Three years ago, Fyk was bankrupt, in jail, and borderline suicidal. He used Facebook to turn his life around.
Fyk's financial troubles dated to 2005. Fyk had been working in real estate. As the months went by, the market turned. Eventually, it caused him to go into a "financial tailspin," as he puts it. With a wife and a young child to support, he scrambled to find a new way to generate income.Some friends approached him about starting a website, and he snatched up the domain WTFMagazine.com. The acronym, they decided, would stand not for What The F— but Where's The Fun, and the site would be a home for original, entertaining content. Fyk likens his business to College Humor."[Our team] was running with no money," Fyk said of the digital business' early days. "We were doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing, putting content together and starting to pick up steam, but I had no idea what I was doing."
Fyk formed an LLC on Sept. 10, 2010, and launched the website in January 2011. "It was just fun, goofy, stupid stuff," he said. His Facebook pages and websites publish the same kind of content today.Shortly after WTF launched, Fyk found himself behind bars. He'd driven to Baltimore to interview an American stunt group, the Adrenaline Crew, for a story. They were all hanging out in a parking lot, about to drive to the interview location, when a drunken brawl broke out. Startled, Fyk said, he stood off to the side and began filming the fight on his smartphone. When things got serious, he stopped recording and tried to break up the fight. Instead, he got blamed for allegedly planning the altercation and found himself charged with attempted murder.Facebook had launched Pages for businesses in 2007, but they were slow to take off. Even by 2011, no one was quite sure of their value. Fyk saw an opportunity, though.
At first, he tried to build on just one Facebook page, representing WTF Magazine. Before long, he realized that pages even totally unrelated to his website could be useful as well.Fyk set out to build and maintain as many pages of all varieties as he possibly could. His wife thought he was crazy. "I'm sitting there when we couldn't put food on the table spending all this time on Facebook pages," he said. "I'm telling her, 'Look, I know the distribution is going to be valuable.'"
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