But here’s the thing: “It was the best investment of my life,” says the buyer, Peter Boychuk, who very much doesn’t hate himself. More than a year later, the site has done sales “in the high six figures.” And he beat the odds by thinking differently -- not as the owner of a viral site, but as the owner of a startup with lots of potential.
Boychuk is 28 and lives in a tiny Georgia town called Buford. He dropped out of college six years ago, then set up a business in his house selling car parts online. Now he has a 12,000-square-foot warehouse and three to five employees. He follows his gut. When he saw Ship Your Enemies Glitter, he thought: If people are buying this, what else might they buy? So once the site became his, he rounded up his auto-parts employees to brainstorm new gags. “They thought I was crazy,” he says.
The team started experimenting -- adding a cupcake that’s actually horse manure covered in glitter ($15), a teddy bear that won’t stop singing ($20) and a spin-off site called Ship Your Friends Bacon (which is profitable, but Boychuk says perishables are way more time-consuming than he expected). Soon creators of other gags started asking him for partnerships. “And I kind of laugh,” Boychuk says, because his site draws way more traffic than theirs do. So he instead offers to buy their stuff wholesale and sell it himself.
