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Hi everyone, Lukas here. I'm a 22 year old guy from Sweden who likes to learn, discover new ideas and ways to do stuff, as well as analyze stuff and find loopholes. I also have a tendency to dabble with different projects, and I tend to regularly doubt and reconsider whatever I'm doing.
Most of all however, I’m really sold on the Fastlane way of life. I’m not there yet by any means, but for anyone interested, I've written a recap of my journey from my "F*ck this event (FTE)" up until this point in time.
If you're curious to see what happens if you dabble in a bunch of things, do black hat stuff, or just take people’s advice on YouTube really seriously, you may find this useful. If you want to become a digital nomad and work remotely, you may also be able to take something away from my own experience with working towards that.
Either way - happy to be here!
2016
The FTE. Sometime during my final year of high school, roughly 3-4 years ago, I had a realization most of you are probably familiar with:
"Shit, I'm growing up. Soon I'll have to get a job and continue working until I'm old and retire. I don't want that."
So I decided to something (you know, watch YouTube-videos).
TMF , self-dev and dreaming. Around this time was when I first stumbled upon The Millionaire Fastlane . The book confirmed my beliefs and opened my eyes to entrepreneurship, being the only path that could help me dodge a lifetime of working for other people.
I wanted to be free, to travel and experience the world. I watched a lot of YouTube-videos at this time, and was drawn in by the alluring notion of earning passive income while traveling the world and putting minimal amounts of effort in.
So I quit video games (I'd been a serious gamer throughout my teens) and decided to make Real Life my new video game of choice. Started going to the gym more often, socialized more, binge-watched self-development videos and read those same types of books until I knew all the analogies and references presented in them.
Applying for college. Soon enough it was time to apply to college, and I had to come up with an answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?".
At this point I'd become really excited about the Digital nomad lifestyle I'd watched so many YouTube-videos about, and I realized my best shot at remote work was studying something that could be done from a computer. "Anything in IT will do", I thought - having no previous experience or interest in programming or anything like that. So I signed up for a degree in Information systems. Since college is free in Sweden where I live, I didn’t have to take any student loans. I could also continue living at home while studying.
College. College was exciting at first and I learned quite a lot during my first year, but the focus on drinking and partying really wasn’t for me. I also realized everything was designed to prepare us for working in the corporate world, something which I had no interest in whatsoever. I just wanted to live my Digital nomad lifestyle!
YouTube and my first SEO-experience. During high school, I'd been quite a serious Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) player and this was something I was still pretty passionate about. So, I started making YouTube-videos on the topic.
One day, I found a way to get my videos displayed to people in-game all over the world. I created a guide on the popular gaming platform Steam and embedded my video in it. With a little help from my gamer friends, I got the guide to rank at the top of the Steam CS:GO guides directory, which led to my videos generating thousands of views.
My top video got around 40k views, and my channel only had a handful of subscribers at the time. This was my first dip into the world of SEO.
I then made a website following YouTube-tutorials and started charging a couple of people $15 for analyzing their in-game recordings and providing feedback as to how they could improve their game.
Falling for a YouTube-guru's tricks. A cold winter evening, I stayed up late, watching a YouTube Live webinar by a guru I'd been following on YouTube. The bald guru was all about self development and passive income, and had just released a brand new course on building an online business for $1399 or something. My judgement must have been pretty clouded at that point in time, because I fell for his promises and spent all my savings on his course in the hopes of finally making some real money online.
I soon realized this was a mistake, so I took advantage of his 30 day money-back guarantee and got a refund (luckily).
Self-publishing on Amazon. I quickly found another guru calling bullshit on the first guru, and offering a better alternative: his Amazon Kindle Publishing online-course. The course was going to teach us step-by-step how to make a bunch of money with Kindle publishing. The guy wasn't very likeable but at least he seemed authentic, and his course was a lot cheaper than the other one, so I thought meh - let's go for it.
2017
Publishing Kindle books on Amazon. Following the course, I did keyword research on Amazon, identified opportunities, outsourced writing, cover creation and review generation, and published books to Kindle. I didn't have a lot of money to play with, so I couldn't do more than 2-3 books at a time. To save money, I wrote a couple myself too.
This online course "blueprint" actually kind of worked - at least for a bit - and I made my money back and then some. Soon enough however, enough people found out about it, and it became increasingly hard to find profitable keywords. As Amazon noticed the increase in low quality books with fake reviews taking up space in their search results pages, they cranked down on many of the outsource publishers, leading to hefty fines, bans and deleted reviews.
In the end, I decided it wasn't worth the effort anymore, as I didn't want to risk reinvesting everything only to have my account banned, so I stopped publishing new books. (One year later, I was indeed banned from the platform).
Discovering Digital marketing (as a career option). Still in college, I was convinced by another YouTube-channel to get into Digital marketing. At this point in time, I was still eager to leave Sweden for a warmer country and become a digital nomad, and freelancing in digital marketing could allow this to happen. I also reasoned that digital marketing was a key skill for me to learn, and that mastering it would make it easier for me to find sustainable success with my own online businesses later on.
So, I enrolled in this online course on Google Ads and SEO and proceeded to get a digital marketing interview for a company in Stockholm. I was only 19 at the time and didn't feel ready to start commuting to another city however, so I quickly turned it down and remained in college throughout the year.
2018
Taking a "sabbatical" (dropping out of college). As last year begun, I'd grown tired of grinding my gears in college working towards something I didn't believe in (a corporate future). Thus, I decided to drop out quietly by taking a sabbatical (I was still living at home and knew my parents wouldn't be happy if I dropped out).
My plan was originally to start freelancing, and I'd bought a course that'd help me get started with that. I also worked part-time as a substitute teacher at the time. In my spare time I'd taken an SEO-course on Udemy, so I knew the basics in theory.
Becoming an SEO-specialist. In the first few weeks of being out of school, I registered a business and started by reaching out to all of my friends. I told them I was able to help people rank in search engines with the hopes of getting a lead or referral from someone. (To be honest I'd barely ranked a website in Google by this point, but I'd been doing Amazon SEO and that online course so at least I guess I knew some more than a lot of local business owners.)
As it happened, I found out one of my friends had a stepdad who owned a small local digital marketing agency who were on the lookout for new talent. (Because most people don't even know what SEO or AdWords is, there's always a demand for specialists within these fields.)
In order to land an interview with his company, I audited their website and wrote down what needed to change for it to be SEO-optimized. This seemed to have worked well as I was invited to an interview. The following day or so, the phone rang, and I'd been hired full-time as an SEO-specialist at the agency.
Why did I get a job instead of freelancing? I figured a job would allow me to learn much quicker, from people more experienced and skilled than myself.
This turned out to be a good choice I think - in hindsight I've learned sooo much throughout my 1.5 years at the agency, much thanks to looking at what my senior colleagues are doing and trying lots of different things on my own. I remember the first few days I didn't understand any of the jargon and technical terms being thrown around, but it didn't take long before I kind of got the gist of it.
As if the new job wasn't enough of a change, two days into it I got myself a girlfriend...
All of this meant a big change in my life. From having been a student and single, I now found myself at an office all day, spending time with my girfriend during the evenings. Here's where the remaining time went:
Starting a website for high-school students. During this time, I noticed the need for a new website. When I was graduating high school, my class had used a website in order to vote and come up with personal "titles" for each other. In Sweden, there's a tradition to get descriptive titles like these when graduating. These titles are supposed to describe who you were in relation to your class during the past years.
Anyway, when my girlfriend's class was going to vote, I discovered the website was no longer around. So, I decided to build a better version of the one I'd used back in the day. I thought this would make for a fun side project where I'd also get to freshen up my PHP programming skills that would also come in handy at work.
I got an MVP of the website done just before the graduation period, which allowed some classes to use it and report potential bugs. This was a great learning experience, and I now had another year to really grow and improve the website before next years' graduation.
Negotiating a remote work agreement. As spring became summer, I sent out a quick application for a remote job at a cool digital marketing agency in Stockholm. Just like last time, I went ahead and provided value up front with an SEO-audit in order to get their attention, and it worked this time as well. After a long interview process with phone interviews, online tests and a visit to their office, I was offered a position as a junior SEO. After 3 months onsite, I'd be able to work from anywhere in the world, they said.
I wasn't sure about this. I was living comfortably at home in my hometown, with my girlfriend 10 minutes away. My current job wasn't bad either, in fact I had a lot of freedom and responsibility over my tasks. Noone micro-managing me or anything like that.
After discussing with my current employer, we came to an agreement that I'd get to work remotely at my current job, which led to me denying the other offer. (Right now, I'm thinking of moving abroad in the beginning of next year).
2019
Stepping down to part-time. In order to free up more time to build my own business, I decreased my working hours to part time, 3 days a week.
Dabbling in freelancing. In February, I got my first SEO-client. However, I soon realized there was no real point in committing to freelancing on a larger scale. After all, the goal is to build a CENTS business as per MJs books.
Student website growing. Throughout the year, my student website had gained a lot of traction, and schools from all over the country were registering for free. Because of this, I started thinking of ways to monetize the user base. I wrote a buyer's guide for graduation clothes with affiliate links embedded and promoted it through e-mail. I also negotiated a deal with a company that could print sashes with the titles my users came up with using my website. As such, I started dropshipping those sashes to my users. Finally, I installed Google Adsense on the website.
By the time of graduation 2019, my website had about 17 000 registered users and addresses on the e-mail list. Since Sweden isn't that big of a country, it was a decent part of the total amount of graduates in the country for the year, so I was happy about that. As for the money generated, I made about $5 000. Not bad, but still a seasonal side business.
Starting a fashion website. After hitting a plateau with the student website and seeing the potential with affiliate marketing first hand, I decided to start a second website - this time in the women’s fashion niche. I didn’t have any experience nor interest in the niche, but on the other hand I help all kinds of companies’ websites rank every day at work, so I figured why not build an asset like that for myself. I got some recent high school graduates to help me write some content for pretty cheap.
Managing multiple writers turned out to be harder than I thought and I couldn’t afford to pay them a lot either, so I decided to just stick with one or two and then work up from there once I had enough work to justify having more. (Should have realized that from the beginning, but I was so up in the clouds with my world domination empire plans).
As of today, this website is my main focus. When the next article on it is done, I’ll be applying for affiliate networks. After that, I’m going to be making content around affiliate offers and building out an online store.
Getting my feet wet in digital nomadism. Last month, me and a colleague from work went to visit another old colleague and friend who was staying in Croatia for two weeks. This was my first real experience working online from abroad. Did I like it? Yeah, it was nice. Definitely something I could see myself doing. Over time however, I’ve come to realize that traveling and living in different countries - while great, don’t get me wrong - is not the part of freedom I’m after the most. Being in complete control of my own time and not have to be dependent on working for other people now feels most important to me, so that’s what I’m working towards.
Moving out. This week, I moved out of my parents’ place. I have about $40k saved up from working and doing a little bit of business as described in this post, while still living at home. I’m saving this money as “f* you money” - an emergency fund for when I take the leap and quit my current job.
I was hoping living alone would give me enough peace and quiet to focus - and it certainly is nice and peaceful. However, I've quickly come to realize that I need some more accountability - trying to grow a business and get stuff done in isolation just isn't cutting it for me. For this reason I'm planning to regularly report on my progress in the Execution subforum as well.
If you’ve read this far - I’m happy you’ve found my ramblings interesting enough. Also, I encourage you to comment below with whatever you’re thinking. I always appreciate new perspectives on things.
See you around!
Most of all however, I’m really sold on the Fastlane way of life. I’m not there yet by any means, but for anyone interested, I've written a recap of my journey from my "F*ck this event (FTE)" up until this point in time.
If you're curious to see what happens if you dabble in a bunch of things, do black hat stuff, or just take people’s advice on YouTube really seriously, you may find this useful. If you want to become a digital nomad and work remotely, you may also be able to take something away from my own experience with working towards that.
Either way - happy to be here!
2016
The FTE. Sometime during my final year of high school, roughly 3-4 years ago, I had a realization most of you are probably familiar with:
"Shit, I'm growing up. Soon I'll have to get a job and continue working until I'm old and retire. I don't want that."
So I decided to something (you know, watch YouTube-videos).
TMF , self-dev and dreaming. Around this time was when I first stumbled upon The Millionaire Fastlane . The book confirmed my beliefs and opened my eyes to entrepreneurship, being the only path that could help me dodge a lifetime of working for other people.
I wanted to be free, to travel and experience the world. I watched a lot of YouTube-videos at this time, and was drawn in by the alluring notion of earning passive income while traveling the world and putting minimal amounts of effort in.
So I quit video games (I'd been a serious gamer throughout my teens) and decided to make Real Life my new video game of choice. Started going to the gym more often, socialized more, binge-watched self-development videos and read those same types of books until I knew all the analogies and references presented in them.
Applying for college. Soon enough it was time to apply to college, and I had to come up with an answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?".
At this point I'd become really excited about the Digital nomad lifestyle I'd watched so many YouTube-videos about, and I realized my best shot at remote work was studying something that could be done from a computer. "Anything in IT will do", I thought - having no previous experience or interest in programming or anything like that. So I signed up for a degree in Information systems. Since college is free in Sweden where I live, I didn’t have to take any student loans. I could also continue living at home while studying.
College. College was exciting at first and I learned quite a lot during my first year, but the focus on drinking and partying really wasn’t for me. I also realized everything was designed to prepare us for working in the corporate world, something which I had no interest in whatsoever. I just wanted to live my Digital nomad lifestyle!
YouTube and my first SEO-experience. During high school, I'd been quite a serious Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) player and this was something I was still pretty passionate about. So, I started making YouTube-videos on the topic.
One day, I found a way to get my videos displayed to people in-game all over the world. I created a guide on the popular gaming platform Steam and embedded my video in it. With a little help from my gamer friends, I got the guide to rank at the top of the Steam CS:GO guides directory, which led to my videos generating thousands of views.
My top video got around 40k views, and my channel only had a handful of subscribers at the time. This was my first dip into the world of SEO.
I then made a website following YouTube-tutorials and started charging a couple of people $15 for analyzing their in-game recordings and providing feedback as to how they could improve their game.
Falling for a YouTube-guru's tricks. A cold winter evening, I stayed up late, watching a YouTube Live webinar by a guru I'd been following on YouTube. The bald guru was all about self development and passive income, and had just released a brand new course on building an online business for $1399 or something. My judgement must have been pretty clouded at that point in time, because I fell for his promises and spent all my savings on his course in the hopes of finally making some real money online.
I soon realized this was a mistake, so I took advantage of his 30 day money-back guarantee and got a refund (luckily).
Self-publishing on Amazon. I quickly found another guru calling bullshit on the first guru, and offering a better alternative: his Amazon Kindle Publishing online-course. The course was going to teach us step-by-step how to make a bunch of money with Kindle publishing. The guy wasn't very likeable but at least he seemed authentic, and his course was a lot cheaper than the other one, so I thought meh - let's go for it.
2017
Publishing Kindle books on Amazon. Following the course, I did keyword research on Amazon, identified opportunities, outsourced writing, cover creation and review generation, and published books to Kindle. I didn't have a lot of money to play with, so I couldn't do more than 2-3 books at a time. To save money, I wrote a couple myself too.
This online course "blueprint" actually kind of worked - at least for a bit - and I made my money back and then some. Soon enough however, enough people found out about it, and it became increasingly hard to find profitable keywords. As Amazon noticed the increase in low quality books with fake reviews taking up space in their search results pages, they cranked down on many of the outsource publishers, leading to hefty fines, bans and deleted reviews.
In the end, I decided it wasn't worth the effort anymore, as I didn't want to risk reinvesting everything only to have my account banned, so I stopped publishing new books. (One year later, I was indeed banned from the platform).
Discovering Digital marketing (as a career option). Still in college, I was convinced by another YouTube-channel to get into Digital marketing. At this point in time, I was still eager to leave Sweden for a warmer country and become a digital nomad, and freelancing in digital marketing could allow this to happen. I also reasoned that digital marketing was a key skill for me to learn, and that mastering it would make it easier for me to find sustainable success with my own online businesses later on.
So, I enrolled in this online course on Google Ads and SEO and proceeded to get a digital marketing interview for a company in Stockholm. I was only 19 at the time and didn't feel ready to start commuting to another city however, so I quickly turned it down and remained in college throughout the year.
2018
Taking a "sabbatical" (dropping out of college). As last year begun, I'd grown tired of grinding my gears in college working towards something I didn't believe in (a corporate future). Thus, I decided to drop out quietly by taking a sabbatical (I was still living at home and knew my parents wouldn't be happy if I dropped out).
My plan was originally to start freelancing, and I'd bought a course that'd help me get started with that. I also worked part-time as a substitute teacher at the time. In my spare time I'd taken an SEO-course on Udemy, so I knew the basics in theory.
Becoming an SEO-specialist. In the first few weeks of being out of school, I registered a business and started by reaching out to all of my friends. I told them I was able to help people rank in search engines with the hopes of getting a lead or referral from someone. (To be honest I'd barely ranked a website in Google by this point, but I'd been doing Amazon SEO and that online course so at least I guess I knew some more than a lot of local business owners.)
As it happened, I found out one of my friends had a stepdad who owned a small local digital marketing agency who were on the lookout for new talent. (Because most people don't even know what SEO or AdWords is, there's always a demand for specialists within these fields.)
In order to land an interview with his company, I audited their website and wrote down what needed to change for it to be SEO-optimized. This seemed to have worked well as I was invited to an interview. The following day or so, the phone rang, and I'd been hired full-time as an SEO-specialist at the agency.
Why did I get a job instead of freelancing? I figured a job would allow me to learn much quicker, from people more experienced and skilled than myself.
This turned out to be a good choice I think - in hindsight I've learned sooo much throughout my 1.5 years at the agency, much thanks to looking at what my senior colleagues are doing and trying lots of different things on my own. I remember the first few days I didn't understand any of the jargon and technical terms being thrown around, but it didn't take long before I kind of got the gist of it.
As if the new job wasn't enough of a change, two days into it I got myself a girlfriend...
All of this meant a big change in my life. From having been a student and single, I now found myself at an office all day, spending time with my girfriend during the evenings. Here's where the remaining time went:
Starting a website for high-school students. During this time, I noticed the need for a new website. When I was graduating high school, my class had used a website in order to vote and come up with personal "titles" for each other. In Sweden, there's a tradition to get descriptive titles like these when graduating. These titles are supposed to describe who you were in relation to your class during the past years.
Anyway, when my girlfriend's class was going to vote, I discovered the website was no longer around. So, I decided to build a better version of the one I'd used back in the day. I thought this would make for a fun side project where I'd also get to freshen up my PHP programming skills that would also come in handy at work.
I got an MVP of the website done just before the graduation period, which allowed some classes to use it and report potential bugs. This was a great learning experience, and I now had another year to really grow and improve the website before next years' graduation.
Negotiating a remote work agreement. As spring became summer, I sent out a quick application for a remote job at a cool digital marketing agency in Stockholm. Just like last time, I went ahead and provided value up front with an SEO-audit in order to get their attention, and it worked this time as well. After a long interview process with phone interviews, online tests and a visit to their office, I was offered a position as a junior SEO. After 3 months onsite, I'd be able to work from anywhere in the world, they said.
I wasn't sure about this. I was living comfortably at home in my hometown, with my girlfriend 10 minutes away. My current job wasn't bad either, in fact I had a lot of freedom and responsibility over my tasks. Noone micro-managing me or anything like that.
After discussing with my current employer, we came to an agreement that I'd get to work remotely at my current job, which led to me denying the other offer. (Right now, I'm thinking of moving abroad in the beginning of next year).
2019
Stepping down to part-time. In order to free up more time to build my own business, I decreased my working hours to part time, 3 days a week.
Dabbling in freelancing. In February, I got my first SEO-client. However, I soon realized there was no real point in committing to freelancing on a larger scale. After all, the goal is to build a CENTS business as per MJs books.
Student website growing. Throughout the year, my student website had gained a lot of traction, and schools from all over the country were registering for free. Because of this, I started thinking of ways to monetize the user base. I wrote a buyer's guide for graduation clothes with affiliate links embedded and promoted it through e-mail. I also negotiated a deal with a company that could print sashes with the titles my users came up with using my website. As such, I started dropshipping those sashes to my users. Finally, I installed Google Adsense on the website.
By the time of graduation 2019, my website had about 17 000 registered users and addresses on the e-mail list. Since Sweden isn't that big of a country, it was a decent part of the total amount of graduates in the country for the year, so I was happy about that. As for the money generated, I made about $5 000. Not bad, but still a seasonal side business.
Starting a fashion website. After hitting a plateau with the student website and seeing the potential with affiliate marketing first hand, I decided to start a second website - this time in the women’s fashion niche. I didn’t have any experience nor interest in the niche, but on the other hand I help all kinds of companies’ websites rank every day at work, so I figured why not build an asset like that for myself. I got some recent high school graduates to help me write some content for pretty cheap.
Managing multiple writers turned out to be harder than I thought and I couldn’t afford to pay them a lot either, so I decided to just stick with one or two and then work up from there once I had enough work to justify having more. (Should have realized that from the beginning, but I was so up in the clouds with my world domination empire plans).
As of today, this website is my main focus. When the next article on it is done, I’ll be applying for affiliate networks. After that, I’m going to be making content around affiliate offers and building out an online store.
Getting my feet wet in digital nomadism. Last month, me and a colleague from work went to visit another old colleague and friend who was staying in Croatia for two weeks. This was my first real experience working online from abroad. Did I like it? Yeah, it was nice. Definitely something I could see myself doing. Over time however, I’ve come to realize that traveling and living in different countries - while great, don’t get me wrong - is not the part of freedom I’m after the most. Being in complete control of my own time and not have to be dependent on working for other people now feels most important to me, so that’s what I’m working towards.
Moving out. This week, I moved out of my parents’ place. I have about $40k saved up from working and doing a little bit of business as described in this post, while still living at home. I’m saving this money as “f* you money” - an emergency fund for when I take the leap and quit my current job.
I was hoping living alone would give me enough peace and quiet to focus - and it certainly is nice and peaceful. However, I've quickly come to realize that I need some more accountability - trying to grow a business and get stuff done in isolation just isn't cutting it for me. For this reason I'm planning to regularly report on my progress in the Execution subforum as well.
If you’ve read this far - I’m happy you’ve found my ramblings interesting enough. Also, I encourage you to comment below with whatever you’re thinking. I always appreciate new perspectives on things.
See you around!
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