My introduction. Generated millions, now at zero, rebuilding.

Hello to everyone reading this.

I just joined the group (the approval was fast, I applied 15ish minutes ago, so pretty cool, I was expecting the decision tommorow, not this fast)

The reason I joined is pretty simple, I'll make myself accountable to make "progress" posts or whatever they're called, provide value where I can and potentially gain valuable info aswell.

I'll start off by backtracking to when I was 12 years old (22 now), without getting into too much details.

An event happened in my life that made me want to explore making money online, since I was a kid, and getting a job was not probable at the time.

I learned a couple things here and there from forums, YT videos (mind you the MMO niche wasn't as flooded as it is today with gurus and alike idiots).

Time went on, nothing came out of it, until I was in school, talking with my friends and one of them had an older brother selling steam (gaming niche essentially for those who don't know) accounts and that intrigued me, went back home and...

Researched, researched, researched.

Found out a small gaming forum (in my country, because the overall saturation in the niche for english speaking countries was pretty hefty) where I could sell these accounts upfront, since most of the members where from my city and close vicinity.

What I essentially did was "dropshipping" even before knowing what the word is :

I set up a small banner ad using photoshop, very basic and posted it inside the group

Wrote a very bad overall sales page but it got the job done (because I didn't have the money to front the cost of the accounts upfront, I basically had a "CTA" along the lines of for more info dm me)

Post got around 300 views or something like that I can't remember exactly

I got 10-20 dm's of people asking how much is an account with CS:GO, COD and what not

Really got into it with one guy and our convo ended by us setting up a "meeting" in my school during lunch break (he was older then me, and he paid me what equates to $12 for the account with his games) *had to backtrack. I already knew what account with games he wanted from our convo and checked with my friend's brother if he had it but I asked him in a way where I positioned myself as the buyer, which I "was"*

He gave me the money, I told him to not worry that as soon as I get back home i'll send him the login info and that I won't scam him since he knows where I go to school and can kick my ass

After recieving the money, told my friend to tell his brother that I need the account today, he went found his brother, then came back to me told me it was $7, I gave my friend the money, and he gave me the login info on a piece of paper that his brother gave to him

Went back home, logged onto the forum, sent the login info and voila first sale completed, $5 profit

Continued to do this for a year or so (made $50-70 a month profit on a good month, I believe the total was like $400ish profit for the whole time)

Came a time, I wake up, check my pc and when I try to open the forum, I see it was banned for piracy promotion, copyright, viruses and a bunch of other stuff

Tried pivoting by creating a fb group for steam accounts (had like 8k members in 6 months, but during the process I made no money because I wasn't able to monetize it, due to members being outside of my place of living so i couldn't pick up cash & parents didn't allow their info for paypal and stuff)

After a while, I gave it for free because it was hard to moderate and focused on school, summer time came around.

Went back to researching ideas in MMO, figured out what dropshipping is because of various teen guru's at the time (Bowles, Tanner), and since I had no money to run ads, I went into finding a supplier that stocks replica Air Max sneakers, at the time they were pretty popular 97, 90, 95, TN and so on, and as stated no money for ads, I figured of doing an instagram page and advertising organically.

*Side note : I already had an idea for reselling these type of sneakers or their equivalent replicas beforehand because I was into them and parents were buying them for me on excellent grades condition and since they were expensive people wanted them, but replicas did as good a job for 3rd of the price*

Did that very successfully 300k visits a month in just a couple months, 10s of daily inquiries, but again payment processing was an issue, parents didn't allow me to use their stuff and the operation again failed.

Then came a period between 15-16 doing a lot of shit (affiliates, youtube, streaming, gaming tournaments, mass email marketing, "dropshipping" necklaces via organic)

Then on accident 2 days after my birthday (I still remember it because a big event unrelated to this happened that day), I found out about Klaviyo and again...

Researched, researched, researched...

Mind you Klaviyo didn't look anything like it does today, but nevertheless, I played around it, learned about the features and so on, and got a really good grasp on how it can be used to map out the customer/potential customer journey.

Had a friend from one of the IM forums who ran a dropshipping store (couple thousand monthly revenue) and I asked him to let me plug it in for him free of charge and that he only pays for the software and a % of the revenue that I generate (if I generate any at all, because I didn't know if I will)

He agreed.

We get set up, he gives me access, trial & error to get it to properly be set up, and I start playing around it.

Lots of trial and error and 5 weeks later, the emails were adding a bit over $1,200 in revenue for him, and he agreed to pay me 20% (that was part of the deal before we even started, there's a whole funny story of how I got my parents to do let me connect the cc info to paypal under their name, but it'd be too long to write here).

Got little less the $240 because of the tx fees and all that, but good money nonetheless for me at the time.

I continued to do this for him, and mind you he was scaling his store, my daily job was just learning about this as much as possible and implementing it (info online was pretty scarce, so lots of trial and error).

4 months in, he scaled the store to $30K/month, and I was generating an additional $7-10k from emails, so I was already "balling" with my income and parents thought the "FBI" would knock the doors at any time of the day soon.

My friend was alresdy connected to some ecom guys that were doing okay, and he one night when we were playing CS:GO told me if i'd be able to do the same for his friends, I agreed and he introduced me to one of them, sales call went "smoothly", it wasn't even a sales call, it was more so like "do your shit, I won't bother you and i'll pay you if it works".

Set his account up in a couple of days, 4 weeks later I was generated $5k for his store (he was at $20k/month revenue give or take without emails)

Getting paid heftily at this point, and then I started thinking how to get more clients, eventually found two more guys in a span of couple weeks and that's where I "capped out".

At that point, because they were also scaling, two of them went the brand route, two sticked to dropshipping, I was making anywhere from $15-20K/month and continued to do so up until my 19th birthday.

Couple days before my birthday, I had a call with one of them, and he explained my services are no longer needed, I asked why he said he was retiring and switching to real estate business, he at that point just from the numbers I know from the dashboards and stuff in those years alone made $3-4M profit for himself).

Moving on, 19th birthday comes, I celebrate bla bla bla and the next day I see that since I've been reckless I was down to my last $15k, and I was like no worries, new invoices will be paid in 20ish days or so, well that ended up happening but not in the way I wanted it to.

2 of the clients that went the branding route were already negotiating months prior with a firm that will buy them out (same firm bought both of them out) and I didn't know about any of that.

Couple days after my birthday, all of a sudden both of them want to chat with me, we set a time for each call, and on the calls they explained they've sold the brands and the firm that bought them has an in house team and that this will be the last month of my services, and that I should send them an invoice for the month and that's it (on a quick note, the firm was backed by $50M in investments, but shit teams, they ruined both brands because I was occasionally checking up on the domains up until a little over a year ago, no sales, emails in spam and all the bad stuff).

Well, that day truly crushed me honestly, but what can you do.

And then, all of a sudden the 4th client starts experiencing issues with paid ads, CAC rising no matter what he does, and I loose him too in a span of a month from the last two clients dropping. We figured out it was a mix of ad spy tools and competitors advertising the same product rising, and poor tracking on FB at the time so you couldn't really optimize properly.

And that was it, it was right around October and I remember having to send the last invoice, and saying goodbye to this guy aswell, we stayed in touch, but nothing business wise, as he moved to south america and runs a small boutique hotel with his father in law.

I was like, okay no problems, I'll just restart and find new clients in no time. I set up everything and months later, thousands of cold emails, dm's, forum dm's 0 positive results, even tough I was offering a performance fee model, nothing upfront.

Most of the email replies were :

"Fuck your guru", "Fuck XYZ name" ( you know who they are :) )

"I am getting 100s of these a day" or similar.

And then I tried to research wtf is happening and quickly found out YT was populated and still is with course sellers on how to sell email marketing to ecom bla bla bla.

So I decided to take a break, take my L's for being reckless, months later the money I had left over from the last paid invoices + savings was running out and I had the "urge" to do it again, and I did up until my 20th birthday it was probably 6-7 months of constantly sending emails, dm's to no positive avail, few calls here and there with stores that do 0 revenue, 0 emails and want me to run the whole marketing machine for them for free without money for ads :)

And that's basically it, that's when I quit, right around my 20th birthday I quit and went on with my life giving up on that idea.

In between now and when I was 20 I was constantly having this idea and making it a success marinating in my subconcious but never tried to do it again, up until recently where I just want to get back on my feet and achieve what I want, not even about money at this point, sure it's nice, but more so it'll be a good way to keep score of the following :

Building the best performance driven email marketing agency for eComm brands, and scaling the agency to at least $6M Yearly EBITDA

My plan on how to do that from A to Z?

I do not know, since I've never even gotten close, but I do know the main priority right now is:

Copy, ads, sales

Iterate on steps them until I can get awesome results for my clients (2 weeks of 8 hour days of learning should place me back on track, already at the end of the 2nd week and feeling pretty confident with the service delivery components overall, still lots of room to improve upon)

Get 1st client by any means neccesary to start generating cashflow

Since I have a minimum criteria of email list, revenue and so on, a client that'd agree to my performance fee would at the very least be a $2.5+k/month deal for me

Take only a % of that cashflow for living expenses (they're very low right now, so that's goos)

Reinvest the rest into tools and getting 1 more client

Repeat the process until I am capped by my time and can't physically handle anymore clients (my guesstimate is 5-7)

And we'll go from there.

See you soon, in a progress post or something like that (I am still unsure as to how frequent my posts should be, but i'll figure it out)

Thanks for reading,

Atlas

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