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Tony launched Redwagons.com in 1998, selling the classic American childhood toy - the Radio Flyer wagons. He found a good break, and went on to start an online store at Yahoo! from his home, armed only with a keen sense of business acumen.

With hardly any capital and no programming skills, Tony was able to grow his online store into a million dollar business in just three years. 

We were given the privilege to interview Tony Roeder and here are the secrets of his success as a home-based entrepreneur.

I had a chance to meet one of the people who work for Radio Flyer Inc. and we talked about their business and their web site. I asked him whether they were selling online, and he said, "No." So, I told him that I'd like to sell their products. He said, "Why don't you. I'm in sales and we're open to people selling our products online."

I absolutely had no Internet experience before that. All I had was an AOL account that I rarely use. As far as the construction of the website was concerned, everything was self-study. We focused our attention on Radio Flyer Wagons and became an Internet toy store primarily selling their products.

The only investment I had in this company was $4,000, which was spent for a web designer whom we "fired" right before the holiday season of 1998 because the site wasn't operating, and he was just difficult to work with. At that point, I found Yahoo! and built my site on the Yahoo! Store system. The site went live in early November 1998, after three months of work which begun as early as September.

No, there have never been any investors. Profits were plowed back into the operations.

I was incubating the site off my handyman business, which was not a large business to start with. I was running my handyman business with 3 or 4 employees. I had a small home office. I ran everything out of my home. I got this online business started with the handyman business serving as its incubator. That's the reason for the low investment as I already had the infrastructure in place to at least get things started.

I also did not take salary for the first year. So that's how the incubation process worked. So if you ask how much money I invested on the company, I couldn't say because it was all melded with the other company. That money ($4,000) was just used for the designer whom we ended up not using.

This is proof that it is possible that "you can do-it-yourself" and "you can get off a business off the ground for under $5,000."

I had some friends who were actually doing OK on the Internet. I also had the sense that the Internet was going to go somewhere and I had the feeling that this is a ground floor opportunity that was about to take off.