Hello. My name is Jason Trout. I wrote this guide to help people start Internet businesses of their own. I started my first online business while a student at the University of Iowa and have been doing it for a living ever since.

I'm currently 27 years old and live in Decorah, IA. I'm going to give you a brief background of me and the Internet businesses I have started so that you have a little better understanding of the person behind this guide.

As I mentioned, I started my first Internet business while in college. It's called Planet-Save.com. It's a web based e-mail system that lets users save rainforest every time they send or receive an e-mail. How? Banner ads are shown in the system and advertisers paid us to have their banners there. We then took a portion of those ad dollars and donated them to a non-profit that was working to save the rainforest. So it was a way for people to take something they were doing anyway, sending and receiving e-mail, and turn it into a way to save rainforest.

My senior year, I entered Planet-Save.com into a business plan competition at the University of Iowa and won a $5,000 award. It was at that point that I decided to forgo getting a "real job" and just focus on web business.

About a year after graduation I ended up selling Planet-Save.com to RedJellyfish.com. It just made sense for a lot of reasons. I then took an equity stake in RedJellyfish.com and also became an employee as well. Then, about two years ago I started another online business called GreenBusiness.net. It's an online community for eco-entrepreneurs and professionals. You can check it out in more detail by following the link above but basically it's a subscription model business. Members pay $12 a month to belong. I recently just hit the 200 member mark which was a fun milestone.

So basically RedJellyfish.com is my day business and GreenBusiness.net is my night business :-) My reason for starting The eBusiness Guide can be found on the Start-Up Thoughts page;

"When I meet people and tell them what I do they say, almost without exception, something like "That sounds great, I wish I could do something like that."

I tell them that they can. Anybody can, you just have to be willing to try it. When I mention this people generally say something like, 'But I wouldn't even know where to start.' And so I put this guide together."