7 Lessons From 7 Failed Online Businesses (And Making 7 Figures)

i was very observant as a child it seemed like everywhere i looked every corner i looked people were unhappy unhappy with their careers their jobs their spouse their day-to-day life everything about their life seemed to cause some form of complaint in them and now this may have just been the environment that i was exposed to but i'm sure a lot of you can resonate especially with the negativity bias that our brains default to we tend to pick up on the negative things the most and with that i knew that there had to be a better way of living i knew deep down that that wasn't the default outcome of everyone's life that shouldn't be the default outcome of everyone's life so why would i try to emulate or follow that path so taking matters into my own hands seemed to be the only option personal responsibility self-education and everything that involved making my own decisions became a very big priority of mine when i was under 20 years old if everyone was doing something i wanted to do the opposite if everyone wanted to retire at 65 i wanted to retire at 30. if everyone wanted to sit on the couch and watch tv at night i would either go to the gym at night or i would sit in my room and watch youtube videos that aren't just mindless and they were educating me on something to increase my skill set so i didn't get stuck in a low skill labor job that are consistently being phased out and the same goes with watching the news and just staying keeping up with the kardashians keeping like staying informed on everything it wasn't appealing to me instead i wanted to develop my own skill set i wanted to read books i wanted to get my information from somewhere because i made the connection that the the information that everyone is consuming if everyone is consuming the same information and it's leading to this specific outcome in life then why would i consume that specific information now there was a default path that i actually looked forward to and that was going to college everyone tells you to go to college so i have my own views on college but i saw the positives in it i was kind of aware at a young age that i didn't need to go to college if i wanted to make some form of an income i knew that i didn't have i don't have to rely on anyone and i don't think anyone should rely on external circumstances to dictate the outcome of their future that includes college and everything else but with the boom of education on the internet it just became eventually that's what i supplemented my learning with but the main reason i went to college was to delay the time that i had to avoid getting a nine to five because that's the exact thing there again i have nothing against nine to fives but at the time they were the bane of my existence i wanted to avoid them at all costs because it's what everyone else was doing so as soon as i stepped foot on the college campus i knew that the countdown had begun from the time that i had to work and build a name for myself and build some form of a business or accept my demise once those four years come to an end and get a nice job on something that i'm interested in and whatever it may be that's why i went to college was to kind of test the waters and get a formal education or at least try and learn some things that i was interested in i never really did it for the money originally i wanted to go into neuroscience because every kid wants to make 300 000 a year at a job but then that eventually became less appealing and then it's like oh do i want to go into engineering do i want to do this that and i ended up starting out in business met a bunch of great people there and during that time that's when i started my first attempt at a business which was a fitness youtube channel because all of my time before that was dedicated to fitness and the gym it was a very big interest of mine and it just made sense why would i not turn something that i'm very passionate about into a business when i'm quite literally following following the people and getting my advice from the people that do that as a business right that's a connection that a lot of people don't make is if you are studying someone that talks about something that you are deeply interested in and they are doing that as a job you may not see on the front end that it is an actual business but it is and that means that you can also do that too if you have that same level of expertise as them it's like i was sitting there thinking okay these guys i know everything that these guys are talking about i'm pretty damn uh good at all of the i have a lot of fitness knowledge why would i not start a youtube channel because i learned it from someone else because the information came from someone that's already doing it okay that's how you learn things you learn things from someone else and then you go on to pass that information on that's intelligent imitation which we have talked about in a previous video now a few months after creating uh 10 000 calorie challenge videos and general lifting videos some vlogs other food challenges and things like that we decided to call it quits we saw some growth uh we started to understand social media in general like how to actually gain followers by let's say one of the tactics is commenting on other platforms accounts to kind of leverage their audience and grow but eventually we just kind of stopped i did it with a friend at the time and it was just taking up too much time so from that i kind of dropped business for a bit and started studying i definitely partied more i got the college experience and that was all fun and great and now around that time i remember there's a deeper story to this but one night my friends and i we went up to the parking garage across the street from our dorms to smoke some wheat because my roommate had just gotten broken up with from his girlfriend who lived in utah so he was down someone told him hey just go smoke some weed you'll be fine i remember that quote vividly where he's like no bro you'll go go smoke some weed you'll be fine and so we went up to the parking garage and we started smoking and then eventually uh this bicycle cop showed up behind us and my friend nick at the time was like guys there's there's a cop behind us and we're like no we're we're high out of our minds and it's like no dude don't don't play like that it's not funny and then i look in my uh rearview mirror and there's a cup writing down my license plate and so i'm like oh and so we end up getting out and he sits us all on the floor handcuffs us figures out that it was the majority of the actual substance and the paraphernalia that went along with that was mine and my roommates and so they took us to the police station they booked us they took our fingerprints we didn't stay overnight but that's a long story short we ended up going home and i thought we were fine he like interrogated me for a while he's trying to get me to tell him who gave us the actual weed and ended up just going home and then i thought i was in the clear but then when i went home for the summer to work my lifeguard job uh thought things were going great it was completely out of my mind i didn't even remember it anymore and i got a letter in the mail and thank goodness that my parents were home at the time but i got home from work i opened the mail got it saw it was from the court my heart immediately sunk into my stomach and i opened it and i was just defeated because it gave me two options it said you can either pay or no you can either go to court and try to defend your case and potentially be convicted of a felony and as as a 18 19 year old kid that's pretty scary especially someone who has been like a like a scholar not even a scholar but you know i took my schooling seriously i took my life seriously at that point so it was like very threatening to me and the second option it gave me was to go to like a diversion class where you show up every week they text you around you have a color that you're assigned and they text you uh every morning what colors have to go in and pee in a cup and get tested for six months and that thing costs like five to ten thousand dollars something like that so that's a lot of money for a college student so overall neither of those options sounded great and i was just defeated it's like i'm screwed i do not know what to do now and around this time i was following matt ogus who is a fitness influencer he was very big in the og fitness days and he recommended the book the power of now and as many of you know i recommend this book time and time again because this is what this was a catalyst to it all i believe this is one of the first like self-help or spirituality books that i read and when i read it and since i was in such that such an emotional rut at the time like all of the words spoke to me like that was when i started to understand the power of spirituality because once i read that book and like dissected it and just like my eyes were glued to the page my worries kind of vanished and i'm like yeah this isn't bad like i i can deal with this when the time comes and so after that i kind of regained my drive and i started creating youtube videos from my house over the summer with my phone and so i created like acne videos i created talking head videos on self-improvement and spirituality kind of like elliott holst where i was in my garage trying to be like a tough alpha male and give like this these harsh truth advice pieces of advice and it it was kind of funny i wish i still had those videos but i don't so i've been trying and failing at this for a long time and that's a common theme here so in my sophomore year i decided to switch things up i'm very big on trying everything literally everything doing everything experiencing everything and rather than because it's common advice like oh pick one thing and focus on that forever and that's a good advice but not forever because you need to pick one thing and focus on it to the point of where you can accurately determine whether you are truly interested in that or not whether you are passionate about it whatever whether it fuels you whether you can see yourself doing that for a long time you can't just spend one day doing it and expect to be passionate about it but you can't spend your entire lifetime doing something that you don't enjoy so during college i switch majors over the summer i switched different interests when i got to sophomore year as we're talking about now i got more into photography right i bought a camera to help with youtube videos i stopped doing the youtube videos again and it was like oh i should probably do something with this so i picked up photography i watched some youtube videos on how to do it and i just spent my time like walking around town taking pictures of like the streets uh landscape photography portrait photography and the main thing here is i didn't really care for the photography i cared a lot about the editing so that's what sent me down a rabbit hole of photoshop and now this also stresses the importance of why trying different things are so important because how in the world could i know that i was very passionate and interested in editing as opposed to say photography without actually diving into photography first right there are certain things that you have to try and become exposed to when and if you want to find that thing that you're truly interested in so during this time i'll throw up some images and kind of cycle through them where this is what i created i would spend six to eight hours in my room just in flow state listening the music jamming out creating these images and you can see them here where they're very surreal and they were just mashed up composites of some of my own photos and then stock photos and i grew to i started posting these on instagram and i grew pretty quickly because this also helped me understand social media and leveraging other people's audiences to grow because there were community pages where that were they only posted photographers work right and if you use if you tag them or use a hashtag they would pick from hashtags and people adding them and post it to their page of like 300 000 to a million followers and if they tag me in that then it's like oh yeah i'll get some of these followers so that made sense to me and that's what i focused on i focused on high quality content so the images my edits and getting those in front of people and that's how i grew that's how i gain like my first 2 000 followers until common theme here i stopped doing the editing and photography but it taught me very important skills like design image composition color theory that transferred over into everything that i'm doing now that's one thing that a lot of people miss is that if you try and fail and start over you're still picking up valuable skills because everything interconnects so let's go through the other business models that i failed along the way because so far we've got youtube twice we've got the photography the digital art and with the digital or i stopped doing that because i didn't know how to monetize it if i were to go back now with my marketing and sales and course building knowledge i could easily build a course that teaches other people how to actually make those composites and i could is is that not the dream is that not what everyone's trying to do here where i get to do what i love so create these edits and teach other people how to do that and um it's supply and demand it's interest that's what all of this is about is doing something that impacts my life on a deep level and makes me happier and teaching other people how to do that and letting the people that are interested in doing that do it through my course and that's how i earn an income so the next business model that i felt with was a facebook ads agency right i was young and i was looking up on my phone like oh how can i make six figures online and i came across this course it was a decent course i don't think it's up anymore it was billy wilson's six-figure agency course and it was good it was a really good course and it taught me a lot about lead generation advertising copywriting all of that fun stuff and i ended up sending maybe 10 to like 50 cold emails i didn't close any clients um ended up giving up on that and just going into something else and then the next thing was a drop shipping rave store like rave clothing because i liked going to festivals at this time i was very big into edm and going and having a good time at a festival and i knew that target audience like the back of my hand i knew exactly what people wore to raves and i knew exactly how they were promoted because i was so immersed in the industry that's another business lesson for you is if you want to be able to market accurately to a specific audience you need to immerse yourself in that audience i can sell if you want to go if you don't go to festivals or raves or whatever it may be and you want to sell something to those people i have a leg up on you because i already go i am the market research at that point so with the drop shipping that's i took a course on that as well it helped me understand branding it helped me up understand how to set up a store how to actually get products shipped from china and i used my facebook ads knowledge from the previous course to try and sell these things and i there's a picture of one of the products that i sold which was like a bra and it was all like diamondy and flashy and i ended up selling nothing as the the theme with all of this goes alright so this is where things get interesting this is where i started with web design and a lot of you know me where when i first started my brand online and actually started growing it was because i had success with freelance web design but i failed with it before so at this time when i started getting into freelance web design i was living with six other guys in a big like old frat house in the like near the college in arizona i went to asu and it was just six dudes that i met in the dorms and everywhere else it was a big beaten down house there was an upstairs at downstairs there was two master bedrooms that people split down the middle and people like slept on opposite sides it was it was a great time uh it was definitely an experience for a young college kid i couldn't do that now i would absolutely hate it now but it was it was an absolutely fun time during this time so this was a time where i was close to a junior in college and i took in no i i don't know where i was in college at this point but the timeline's all fuzzy here because i don't really do this often but this is when i took an intro to web development class and i went to those classes and i learned the basics of html and css in like the first two classes but then this is when i became extremely interested and obsessed with coding itself i saw so much opportunity for it because it's like i can get a job without a degree i don't have to get like a crazy nine to five or like a corporate nine to five i can work and do like creative coding work this job seems amazing and so that got me interested very interested and i would spend my time after school just taking courses this taught me the value in self-education more than i already had that solidified in my head where i have to be continuously learning and building projects on my own outside of school outside of work whatever it may be there has to be something that i can dedicate my time to and that gives me that intrinsic energy so spent my time after college studying learning how to code and the beautiful thing about self-education is that i learned the entire course's curriculum the college courses curriculum in like three weeks just by studying on my own and i didn't show up to the class at all and i still got an a so when i think of it i believe that was my junior or senior year but i knew that time was running out it's either i need to make something work now in order to secure my future or i'm screwed and i'm gonna end up like everyone else like i preface this video with so now i had a lot of skills under my belt a lot of skills so i just start i decided to start uh an ecom brand e-commerce brand and i ended up starting two of them so the first one since i was into web development and i was immersed again immersed in that market so to say i knew that market like the back of my hand i could market to them well and i knew that developers were very passionate about their work so i decided to start a blue light glasses brand and now uh because developers they have they stare at a screen all day it only makes sense that a blue light glasses brand would sell very well to them and so at this time i had this brilliant idea i called my dad and i'm like hey dad what's going on you uh i have this brilliant idea and it's gonna make me a millionaire you want to send me over a few thousand dollars so i can buy product and of course like i i wasn't expecting him to say yes but he said yes he believed in me like this was the first time where someone like i had an argument and i had an idea that actually made sense to the point where he would invest in my business and my dad isn't the wealthiest man alive a few thousand dollars is a lot of money to him and it truly meant the world that he took that chance on me and so i did everything in my power to make that work i ordered the product i made sure it looked good i started setting up the store i set up ads i studied influencer marketing and this is a picture of my first ad where you can see the glasses and you can see um my hedgehog at the time momo rest in peace momo he did not make it and he is not alive today but long story short i blew that three thousand dollars and didn't make it work and in between the long shipping times for the product to actually get to me packaging it all up and then trying to promote and advertise without much money it just didn't it didn't work and so now this taught me the value in building an audience where you don't have to rely on shoveling money into a furnace in order to actually test things out you have an audience where you can test ideas via content and then you can see what they actually want and then you can create a product or service for them so this sparked another major low point like the time i got arrested and found the power of now by eckhart tolle but it's like i just wasted a bunch of money i've tried all these things like is this actually gonna work um like when will it work i have all of this knowledge i feel like i know quite a bit uh like why can i not make this work and so that put me into another like emotional rut in a sense and it was around this time where i called my dad i'm like hey wasted your money don't know what to tell you and he pretty much told me like you have these web development skills like you've been doing this for a long time there has to be some kind of job that you can get now that is more higher paying than the one you currently have and so that's when i started applying to web development jobs and i ended up getting one at a web design agency and so now with that money coming in i have decent money coming in it was like it was like 60 70 000 a year and that's a lot of money for a person that is still in college and that's when i dropped out because it's like why would i continue doing this when i'm making money and i want to spend my time elsewhere trying to build these businesses still and so i started in a wallet brand this was the second e-commerce brand where i'll throw up pictures these are the wallets that i made um i ordered them i got professional pictures done i did everything right i felt like i did everything right but then when it came time to promote i just i just didn't do it i i don't know why i got afraid or something and i just didn't actually try and sell the wallets i ended up just giving up and this is when i started to go all in on freelancing because i had some jobs coming to me here and there because i'd been putting my name out this entire time and it's like people knew that i did seo people knew that i did web design people knew that i did facebook ads and all this other stuff and so i had some clients coming to me here and there but i really narrowed in on web design and this is not to mention that i also failed at a content marketing agency um an seo agency and a few other things i just tried everything right but they all complemented each other because they go hand in hand and so while i was at the web design job i started to make connections it's like okay they have a marketing department they have a sales department oh like this is how they actually deliver the work and keep track of the products i mean projects and all of this other stuff and it started to make sense and i started to form this foundation for a new freelancing business with web design so once i had the idea of or just was committed like okay i have a lot of expertise in the web design it in the web design area and so i just dedicated everything to that my job was kind of cushy and i had a lot of time at work to do things so that's when i was cold emailing people that's when i was dming people in like facebook groups and all of the other lead generation uh methods that people teach you i was walking into local businesses talking to people i was seeing like cars where they advertise their business on the actual car and i was writing that down in my notes as i was driving so i could cold email them later and reach out to them on facebook and all this other stuff and i ended up getting work from friends family and then like in the referral network and i closed a few uh from like cold emails and other things like that and i started consistently bringing in like three to four like 1500 to 2500 web design deals consistently and then at this point i kind of realized that web design itself it's a very good thing to start out with but there you can make it more powerful by learning offer creation and so this is when i learned offer creation and started to tailor a service to a specific type of business and i chose service businesses which is something like pest control or uh what would you say accounting consultancies all of that stuff and i created a simple uh funnel for them so instead of a full website it was a landing page with an opt-in and then emails on the back end to sell them and follow up with them to get them booked as a client right and i could even i even offered facebook ads on top of this to kind of help drive traffic to the landing page that i gave them but all of this together during this time allowed me to pull in my first six figures while freelancing so this is when i started growing my brand and my audience on twitter i had success with the freelancing i was charging like 2500 to 5 000 for that service funnel and possibly ads on top of it as an upsell and i had a lot to offer and i saw someone selling a freelancing product on twitter and talking about their interests and all this other stuff and i'm like okay why why wouldn't i be able to do that that looks fun and so i spent my time just like again in monk mode getting obsessed with creating this ebook and i created a freelancing ebook that gave people the basics of freelancing and then eventually went on to create a complementary web design product with that and but the the first ebook that started pulling in around 3 000 a month on top of what i was making with client work on twitter and so i saw the power in that i networked i did all the other stuff all of the stuff that i teach in modern mastery hq where uh youtube video subscribers youtube subscribers you guys can get you can join for five dollars using the link in the description for that but eventually i created these just different products that built off of one of one another and worked into each other and during this time i was growing i grew to like 10 000 followers and i was still landing clients on twitter because creators and consultants and other things are service businesses so i just took my offer and positioned it towards people on twitter and grew an audience and eventually i was able to create this self-sufficient audience and content ecosystem that brought in clients and started making sales for me and eventually i continued to pivot and i started a consulting service and i eventually hit a hundred thousand and then i branched out to instagram i hit 200 000 there recently and it's just been uh two to three years of like iterating on these products and seeing a lot of success because the main thing is just building an audience and getting my name out there to more people right because in real life and when reaching out to people with like cold email you're not really reaching out to a community or a network of people your and referrals are still a thing there but when you have an audience and you build it to 20 30 50 100k that's a hundred thousand people that know exactly what you do and they can refer people to you and if you have the funnels in place it just makes sense you're in full control of your income over that at that time so that is my story in a nutshell and how i got to where i am today uh now my main offerings are modern mastery the community and digital economics which is a cohort and then of course i still do some consulting on the side for marketing for like online service businesses but mostly like one person service businesses so like freelancers coaches creators consultants and yeah so i want to end all of this with seven lessons that i've learned because this is it's just a story i hope it was a bit inspirational but i want to teach you the seven lessons that i learned along the way the first one being that nothing happens then everything happens or nothing makes sense and then everything makes sense because you're going to go through your when you are going down this unconventional path you it's unpredictable there really there's courses and other things that can teach you certain aspects of it but most of it is dependent on your ability to self-educate and iterate and pivot and pick up specific knowledge along the way it's like as we always talk about when you're exploring the unknown you're kind of like collecting dots right you're collecting dots to a point where you can connect the dots and then once you connect all of the dots that's when things take off so that leads into lesson number two which is figure it out stop relying on the external to give you what you want if you don't have energy then generate your own energy with purpose and passion and pursuing things that you're curious about if you don't have an income then take to self-educate online and figure out how to make an income the third is don't be afraid to start over we talked about this a bit but starting over on the unconventional path isn't starting over right you're consistently picking up information that is extremely valuable and once those dots connect that's the when the dots connect of like starting over and then it creates this way of doing things that is very unique to you that other people can't replicate that is what you're looking for so that leads into number four which is um embrace the uncertain and unpredictable path because nothing worth having is predictable right a predictable life is not a good or meaningful life that means you are just living out the same actions day after day after day after day there's nothing there that can create meaning or interest in your life like in a story a story isn't predictable a story is like okay how's this battle gonna go who's gonna win this fight who's gonna do this who's gonna do that how is this story gonna end up and that's what creates an interesting life for you if you approach it from a zoomed out lens or a sort of meta perspective where you're able to stay present and view things for what they are and not go get and not get so consumed by your emotions lesson number five is to try everything people warn against shiny object syndrome but i've never seen that to be the case you have to try everything in order to see what sticks with you right as i said earlier you can't figure out what you're actually interested in until you try something figure out that you're not interested in it and follow it down another path that is revealed because you tried that one thing you have to try what you are aware of now in order to expand your awareness into these other areas that you had no idea existed before number six is give give give you are not going to make it in this space if you need things if you need the money if you need the validation or you need something external right if you are thinking about the money the entire time and you're like so dependent and fearful of losing that money or that client you're going to do worse work people are going to sense your neediness and you just aren't going to make it so you need to get in the habit at the very start to give out free value quite literally dm people be like hey man i saw you were working on this here's a few tips i wrote up oh here i built a landing page for you or just dm people ask them to get on a call and then help them like give them advice consult them for free on how to get something now number seven is shoot your shot and then shoot again because there are i see this way too often especially with people trying to land clients is they'll send five to ten dms and they're like i'm not making any money this is i'm not gonna start and i went through that too but you have to understand that it's a game it's it's a numbers game and of course like you can step up your marketing or your sales or other knowledge in order to make that more effective but it really is about just getting in front of the right people it's about you have your offer and you have traffic right so as jk molina says if your offer sucks then it doesn't matter how much traffic you send to it right if you suck as a person and you're trying to go on dates and your offer sucks and you put yourself where a lot of people are you're not going to get dates you're not going to have that happy ending but if you make the offer very good and then you put it into you have a lot of traffic going to it then you open yourself up to more luck right you need people to generate more luck or increase your chances of luck than landing that client so when in doubt build more leverage get your name in front of more people network with more people build an audience develop your skill set all of the above so that is my story i hope you enjoyed it if you like this video consider liking the video consider subscribing there is a link to modern mastery digital economics my free planner my free creative challenge and a bunch of other things in the description if you want to check that out but until then thank you for watching i will see you in the next one

2022-06-20 20:57

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