiredNews