You DID NOT follow that dude’s advice at all! That post office package guy who wrote the $97 book I think he has some foundational info to build an application upon and, the myriad of other sources on amazon and the web, you did not do much of what he says as far as I can see.

I have already got a place onto a maybe #50 ranking international MBA program and your application would probably not even get into that.

Mostly all the comments that have been mentioned, and from my humble view point, lack of strategy and angle of attack on your application and absolutely no unique personal own story. You do not tell a compelling personal story of conquest on your essays and work history! And of course academic life.

Essay writing is an art! You say you wanted to be an artist growing up so can you write to bring out an emotive and moving response from the reader ? Can you write an essay and creatively imagine its composition from start to finish like an art!! Ahhh ok I’m rambling but yea. You need to research how to do this perfectly if you can. This should be your main area of focus for next time.

We all want to get into HBS and, excuse my aggressive stance but it’s a war out there!!! LOLOLOL You need a formidable strategy.

Best wishes to you dear

Apply to more than one school. Life (jobs, girls, opportunities) is so. You can’t just bet on only one horse.
Your GMAT quant is low. Target in both V and Q should be a least 80%
Your post MBA career is not clear. Emphasize down-to-earth commitments, not a title “CEO”
The girlfriend story : At least show immaturity. If a girlfriend can take you of course, what kind of leader will you be ? The same goes for lies. Don’t mention it.
In addition to a low GPA, Nothing shows you can handle maths.
The way you tell the story doesn’t show charisma.
Your entire application should convey one message, built around one powerful brand. In case of entrepreneurship, you may also want to consider Stanford.
Don’t use teacher/professor recommendations
If I were Adcom, I would think : “This guy doesn’t need an MBA. He is doing just fine”

I also think that the main problems of your application are your essays. To be honest it sounds like they are written by a high school student rather than a harvard aspirant. English is not even my mother tongue but I can tell a huge difference to other applications I have read so far. “The girlfriend thing” at the beginning is just complete crap and when you talk about your strenghts and weaknesses you talk so much about your weaknesses that I forgot that you even have strenghts. You reall shouldnt make the whole hire/fire part so detailed and long. You always have to make your weaknesses sound like a strenght “at the end”. As an example:

The CEO of Nestlé did the following in an interview when the reporter mentioned that they made one of their chocolate bars shorter in order to hide a price raise:

He shortly agreed that they made it shorter, thus didn’t deny the criticism. BUT, right in the next sentence he said that Nestlé decided to do so in order to keep the calories per bar below 100cal. So now while you are in a Diet you can still have a chocolate snack once in a while since it is less than 100cal.

So what do you think? Do you think anyone seriously is still thinking about how Nestlé “raised the price without actually raising the price”? I don’t think so … people rather see something good in this shorter and more expensive bar. That is ridiculous I know … but that is Marketing. You have to market yourself better. Make Harvard think at the end “Wow, this guy has even plenty of weaknesses, but none of them are effecting his work in order to be less succesful!”

Hope I could give you a little impression of what I think about your app. Hope you get in! Maybe we will see each other … I am going to apply for the 2011 class!

Dom

Again, I dont mean to upset you but in my opinion I dont see much here that would make me want to meet you if I was in the Adcom’s shoes.

Honestly, I also have to say that I dont think any of your essay responses really answered the questions fully. The first essay asks what you want them to know about your undergraduate experience, yet you talk about what your interests are now and what you did in high school sandwiched around a small piece of information of your undergraduate experience. Also, there are a number of sentences which I am not convinced are complete. Reading your resume-type listing, I thought you and I were the exact same (although reverse the quant and qual scores of the GMAT), but after reading your essays I have to admit I was unimpressed with your experiences. It could have been the bad foot on which you started us out, or it could be the grammar of ending sentences with prepositions. A mantra that I used while writing my essays was “What does this sentence tell the adcom about me?” And telling them that you enjoyed your undergraduate experiences doesn’t really tell them anything. I am no expert, for sure. I hope that I get an invitation to interview (I applied round 2 this year), but I dont think there is much to these essays that makes me want to meet you.

I think selling your company is a huge accomplishment, i know it’s one of mine, but I dont even really know what your company does, which tells me that you value not doing drugs (which millions and millions of students across the country do) over selling a corporation you created to a publicly traded company (which very few have done). See where morality isn’t really an accomplishment?

I swore I wouldn’t write a long post, but simply stating that you raised money (although it’s a large amount), isn’t enough for me to really understand or believe what you did, particularly because you told us that you had no money after a huge profitable streak. Giving detail on HOW you raised this money and what hoops you had to jump through in order to obtain the funding is more valuable than saying you did it.

There are other things that I would personally think are not very smart to put in your essays (a negative example of leadership experience, I would talk about helping an employee develop professionally somehow instead), but I think this is enough.

Good luck if you decide to apply again, but I would suggest that you figure out why you would want an MBA. You seem to know how to raise money already, you seem to know how to run a business, and you seem to understand how to find good help, what’s left?

You do have a good background, but you didn’t package it too well. Rewrite essays from scratch if you reapply.