The American Dream

1. Graduate high school
2. Go to college
3. Start your career
4. Get married
5. Buy a house
6. Have children
7. Watch them grow up
8. Send them off to college, then to start their careers
9. Become a grandparent
10. Retire, travel, and enjoy life

My American Dream

1. Graduate high school/Start your career
2. Graduate university as soon as possible/travel a third of each year/continue developing your career
3. Travel full-time/Enjoy Life/Make tons of Money

The rest is subject to change:

4. Retire/Get married/Have children
5. Travel with wife and children
6. Send them off to college, then to start their careers
7. Become a grandparent

I wrote my first guest for TravelBlogs.com which you can find at TravelBlogs.com . For anyone interested in starting their own mobile business I suggest you check it out.

travelblogs

I was interviewed back in August about my work, travels, and plans for graduation back in August for an article to be written in my hometown paper.

Well, a few months ago they published the article on the front page of the weekly paper including to color photos of me with the Machu Picchu in the background and one in the mud volcano in Colombia (the photos only show in the print edition).

“Going into his final semester at college this fall, Jason Batansky isn’t worrying about landing that first big job, despite the struggling economy.

His goal at graduation: to be “location-independent and travel the world.”

That isn’t as footloose and fancy-free as it may sound.

A 2006 Lower Merion High School graduate, Batansky, 21, of Narberth, established his first online business while he was still in school.

Going on to the University of Pittsburgh, he created a second Web-based business while maintaining a schedule that will allow him to graduate a semester early.

And he’s already earned enough through those ventures to finance three summers of travel, and then some.”

You can click on this full blog post to read the rest of it.

Batansky, who grew up in Wynnewood, caught the travel bug early. When he was 10, his mom, Toby, took him and sister Ali on a trip to Tanzania. When he was 13, they visited Israel. “That got me really interested,” he said.

His venture into entrepreneurship started on a minor scale. During his junior year at Lower Merion, he had a friend who had sold some items on e-Bay. “I did some research and started small, selling things around the house that were no longer used,” he recalled.

Then, after some more research, he decided to set up an online store, selling “products that people had trouble finding.” By senior year he had the operation, at www.buysomethingawesome.com, up and running.

The “store” offered a “unique product line,” Batansky said, from T-shirts and backpacks and decorative neon signs to cologne, watches and sunglasses. Naturally enough most items were geared to a youth market.

“I would find people who liked to design funny images and sayings and offer to put them on T-shirts and give them a portion of the proceeds,” he said describing one approach.

One shirt, with the saying, “We do things my way or the Hemingway” and featuring an image of the writer, caught the attention of the Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Ill., and resulted in one of his biggest orders. For a reason that’s a mystery even to Batansky, it remains one of his biggest sellers.

As business grew, Batansky made connections with wholesalers and manufacturers, who would ship orders directly to buyers so that he didn’t have to keep a big inventory on hand. He added a popular clothing line, Alternative Apparel, to the store.

To build the venture, Batansky knew he had to establish a strong business identity and “brand” through a creative Web site design, company logo and advertising. He analyzed Web-site statistics to write effective ads and optimize search-engine recognition and Internet links, and bought advertising space on other Web sites and blogs.

To date he figures the site has had more than 2,200 customers worldwide. In its top sales month it reached $7,050 in revenue.

With the business running well, he set about realizing the second part of his dream. Always intrigued by South America, he wanted to travel there for the summer after his freshman year at Pitt. His mom and dad, Norman, were skeptical, but when he landed a marketing internship with a company in Ecuador they relented.

“I would work four days a week, and other days I traveled on my own to different places, beaches and jungles and different cities,” Batansky said. He found ways to keep expenses low by staying in hostels. “I met people from all over the world,” he said.

Meanwhile, he kept Buy Something Awesome running, and it was so successful that he was able to fund trips to the Galapagos Islands and Colombia, a country he “fell in love with.” “I’ve been going back ever since,” he said.

At Pitt, Batansky is majoring in cultural anthropology and communications. While there, he has interned with a Small Business Administration center in Pittsburgh, where he has had the opportunity to “sit in on meetings and work on writing marketing plans and business plans.”

During his sophomore year, he needed to prepare a résumé. “I went to the advising department and got a basic critique, then started doing some research on my own until I got to the point I was comfortable with it.”

Before he knew it, Batansky said, he was helping friends with their résumés, and again, he thought, “Why not create a business?”

The result was his second online venture. Customers can get basic or more extensive help through the site. Batansky said he works with clients through an online questionnaire or phone consultations, crafting effective job descriptions, creating clear and eye-catching formats, making their writing spelling- and grammatical error-free — in short, finding ways to make their résumé stand out among a stack of applications.

While his clients at first were fellow college students, Batansky said he now works with people at different career levels “in all different industries” from film producers to engineers to information-technology and software-development professionals.

The beauty of both of his online businesses, he said, is that, thanks to the Internet, “there’s no reason why you can’t run them from anywhere in the world.”

And that is just what he has done each summer since freshman year, returning to Colombia and other parts of South America. He has traveled to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Machu Picchu in Peru, and this past January took a break from Pitt to enroll in classes at a university in Argentina, staying on through the spring and summer. He was home recently just long enough to get ready for his last semester in Pittsburgh.

When he started visiting South America, Batansky admits his Spanish was about at “beginner-intermediate level.” He now has a pretty good conversational grasp of the language, though he knew no Portuguese when he traveled to Brazil.

It’s never been a problem, he said. “People are usually very patient.”

Likewise he’s never been concerned about traveling on his own. That is, since one experience on his first trip, when he was out walking “on a deserted street at 1 a.m. — something you should never do” — and luckily escaped what was probably a robbery attempt. “When you’re traveling, you’re never alone unless you want to be,” Batansky said. He has often met other travelers, from many different countries, with whom he has traveled for “a day or two or a week,” to visit common destinations.

“Traveling is so much easier than people imagine, and so much cheaper, too,” he said.

When he graduates this winter, Batansky said his goal is to return to Colombia for perhaps six months. Later he’s thinking about visiting Israel again, and then maybe other parts of the Middle East or Asia, where he’d like to visit a friend in Bangladesh he made on an earlier trip.

To support him
self he plans to keep his online businesses running. He might expand them, from wherever in the world he may be, “but I’ve got lots of different ideas, too,” he said.

I will not just be traveling as i explore Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. I will continue operating my two e-commerce websites. I run two businesses that are the reason I can afford to do this. On the first website, which I started in high school, I sell a variety of products such as t-shirts, cologne, lighters, neon signs, etc. Fortunately, most products are shipped directly from the distributors and manufacturers. For the other products i create locally, my sister has volunteered to ship.

The other business is a career service specializing in writing resumes. This is where it gets interesting. I started this business last April. Since then, it has grown a lot and i have increased my prices more than 300%. If there is one thing that will let me support myself abroad in the future it will be with this business because all I need is an Internet connection and can earn money from people of developed countries while i live in a developing country.

Living abroad permanently is a dream of mine. A few months ago while lying in bed (the place where i think best), i thought about marketing my service to long term travelers. These are the people who take a gap-year or two to travel the world, returning with a big gap in their resume/C.V. I believe that by marketing my service to these traveler is a business niche that will allow my business to thrive.

I have since been working on putting my thoughts into action. Over the past few months I developed a professional e-commerce website where clients can purchase my services. I have slowly begun marketing it online. I also had business cards designed to distribute to potential customers as I travel. I am in the last phase of preparation now where I am developing an engaging postcard to distribute in hostels, language schools, tour agencies, etc. while I travel. The postcard design is almost complete and in the coming days I will be rushing to get these printed in time for my trip in 18 days.