User Power
Value/Post Ratio
85%
- Oct 6, 2023
- 65
- 55
Hey there and thank you for stopping by!
(WARNING: This is a LONG read)
My name is DeNero, and as my first post on here, I wanted to start off by introducing myself and sharing a bit about who I am and my story.
I remember first reading TMF in the summer 2016 (and Unscripted a few years later). During that time I was very motivated to start an online business, work from anywhere, make millions every year, and travel around the world - and this was one of the best business books I read at the time that kickstarted my path.
But my journey got off to a bit of a rocky start, where I started and pursued different online businesses/opportunities, and despite having some decent success with them - it was never really consistent enough to the point where I could comfortably travel full-time, afford whatever I wanted, and not have to worry about the price tag (aka at least 10k+/m in profits).
But then came 2021 and everything changed. It was the first time since I started my business journey, where I truly experienced a huge breakthrough and the BIG success that I always dreamed about. However, as you read from the title, to say that the last few years of my life have been a rollercoaster, would be quite an understatement. So without further ado - here is how it all went down:
At the end of 2020 I got into crypto, but more specifically into the whole world of DeFi (I actually first got into crypto in 2017, but that story is for another day). It was a very exciting innovation in the crypto space, and I spent a lot of time learning as much as I could about it. However during that time, I didn't have too much money to invest, only around 2k, as I was working part-time as a coat checker at a banquet hall on the weekends, making on average $120-200/night and about 2-3k/month (and keeping a lot less after paying off a lot of expenses); but despite that I invested as much as I could in various projects in the DeFi space, while trying to figure out how to succeed & make money online so I can travel the world full-time which has always been my biggest dream & motivation.
After a month or so of daily grinding, at the end of January I finally hit my first big “win”. As many of you have probably heard of it, this project was none other than Shiba Inu - in which my friends & I were its first investors in 2021 way before it blew up & everyone started talking about it (at the time it had 0 daily volume and had a MC of 150-200k). However, as most people who got into it as early as I have, sadly I didn’t hold my tokens for very long after the big & very long consolidation & downfall of its first big run (it went down 90%+ and stayed that low for several weeks, which at the time felt like months); but I still was able to turn a $500 investment into 10k within a week or so (I can tell you the whole story about Shiba, its origins, how I found it, how we made it initially blow up, etc another day if you’d like).
And even though it’s not much, this opened a lot more doors and gave much more money to play with, which increased my chances of striking it REALLY big & potentially making millions, at least that’s what I believed and the way I saw it at the time.
Fast forward about a month or 2, and I moved from ETH to a brand new chain called BSC which was created by Binance. At the time it felt like a goldmine because it JUST started popping off, so I decided to go all in on that chain and become one of the earliest investors on it.
Initially things were very rocky and I ended up losing at least half of my 10k due to P&D projects or complete scams/rugs, leaving me with around 5k after a few weeks. But a few weeks later after a lot of grinding & hard work, I finally struck the golden project that I’ve been looking for all along, and this project was called SafeMars.
In a nutshell, SafeMars piggy-backed off the success of the original SafeMoon, which reached an ATH of 10B MC. After missing the SafeMoon train early on (even though funny enough I first saw it during the presale and considered investing, but decided to pass because it felt like a scam & too risky), I came across SafeMars in the beginning of March; and I knew this was my 2nd chance to get in SUPER early and strike it big. So I decided to invest a total of $300–400 at 25–30k MC and got 1–2% of the supply (I also was 1 of the very few people who did the private sale for liquidity)
And boy did I strike it big indeed. Fast forward a month later, and on April 20th my $300-400 initial investment turned into a massive $5,000,000+ bag at the peak MC of 500m, and that’s after I sold a portion of my bag along the way for some 5figure profits.
However, this is also where I made my biggest mistake to date. Instead of selling all my tokens for ~$4.5-5m and re-investing it into safer projects that haven’t blown up yet and could give me virtually guaranteed returns in the coming months, my goal was to hit $10m with it and sell 90% of my tokens for a huge profit and leave a moonbag, or do that when my tokens were AT LEAST worth $7-8m. And although I was SO close to getting there on 2 occasions, big holders just kept selling their entire bags anytime it hit 500m MC and tanked the price (my goal was for it to reach 700-800m at least before selling a lot).
At the very end, I ended up getting out with a very disappointing, but still a large & respected 600-800k by the end of May. Along the way, I also made other great investments on BSC and some on ETH chain that became very successful, so my crypto networth was still well over $1m during this time. Not bad after starting the year off with around 2k a few months earlier, right?
Fast forward to the end of September/early October 2021, and after a very slow summer, I hit my biggest winner to date. After the success of Saitama, anime meme season started taking off. And amongst the many anime projects, I came across and invested very early on into 1 in particular called Mononoke Inu. I believe I invested around 1-2k at around 100k MC, and got 2% of the supply. The team seemed committed and the meme potential was huge.
Despite some early hiccups and FUD, slowly but surely it regained its momentum and then started REALLY taking off. Over the next few weeks, it went from a 50k MC project, to an ATH of ~650m at the end of October. A lot of that success came down to 1 guy who was crazy enough to invest 2-3m into it over the course of a week (sadly it turned out to be a bad investment for him, but I’m sure he’s very well off if that’s how much he could afford to invest in a memecoin), and that made everyone even more bullish than before.
And it was that exact week, nearly exactly 2 years ago, when I reached my ATH crypto networth of EXACTLY $10M, which has been my main goal that entire year and since I started my online business journey many years ago in 2016.
But there was 1 problem - the liquidity on Mononoke was TERRIBLE and very low, which on 1 hand was good because it allowed it to grow quicker, but on the other hand that meant that in order for me to cash out 5m+, I would not be able to do it right away and would have to sell it smaller chunks over time. And similarly to SafeMars, I got a bit too emotionally attached to it thinking it was going to keep going and that this time FOR SURE it would reach a 1b+ MC (after Saitama reached 2-3b at the same time) and I’ll have a $10m+ bag - especially given that the whole the market was looking very strong & bullish as well and December has always been historically a great month in crypto.
Well sadly after being SO CLOSE to start cashing out my millions, it became like SafeMars 2.0 all over again. Just as quickly as it went up, it started to crash as everyone started panic selling after several big whales dumped their bags, and since that moment it never really recovered.
I remember that day like it was yesterday, it all just happened so quickly and I barely even had any time to enjoy this achievement and analyze the best way to approach cashing out my tokens (it was all less than 1 day). So at the end of it all, I ended up getting out around 600-800k a week or 2 later, and missed out on another huge opportunity that felt like my last big chance given this was already the end of the year with not much time left before the start of 2022, which I was not very bullish on.
(By the way, during this whole time, since the summer of 2021, I left Canada and started traveling the world and getting a taste of that luxury lifestlye. I went to Latin America first and then to Europe in the summer of 2022, stayed in some incredible places & villas, went to epic business/personal development events, was living the life, and FINALLY achieved my biggest life dream since many years back when I first started my online business journey.)
Anyways, long story short, over the next few months I kept grinding it out and made some good success with several other projects that I got into early on, but Q1 of 2022 the whole market dipped a bit and became very neutral. Nothing much was happening, and at the beginning of May I made a promise to myself that if in the next few weeks nothing changes - I will cash out & sell everything I had at that time (around $2m worth of tokens), and leave crypto for the time being to focus on various business projects & ventures.
And before I knew it, on May 9th - “1-2 weeks before I planned to sell everything” the whole market flopped. Everything went on a HUGE dip, and by the end of May or beginning of June my 2m networth dropped all the way down to around 1m or even slightly below that. At that point I was very angry, frustrated, annoyed, confused, and didn’t know what to do - I couldn’t believe I mistimed this whole downfall by 2 F-ING WEEKS, or that it at least didn’t happen at the END of May or June instead.
I kept asking myself - do I remain calm and keep going to at least get back to 2m, or do I take the L, accept the loss, cash everything I have left and move on?
I didn’t want to sell at such a huge loss and decided to keep going, and at this point crypto became very mentally draining and was no longer as fun & exciting as it was in all of 2021. I just simply wanted to make my money back and be done for good.
But since I wasn’t in the best mental space, I ended up making some very poor and costly decisions by taking on too many big risks, much bigger than I did before (to speed up the process of making my money back), which also included sports betting - most of which did not pay off. And over the next year or so, I was slowly bleeding my money away and ended up going down to my last 50-100k by spring of this year (2023).
And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, life decided to throw even more lemons & challenges at me, and things took another toll.
One day, as I was getting ready to sell the majority of my most valuable NFTs for ~50k, I made one of the worst decisions to date and connected my wallet to a site that was not very reputable but seemed legit, because the buyer wanted to buy my entire NFT collection (instead of only a couple) for an amazing price, and his condition was to do it through that website which he claimed was a reliable escrow service for crypto & NFT transactions. Well, shortly after connecting my wallet and being unable to do the trade after he kept making a bunch of weird excuses (which already seemed fishy to me), 30mins later I get many notifications that all my NFTs have been transferred over to another wallet.
At that moment I felt like my heart just dropped.
Yep, I got hacked & wiped out for the last big amount I had left trying to exit crypto with and start fresh, and that was one of the toughest and worst feelings I’ve felt in my life and one of my lowest points. I went from being a multi-millionaire a year ago, to having virtually nothing left after 2.5 long & tough years of grinding it out everyday (and even longer as I started my online journey at the end of 2016), which felt like all that effort was for NOTHING (although on the positive side I gained a lot of valuable experience and learnt some tough lessons).
I also had a lot of bills to pay, daily expenses to cover, and an expensive flight ticket to purchase to return back to Canada and visit my family who kept asking me every time we spoke when I’ll come back for a visit, and a few months before that we agreed I’ll be back during the summer time in 2023. This was also the best time to visit because my grandparents from another country came for a 2 month visit this summer, and really wanted to see me.
Luckily I had some other NFTs & tokens in other wallets, and I managed to get enough to buy a pretty expensive $1.5k *1-way, economy* 5 hour flight ticket from Panama City to Toronto, and this summer I spent a lot of time with my family, grandparents, friends, played tennis weekly (for the first time since I left a few years back), and most importantly started to go through a lot of my former books, as well as physical + digital notes and strategizing how I plan to getting back on track and reach the level I was at my peak. So the timing of me returning to visit my family was perfect.
Fast forward to today, and I decided to document my whole journey and this new chapter of my life across various social media platforms - firstly for myself to 1 day look back and see how far I’ve come; but most importantly to network with like-minded people who are on the same path as me, and in general for anyone who would like to follow me & my journey and hopefully use it as inspiration.
I am very ambitious and have set a lot of big goals & things I plan to achieve by the end of this year as well as for 2024 and the years to come (a lot of which I’ll be building on top off from various online business projects I was working on a few years prior to getting into crypto).
I’d like to believe that my recent turn of events has been a blessing in disguise, as tough times are part of a hero’s journey. Going forward, I’m ready & excited to overcome any obstacle that comes my way and come back BIGGER & STRONGER than ever before. I’m making this commitment to myself and I’ll do whatever it takes to get back to where I was at my peak, TIMES 10, while making a big & positive impact in the world along the way.
More specifically, from now until the end of the year - I plan to partner with a lot of influencers on YouTube & IG and help them create, package, price, sell, and scale their online coaching program to millions & beyond; and overall to help busy entrepreneurs work smarter and automate various parts of their business to free up their time. This will be my main focus going forward, and I also plan to document my weekly progress about it on here as well, so keep an eye on my future posts.
I know this was a bit long, so thank you for taking the time to read my story, and I look forward to personally connect with you more closely! Also, let me know if you have any questions for me in the comments below and I’ll happily answer.
Cheers to our greatness & success
DeNero
P.S. I’m still a huge believer in crypto and will always own & invest in crypto long-term, I just came to a realization that this is not my passion, calling, or purpose in life; and although it may be fun, I do not get true fulfillment by buying & selling different tokens/coins.
Also, if anyone here happens to know the best way to structure a US LLC for a non-US resident (to accept payments online), and be able to quickly start a corporation in a foreign + reliable country with a low tax rate (<10%) and then connect the 2 together to transfer funds, I'd love to hear your experience & tips on the best way to go about it the right way.
(WARNING: This is a LONG read)
My name is DeNero, and as my first post on here, I wanted to start off by introducing myself and sharing a bit about who I am and my story.
I remember first reading TMF in the summer 2016 (and Unscripted a few years later). During that time I was very motivated to start an online business, work from anywhere, make millions every year, and travel around the world - and this was one of the best business books I read at the time that kickstarted my path.But my journey got off to a bit of a rocky start, where I started and pursued different online businesses/opportunities, and despite having some decent success with them - it was never really consistent enough to the point where I could comfortably travel full-time, afford whatever I wanted, and not have to worry about the price tag (aka at least 10k+/m in profits).
But then came 2021 and everything changed. It was the first time since I started my business journey, where I truly experienced a huge breakthrough and the BIG success that I always dreamed about. However, as you read from the title, to say that the last few years of my life have been a rollercoaster, would be quite an understatement. So without further ado - here is how it all went down:
At the end of 2020 I got into crypto, but more specifically into the whole world of DeFi (I actually first got into crypto in 2017, but that story is for another day). It was a very exciting innovation in the crypto space, and I spent a lot of time learning as much as I could about it. However during that time, I didn't have too much money to invest, only around 2k, as I was working part-time as a coat checker at a banquet hall on the weekends, making on average $120-200/night and about 2-3k/month (and keeping a lot less after paying off a lot of expenses); but despite that I invested as much as I could in various projects in the DeFi space, while trying to figure out how to succeed & make money online so I can travel the world full-time which has always been my biggest dream & motivation.
After a month or so of daily grinding, at the end of January I finally hit my first big “win”. As many of you have probably heard of it, this project was none other than Shiba Inu - in which my friends & I were its first investors in 2021 way before it blew up & everyone started talking about it (at the time it had 0 daily volume and had a MC of 150-200k). However, as most people who got into it as early as I have, sadly I didn’t hold my tokens for very long after the big & very long consolidation & downfall of its first big run (it went down 90%+ and stayed that low for several weeks, which at the time felt like months); but I still was able to turn a $500 investment into 10k within a week or so (I can tell you the whole story about Shiba, its origins, how I found it, how we made it initially blow up, etc another day if you’d like).
And even though it’s not much, this opened a lot more doors and gave much more money to play with, which increased my chances of striking it REALLY big & potentially making millions, at least that’s what I believed and the way I saw it at the time.
Fast forward about a month or 2, and I moved from ETH to a brand new chain called BSC which was created by Binance. At the time it felt like a goldmine because it JUST started popping off, so I decided to go all in on that chain and become one of the earliest investors on it.
Initially things were very rocky and I ended up losing at least half of my 10k due to P&D projects or complete scams/rugs, leaving me with around 5k after a few weeks. But a few weeks later after a lot of grinding & hard work, I finally struck the golden project that I’ve been looking for all along, and this project was called SafeMars.
In a nutshell, SafeMars piggy-backed off the success of the original SafeMoon, which reached an ATH of 10B MC. After missing the SafeMoon train early on (even though funny enough I first saw it during the presale and considered investing, but decided to pass because it felt like a scam & too risky), I came across SafeMars in the beginning of March; and I knew this was my 2nd chance to get in SUPER early and strike it big. So I decided to invest a total of $300–400 at 25–30k MC and got 1–2% of the supply (I also was 1 of the very few people who did the private sale for liquidity)
And boy did I strike it big indeed. Fast forward a month later, and on April 20th my $300-400 initial investment turned into a massive $5,000,000+ bag at the peak MC of 500m, and that’s after I sold a portion of my bag along the way for some 5figure profits.
However, this is also where I made my biggest mistake to date. Instead of selling all my tokens for ~$4.5-5m and re-investing it into safer projects that haven’t blown up yet and could give me virtually guaranteed returns in the coming months, my goal was to hit $10m with it and sell 90% of my tokens for a huge profit and leave a moonbag, or do that when my tokens were AT LEAST worth $7-8m. And although I was SO close to getting there on 2 occasions, big holders just kept selling their entire bags anytime it hit 500m MC and tanked the price (my goal was for it to reach 700-800m at least before selling a lot).
At the very end, I ended up getting out with a very disappointing, but still a large & respected 600-800k by the end of May. Along the way, I also made other great investments on BSC and some on ETH chain that became very successful, so my crypto networth was still well over $1m during this time. Not bad after starting the year off with around 2k a few months earlier, right?
Fast forward to the end of September/early October 2021, and after a very slow summer, I hit my biggest winner to date. After the success of Saitama, anime meme season started taking off. And amongst the many anime projects, I came across and invested very early on into 1 in particular called Mononoke Inu. I believe I invested around 1-2k at around 100k MC, and got 2% of the supply. The team seemed committed and the meme potential was huge.
Despite some early hiccups and FUD, slowly but surely it regained its momentum and then started REALLY taking off. Over the next few weeks, it went from a 50k MC project, to an ATH of ~650m at the end of October. A lot of that success came down to 1 guy who was crazy enough to invest 2-3m into it over the course of a week (sadly it turned out to be a bad investment for him, but I’m sure he’s very well off if that’s how much he could afford to invest in a memecoin), and that made everyone even more bullish than before.
And it was that exact week, nearly exactly 2 years ago, when I reached my ATH crypto networth of EXACTLY $10M, which has been my main goal that entire year and since I started my online business journey many years ago in 2016.
But there was 1 problem - the liquidity on Mononoke was TERRIBLE and very low, which on 1 hand was good because it allowed it to grow quicker, but on the other hand that meant that in order for me to cash out 5m+, I would not be able to do it right away and would have to sell it smaller chunks over time. And similarly to SafeMars, I got a bit too emotionally attached to it thinking it was going to keep going and that this time FOR SURE it would reach a 1b+ MC (after Saitama reached 2-3b at the same time) and I’ll have a $10m+ bag - especially given that the whole the market was looking very strong & bullish as well and December has always been historically a great month in crypto.
Well sadly after being SO CLOSE to start cashing out my millions, it became like SafeMars 2.0 all over again. Just as quickly as it went up, it started to crash as everyone started panic selling after several big whales dumped their bags, and since that moment it never really recovered.
I remember that day like it was yesterday, it all just happened so quickly and I barely even had any time to enjoy this achievement and analyze the best way to approach cashing out my tokens (it was all less than 1 day). So at the end of it all, I ended up getting out around 600-800k a week or 2 later, and missed out on another huge opportunity that felt like my last big chance given this was already the end of the year with not much time left before the start of 2022, which I was not very bullish on.
(By the way, during this whole time, since the summer of 2021, I left Canada and started traveling the world and getting a taste of that luxury lifestlye. I went to Latin America first and then to Europe in the summer of 2022, stayed in some incredible places & villas, went to epic business/personal development events, was living the life, and FINALLY achieved my biggest life dream since many years back when I first started my online business journey.)
Anyways, long story short, over the next few months I kept grinding it out and made some good success with several other projects that I got into early on, but Q1 of 2022 the whole market dipped a bit and became very neutral. Nothing much was happening, and at the beginning of May I made a promise to myself that if in the next few weeks nothing changes - I will cash out & sell everything I had at that time (around $2m worth of tokens), and leave crypto for the time being to focus on various business projects & ventures.
And before I knew it, on May 9th - “1-2 weeks before I planned to sell everything” the whole market flopped. Everything went on a HUGE dip, and by the end of May or beginning of June my 2m networth dropped all the way down to around 1m or even slightly below that. At that point I was very angry, frustrated, annoyed, confused, and didn’t know what to do - I couldn’t believe I mistimed this whole downfall by 2 F-ING WEEKS, or that it at least didn’t happen at the END of May or June instead.
I kept asking myself - do I remain calm and keep going to at least get back to 2m, or do I take the L, accept the loss, cash everything I have left and move on?
I didn’t want to sell at such a huge loss and decided to keep going, and at this point crypto became very mentally draining and was no longer as fun & exciting as it was in all of 2021. I just simply wanted to make my money back and be done for good.
But since I wasn’t in the best mental space, I ended up making some very poor and costly decisions by taking on too many big risks, much bigger than I did before (to speed up the process of making my money back), which also included sports betting - most of which did not pay off. And over the next year or so, I was slowly bleeding my money away and ended up going down to my last 50-100k by spring of this year (2023).
And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, life decided to throw even more lemons & challenges at me, and things took another toll.
One day, as I was getting ready to sell the majority of my most valuable NFTs for ~50k, I made one of the worst decisions to date and connected my wallet to a site that was not very reputable but seemed legit, because the buyer wanted to buy my entire NFT collection (instead of only a couple) for an amazing price, and his condition was to do it through that website which he claimed was a reliable escrow service for crypto & NFT transactions. Well, shortly after connecting my wallet and being unable to do the trade after he kept making a bunch of weird excuses (which already seemed fishy to me), 30mins later I get many notifications that all my NFTs have been transferred over to another wallet.
At that moment I felt like my heart just dropped.
Yep, I got hacked & wiped out for the last big amount I had left trying to exit crypto with and start fresh, and that was one of the toughest and worst feelings I’ve felt in my life and one of my lowest points. I went from being a multi-millionaire a year ago, to having virtually nothing left after 2.5 long & tough years of grinding it out everyday (and even longer as I started my online journey at the end of 2016), which felt like all that effort was for NOTHING (although on the positive side I gained a lot of valuable experience and learnt some tough lessons).
I also had a lot of bills to pay, daily expenses to cover, and an expensive flight ticket to purchase to return back to Canada and visit my family who kept asking me every time we spoke when I’ll come back for a visit, and a few months before that we agreed I’ll be back during the summer time in 2023. This was also the best time to visit because my grandparents from another country came for a 2 month visit this summer, and really wanted to see me.
Luckily I had some other NFTs & tokens in other wallets, and I managed to get enough to buy a pretty expensive $1.5k *1-way, economy* 5 hour flight ticket from Panama City to Toronto, and this summer I spent a lot of time with my family, grandparents, friends, played tennis weekly (for the first time since I left a few years back), and most importantly started to go through a lot of my former books, as well as physical + digital notes and strategizing how I plan to getting back on track and reach the level I was at my peak. So the timing of me returning to visit my family was perfect.
Fast forward to today, and I decided to document my whole journey and this new chapter of my life across various social media platforms - firstly for myself to 1 day look back and see how far I’ve come; but most importantly to network with like-minded people who are on the same path as me, and in general for anyone who would like to follow me & my journey and hopefully use it as inspiration.
I am very ambitious and have set a lot of big goals & things I plan to achieve by the end of this year as well as for 2024 and the years to come (a lot of which I’ll be building on top off from various online business projects I was working on a few years prior to getting into crypto).
I’d like to believe that my recent turn of events has been a blessing in disguise, as tough times are part of a hero’s journey. Going forward, I’m ready & excited to overcome any obstacle that comes my way and come back BIGGER & STRONGER than ever before. I’m making this commitment to myself and I’ll do whatever it takes to get back to where I was at my peak, TIMES 10, while making a big & positive impact in the world along the way.
More specifically, from now until the end of the year - I plan to partner with a lot of influencers on YouTube & IG and help them create, package, price, sell, and scale their online coaching program to millions & beyond; and overall to help busy entrepreneurs work smarter and automate various parts of their business to free up their time. This will be my main focus going forward, and I also plan to document my weekly progress about it on here as well, so keep an eye on my future posts.
I know this was a bit long, so thank you for taking the time to read my story, and I look forward to personally connect with you more closely! Also, let me know if you have any questions for me in the comments below and I’ll happily answer.
Cheers to our greatness & success
DeNero
P.S. I’m still a huge believer in crypto and will always own & invest in crypto long-term, I just came to a realization that this is not my passion, calling, or purpose in life; and although it may be fun, I do not get true fulfillment by buying & selling different tokens/coins.
Also, if anyone here happens to know the best way to structure a US LLC for a non-US resident (to accept payments online), and be able to quickly start a corporation in a foreign + reliable country with a low tax rate (<10%) and then connect the 2 together to transfer funds, I'd love to hear your experience & tips on the best way to go about it the right way.
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