***
my bitch is my money
money is my bitch
yeah that bitch treat me like a trick
she says without her I can't be rich
***
January 8th, '01
Twiggy's POV
After a day of going around town doing a few "aunties" some favors (you know, grocery shoppin' and shit), I made a quick stop to the music store on 134th and Lenox.
"Ayeee, my man! Twiggy baby, what it do, what it do?," Willis, the shop owner and my only business partner, said, pullin' me in for a hug after dappin' me up.
"Chillin'," I told him truthfully, "It's you we gotta be worried about, 'tcho old ass. You still seein' that doctor, right? Your meds up-to-date?"
"Man, chill out scrap. You know Sinéad keepin' me healthy."
"Aight, coo' coo'," I said. "So, what you got for me?," I asked.
"Look here homie," he said, rushing over to a box. "I finally got you the Beatles "1" you was beastin' about. I got R Kelly's "TP-2" dot some shit and some Limp Biscuit shit."
"That's wassup, man. You know that Beatles album boutta be my biggest hit. Kelly gon do good too, but ion know 'bout them Bizkit bitches."
"Ah, them white kids gon' love that shit, son," Willy waved me off. "But you know what else?," he asked me, raising an eyebrow.
"What?"
"I got some never released shit."
My ears perked up, "Go on."
While digging into the bottom of the box, he said, "You know how they be sendin' me shit to sell a month or two later? Well, I got that J. Lo chick's album. Should be out on February 10."
He handed me a fresh CD, with J. Lo on the jacket. "She don't look that good up close," Willy pointed out, nonchalantly.
"Nah, but that ass?"
"Oooh, si mami!," we laughed out loud, slappin' skin.
After settling down, I paid and thanked Willy for the albums and made my way home.
***
I lived in a condo right outside Central Park, on the north side. It ain't fancy or anything, but it was private, had parking and most importantly, I owned it after buying it with cash on the first day.
I drove into the sub level parking area and went up 10 sets of stairs before taking the elevator for the last 8 floors. With only so many hours during the day, a man's gotta try to keep in shape the best way he could.
Steppin' into my crib, I put some Hot Pockets in the microwave and checked my answering machine. Upon hearing Cam'ron, I turned it off.
Cam was my people, no doubt about it, but I ain't like the shit he pulled on that kid the other day. Not wanting to get into my feelings, I grabbed my Hot Pockets and started upstairs to my "office". Work would calm me down and make me some money.
When I was 17, I came across a truth. I didn't wanna go to college. It was something no one had ever pushed on me, so all my life I pushed it on myself. I worked my ass off in class, day in and day out, determined to get my high school diploma and find a scholarship that could get me some kinda ride to college.
Then, Cam'ron came to me wit some kinda business proposition. Some Ling Lings had put him onto movie and music piracy, so he came to me and suggested we do the same thing. "Issa big market for bootlegged shit, dawg," he'd said. "I know you good wit computers and you know that shit too."
He was right. After noticing how comfortable I was in front of a computer at 10 years old, a man named Eli had hired me to phish online.
Basically, I was sending multiple emails to people from different domains, promising them an easy way to attain financial wealth and bliss when all I was really doing was getting them to send their personal information through questionnaires, like their mother's maiden name, their address, and their socials. It was a lot of work and we got minimal returns but it was the only work I could get and I was good at it.
I was so good I created an email generator, a program that created 10 emails per second. That's 600 a minute. That's 360,000 emails an hour. Any given hour, about 250,000 of the emails were hit back with a response and in the end, about 100,000 of 'em gave their info.
We didn't always get their money; some of 'em realized what we were doing before it was too late and changed up their bank info, but we sold socials like nobody's business.
I stopped phishing when I was 16. I'd done my part and felt guilty that some of the people we scammed were black men and women, people tryna catch a break from a fucked up system. The guy I was working for, Eli, let me go and since then I hadn't scammed until Cam's proposal.
Accepting his deal, I uploaded music and movies into cheap CDs from the 99¢ store and Cam sold them around Harlem, in the train stations, and in and out of his house. Our secret sauce was selling never released shit.
Damn near everything in this world is made in China, so everytime a white corporate dude sent some shit for them to manufacture, the Chinese kept a piece of the future with them to sell as they saw fit. Some real OG shit, if you askin' me.
They sold us movies and songs that had dates set for months away, but we waited up until a week or two before release to start selling it around. It was a counterforensic measure that didn't pan out in the end, 'cuz we came this close to running into trouble with the Feds.
After that scare, we stopped our little hustle and Cam went back to pushin' drugs. I was 18 and officialy out the foster care system. I didn't wanna sell poison to my people, but knew I had to find a way to make money before desperation overruled my morals. So I went back to my what I knew best: the computer.
I stayed up for nights, tryna figure out where Cam and I went wrong. One night, it hit me that we were too personal with our customers. We came to them. They knew our faces and our names. If I could find a way to sell shit anonymously, I'd worry less about getting caught and more about the hustle.
I went online and opened up a domain, www.vibesload.com, where I'd sell music to a larger scope of people. The first few weeks went alright. After getting the word out around the hood, I sold about $50,000 worth of CDs the first year. It still felt too personal, having to go to their P.O boxes and it was time consuming.
So, I tried something new. Napster came along not too long after, but I knew in my gut I was onto something with my secret weapon.
I uploaded songs on my domain into files and gave the people who hit the website the option to download it. My money came in 3 ways: selling the songs to the users, creating a VIP VibesLoader membership that gave customer premium quality music and the option to buy in bundles, and lastly, running ads from local businesses.
Napster wasn't doing that, but my real magnum opus was my "music recommendation algorithm". In a manner of speaking, my algorithm could recommend a person to new songs they may want to buy. Someone who played Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kurupt all day might want to start buying Eminem's songs, so the algorithm recommended it to 'em.
It sells more music faster and pleases the clientele all the same, however; the bigger, more profitable picture was the data gathered by the algorithm. I hadn't put it to good use yet, but I knew that the day VibesLoad got caught, it'd be my ticket out of trouble.
In the early days, I tried to get Cam'ron on board with me but the early days made less money than his drug dealin' so he rejected it. I wasn't stressin', though.
VibesLoad's first year made a pathetic 50k. Fast forward 5 years and Vibesload was on it's way to hitting $1.8 million. The wild part was, outside of Harlem, no one knew me personally and outside the tri-state area, no one knew VibesLoad.
I was netting 30% this year, a solid 540k and I knew exactly what my next step was: selling VibesLoad's algorithm to a major tech company, namely, Apple. Cashing out on VibesLoad had always been my endgame, a way to run into a big chunk of cash to start up another company.
In this case, I was fulfilling my dream of starting a record label company, like Suge and Dre.