The Geek Crusher home

It’s been ages since our last post. Here’s what we’ve been working on in all that time:

Punk baby clothes

Soon we will resume progress on the Crusher. Until then, buy some baby clothes.

According to the fortune cookie I got with my dinner last night, success is only a month away.

So who are we anyway?

I’m Andrea Thornton (age 25), and Dave Wall (age 22) is my business partner. We currently live in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are both young, adventurous and spontaneous. We knew early on the office life wasn’t for us. We’re both crazy enough to decide to create a mobile office that will allow us to travel the country on a perma-road trip. Our friends think we are weird. My roommate even refers to it as the “giant ice cream truck.” So maybe we are a little weird. At least we aren’t boring. And at least we aren’t wasting away the best years of our lives in a cubicle answering to a boss.

So what do we do?

It was a family vacation in Belize that first made me realize that the internet was the way to go. We were on a tour bus driving through a little village. Amongst the tin shacks and run down houses was an internet cafe. It was that moment that I realized I didn’t need to sit in a stuffy cubicle to be productive. I could be at an internet cafe in a tropical village. I could be on the beach. I could be anywhere.

I started out in web design and then learned the in’s and out’s of e-commerce and internet marketing. Now we build internet companies ranging in everything from women’s golf equipment to collectible cookie jars. And the best part is: We are portable. And the truck is just the beginning. Why stop there? How about a house boat office? Or a flying office?

How’d we come up with this crazy idea anyway?

Back in the very Early days of Archetype Development we came across a 1976 Bluebird school bus for sale on Craigslist.org for $500. We really had no practically use for this 90 passenger monstrosity, but really, who could pass up something like this? We got to work cleaning it out and prepping it for conversion into to ultimate snowboarding roadtrip mobile party bus. The problem was, it was too big to park anywhere even remotely near us so working on it became sort of a back-burner project and most of our free-time was dedicated to building up Archetype Development.

We came up with the idea to turn it into a mobile office. It would take a lot of work and money, so we decided maybe it would be better to start on a smaller, more usable vehicle. Something newer than ‘76 seemed like a smart idea too. The bus sat for a year while we figured out what to do with it. It was just too big to ever be practical so we ended up selling it and put the money towards finding something better.

I’m not much for writing. I never know quite how to start. I’d start at the beginning, but that was almost a year ago and I tend to get myself too concerned with the tiny details, so if I just started at the beginning this would go on way too long. I guess I’ll just sum up the basic concept of who we are and what we are doing.

First of all, my name is Andrea. Dave is my business partner. We shared one common dream: freedom. Our goal was to create a situation where we could be free from the confines of a regular 9-5 office job. We wanted to be able to enjoy our young years traveling the country, snowboarding, sightseeing and adventuring without having to pinch pennies, save up vacation time, catch up on missed work or wait until retirement to enjoy our freedom. Our solution? Take work with us on our journey. We started our own company a little over a year ago - I’ll get into the details of that later. Being young and unfunded (I’m 25 and Dave is 22) we didn’t have a lot of money to work with. We put everything we had into building up the company and finally as of last week we had gathered enough money to make the first purchase that would make this dream of freedom a reality: an old Praxair truck.
Now this may not look like much to be excited about to you, but for us, this was the ticket to freedom. It had already been converted into a motor home. It had shelving, a sink, fridge, etc. We scored the thing for $3095. Our ultimate plans for it involve super space-optimized work stations, bathroom, and sleeping areas, so we have a lot of work to do.

This blog is a place for us to document our progress and our adventures.