Be a Pirate, they say

How selling websites in Australia got me arrested and deported

(picture: playing football in Indonesia after leaving Australia)

Being part of an accelerator makes me often feel like I’m back at school, even though I graduated long time ago.
I know it sounds arrogant, but I hope I am not.

During our second Design Thinking session at Eleven last week we were told to “be a pirate”.

This session reminded me that I have a first-hand story of being a pirate…
It does not always end as expected:

Being a Pirate in Australia

We had been traveling for about 4 months, money was going down quickly so we decided to look for a job.
Backpackers in Australia usually do fruit picking.
It’s a job for slaves but (hey) backpackers are cheaper, as you don’t need to feed and host them.

There were about 6 of us crammed in a van, we visited a few farms along the coast.
All the farms needed help but since we had tourist visas (working wasn’t permitted) the farmers did not want to risk heavy fines for being caught employing illegal labor.
So, farm after farm, rejection after rejection, we travelled north and reached Cairns.
Money was going down fast and some people were running out of it completely.

And Cairns was expensive.
We spent the whole day looking for the cheapest backpackers hostel in town until we ended up at a rathole managed by a constantly stoned Australian guy.
Rooms were filthy and bathrooms full of cockroaches but it had a beautiful wooden terrace.

We basically took over the place and made it our home.

As it turns out, the cockroaches were often cleaner and civilized than my fellow travelers, people from Italy, UK, Holland and Mexico.

Right…Mexico.
So, there was mexican this guy I had met in Sydney a couple of months before: his name was Manu (actually not but he was given this name a few weeks earlier in Fiji by some fake guru I think).
He was a former timeshare pusher from Cancun .
In Sydney we had unloaded a whole lorry of office supplies together for a few bucks and a few beers.
That day we had decided this line of work was too much for too little money.

Back to the present — sitting on that beautiful terrace in Cairn together, Manu looked up and said:

• “Cabron, fuck the fruit picking” he said, “let’s sell websites”.
• “websites?”.
• “yes, you can do websites and you have a digital camera, so let’s sell websites. Everybody wants a website.”

It was 2000. Everybody wanted a website. Nobody had one.
Nobody had a digital camera neither.

Now, “do websites” meant I had a basic knowledge of FrontPage Express, a WYSIalmostWYG horrible Microsoft program I had learned to play with in Sydney.

I had a blog and in Sydney I spent many hours trying to understand how to publish content on the web in a“pay 2 dollars for unlimited internet” place in King’s Cross (you were not allowed to go to toilet or you had to pay again the 2 AU$. Imagine the faces of people in that room).
Html? I had no idea there was HTML behind it.
But I published stuff so I was a web designer for the world.

So, here I am , Luca the Italian web designer who doesn’t know what HTML is…Good start!

I didn’t have a laptop either. Even better.

Our only assets were: a camera, knowledge of web design and sales skills.

So, we prepared an A4 flyer that said something like “a website for 99 AU$, including pictures” and started going around the city.

Now, Manu is probably the best salesman I have ever met.
If you ask him why, he’ll tell you something about his poor childhood and the desire to come out of it. It’s cheesy mexican telenovela stuff, so don’t ask him, he gets nostalgic.

We sold websites to a bakery, a diamond shop, a funky restaurant (which partially paid in marijuana), a travel agency, a didgeridoo shop and so on.
Manu was going out, I was in some internet cafe “coding” the websites.
It worked smoothly. Money came in, I bought my first laptop and we doubled the efficiency. More money came in and it started feeling like we had a real thing going on.

It was of course completely illegal: working on a tourist visa and not paying taxes.

After a couple of months I lost my co-founder: Manu got the travel itch again, and was off to Bali.
I decided to stay, make a little bit more money for the road and then leave.

So, I hired another salesman, a guy from Rome, named Federico.
We printed a few more A4s and he went around distributing them.

Then, one day when I was about to head out, a lady calls:

• “Hello, I am from a bar XYZ at Lake street, I need a website”
• “I am sorry but I am leaving” (I had decided to continue my trip).
• “Ok, good bye”

Then I realized my next stop was Cape Tribulation, which meant I had to go back to Cairns anyway, so I called her:

• “Hello, this is Luca, for the website”
• “What website?”
• “The bar, remember? You called me. I can do your website now.”
• “Ah right, ok, let’s meet on Monday at 10 am”

Strange…I thought. Seems she had a short memory.

So I go to the meeting and the lady at the bar shows me a table where another lady is sitting.
I go to her, we shake hands, I open my laptop and she starts asking questions like:

• “how many websites have you done? How do they pay you? How much did you sell?”.

I answer politely and then I ask:

• “shall we talk about your website?”.

She stops for a second, reaches in her pocket and says:

• “I have bad news for you Luca”

and she shows me a badge from immigration.

In that moment a body guard approaches the table and crosses his arms, very close to me:

• “You are under arrest for working without a Visa, please follow us”.

So I followed them to the Immigration office, a big building 50 meters from the bar.
Federico had managed to leave our leaflet at a local bar where the immigration officers went to have their coffee! How smart ☺

I spent the next few hours answering questions and being tricked into signing something I was too tired to read.
Basically I signed a declaration (written by them) that my plan was to stay forever in Australia by going once in a while to New Zealand.
My actual plan was to travel for a couple of months more and leave, but they needed to seal the case, I guess.

Oh, and by the way — i neglected to mention that during this time I was with my Japanese girlfriend. She was crying all the time. To calm her down I told her: “don’t worry Shizu, we’re going to Bali now, there’s no need to cry.”

So, since I was cooperative with the immigration officials (read: I did not really care about being Australia anymore), they gave me five weeks to go back to Sydney, fix and sell the van, then leave.

And so we did.
Five weeks later we were in Bali, living like kings.

In hindsight, that saved us from 2 more months of traveling in bad weather (rainy season was coming) and let us instead discover the joys of Asia.

As Manu had written to me from Bali a few days earlier:

I just got back from the interior, and is sooo beautiful.
Kuta is a shithole, just like any other shit hole in the world, but Bali is all around it!
Well cabron, leave boring and expensive Australia and come to Bali.
I have spent an average of 5 usd a day, hotel, my own room with bathroom and swimming pool, and all the food I can eat.
A big fat burger is only 1.50! And that is expensive.
I am going to rent a motorcycle for about 50 dlls…for one month!
Really, you should consider coming to Indonesia.
I found a Guy I met in Fiji, and traveled with him around Bali, and he says that Australia was OK, but he wouldn’t bother going there again, and I have to agree.
If I had known how was going to be here, probably I would have been in Oz for only a month, and come here for a long time.
With the money you spend there in one week, you can easily stay here for a month or even more.
Last night I stayed in a House in the mountain, a beautiful room with a huge bathroom, close to the most amazing coast I have ever seen, for 3dlls, with breakfast included.

See? He easily sold me on the wonders of Bali… ☺

So, I was a pirate, I was caught, it was scary for a while locked in an interrogation room being asked a hundred endless questions but it actually ended better than I could have ever planned myself.

If, when Manu first proposed to sell websites, I had replied: “no, it’s illegal, I will go back to Italy to work” there would have been no Bali, no Asia, no wanting to go back to Asia, no online business, no 10 years of travels around the world.

And, the most precious thing, no such a story to tell.

Because at the end, all you’ve got left and all you can leave behind it’s a story.