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WARNING: This is an exceptionally long post. I decided to be critical and self-reflective and just started writing…and I wrote A LOT over these last few days. I don’t expect too many people to read this all the way through, and I don’t blame you if you don’t. However, if you do, and have advice to offer, I’ll read every word of every comment and do my best to respond.
Thank you, truly.
@Andy Black got ChatGPT to write TL;DR if this post looks daunting, so I'll include that here:
The author is a 30-year-old living with his parents, working a part-time job he dislikes, and struggling with multiple failed business ventures, including Clickfunnels, dropshipping, copywriting, employee retention credits, and SMMA/SAAS for mortgage loan officers. He is seeking a way to achieve $10,000 per month to move out, pay off student loans, and help his parents retire. Despite his tech-savvy skills, discipline, and charm, he feels stuck and uncertain about his next steps. He's considering three potential paths: online personal training, dating coaching, or returning to his SMMA/SAAS business. The post is a self-reflective exploration of his past failures and skills, looking for clarity and advice on what to pursue next.
On to the post...
Maybe this is what I need - a place to report on my progress. It worked back when I was in high school, learning to talk to girls, so maybe it’ll work with business too.
Why $10,000 a month? It seems achievable, but at the same time, it’s a lofty goal, being somewhere in the neighborhood of double what most households make in a year. It would allow me to pay off my student loans, move out of my parent’s house, and take a breath without worrying about money for a little bit.
Having just finished Unscripted , I’m sure there’s some irony in making this thread…after all, some could argue that THIS is “action faking” - writing about things I’ve done or things I’m planning to do rather than using that time to do them.
Truthfully, after my most recent adaptation of my business to the SAAS model, and its subsequent failure, I don’t have a direction or know what to do or focus on. I read Fastlane before I switched to SAAS, I read Unscripted after that SAAS failed, and I spent a good amount of time reading through Gold and Notable threads to get some insight and perspective before I came here to write out my own.
I don’t have a direction or a goal yet, so I’m just going to write, and maybe through being brutally honest with myself and all of you I’ll have a moment of clarity - either through some of you noticing things I missed, or through my own “thinking out loud” here.
The Situation
I turned 30 years old a little less than 4 months ago, and as a 30-year-old I’m still living at my parent’s house in Delaware in my original childhood bedroom. Almost 6 years ago I moved back in after leaving my job with a mortgage lender, both because I didn’t enjoy the work and because it became apparent that it was a “churn-n-burn” company where I was unlikely to be employed after another year. When my lease expired, so did my job. That was in October of 2018. I believed I would find new employment and move back out of the house by early 2019…that has not been the case.
Right now I’m working full-time at a job managing a medical marijuana clinic that I originally took part-time to allow me the flexibility to work on my other ventures outside of work, namely modeling. COVID came around and put a stop to that, so now I work 32 hours per week at a job I don’t like, under a boss who’s a prick, in a company that likely won’t be around much longer. He’s already cut back my hours from 40 to 32, and because other competitors are popping up and undercutting our price the business is quickly losing revenue. If I do the math with these new hours I’m making $37,440 per year gross. Currently, my obligations are a minimum payment of $302 on a $20,000+ student loan debt, and I’ve been putting off renewing my LLC license because I know if I cancel I’ll have to prepay the upcoming year’s tax to close it - which will probably be pretty expensive. Plus, I may just continue running the business under this same name.
I’m aging, my parents are old, my brother recently lost his job in New York and is on unemployment, and my sister essentially had a mental breakdown and disowned our family about a year ago. We grew up happy and healthy and my parents deserve to retire and relax. MJ’s books describe needing a strong WHY, so here’s mine:
Move out of my parent’s house, and Delaware as a whole, because I feel like a loser living at home at 30. Retire my parents, they don’t deserve to be worked into the grave because their children couldn’t figure it out. Somebody has to win, it might as well be me.
I’ve got time constraints and I’ve got money constraints, so I need to figure it out - quickly.
Attempted Ventures
Ignoring my work history, which mostly consisted of odd jobs at gyms and a modeling/acting stint that led nowhere, I’ll try to describe the business ventures I’ve attempted and evaluate why they failed as well as any skills I may have picked up from them:
Clickfunnels for Local Businesses
I read Russell Brunson’s Dotcom Secrets and I believe this was the first time I went into business for myself, which is also when I established my business as an LLC and got a license. I couldn’t afford to run Facebook ads for myself so I believe I cold-called local brick-and-mortar businesses that offered services I could adapt using Clickfunnels - ones where I could create an attractive offer. I tried to pitch this service for free in exchange for testimonials, but nobody would take me up on it. I ended up getting only 1 client - a carpet cleaning business, and successfully got him enough leads that he couldn’t handle the workload. He also couldn’t afford to pay me after the trial, so he paid me on a per-job basis, eventually he was unable to afford that either. I made the mistake of attaching his page to my ad account and his card eventually got declined due to insufficient funds, leaving it stuck attached to me. I was working at my local gym at the time and offered a similar service for them to get new members in the door. They accepted and saw some success, but my payment was still my hourly wage.
This failed because it violated several pillars of CENTS - notably Entry and Need. I don’t remember if Clickfunnels was very cheap or free at the time, but that was the only barrier to entry I had to run this business. I could make a half-decent landing page in a few minutes, set up a Facebook ad campaign, and just let it run. I was very surprised by how difficult it was to sell a free service to people, so my offer must not have been perceived as valuable - likely being viewed as “just another advertising service”, except this is run by a kid who probably doesn’t know what he’s doing. This venture taught me the basics of using Clickfunnels, and Zapier and running Facebook ad campaigns.
Dropshipping with Shopify
I fell into this one because it was the flavor of the month, and I was seeing all these kids making a ton of money reselling cheap products from AliBaba. I already knew how to run Facebook ads, so I thought if I could find a winning product I could design a decent ad for it to get some traction. I was still working my part-time job at the gym and pursuing modeling/acting on the side. I saw some success with what I called the “electron cable” which is just a standard iPhone charger but glowed in the dark while being available in a variety of colors. The value skew I went for was that the glowing colors ensure you have a functional charger, removing any doubt about whether potential issues are with the phone itself, or the charger, and that this could be expressed in a wide array of vibrant colors. I had a few orders come in and fulfilled them via Shopify, but then COVID started up and shut down all exportation from China, where many of AliBaba’s products were produced. Not knowing when that situation would change, I closed down this venture as well.
This business’ main violation was Control. I neither controlled the platform where I ran my store, nor the manufacturer who would make these products. When those both shut down, I had nothing - I could not fulfill orders and had to offer refunds because I was not the one creating the product, I was merely acting as a middleman to advertise it after a rebranding. Entry was violated as well since all it took to run this was a Shopify store and some time spent researching and testing the market to find a winning product. This venture taught me how to test the market without overinvesting, though that is something I neglected to do in the future.
Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University Copywriting
I was the perfect mark for this. By this time I had spent the last few years during the beginning of the pandemic working a new part-time job managing a medical marijuana clinic while still working with an acting/modeling coach to get me booked for work. Due to my unwillingness to get vaxinated and boosted, they could not represent me and that was the end of my relationship with my agent. I got home from a particularly lackluster vacation with my family and might’ve had something of an FTE (F*ck this event), realizing that this vacation would be the highlight of my year - and it pissed me off. I went looking for anything to help give me some direction to escape my dead-end job and came across Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University around the time he started becoming popular. I knew of him way before this, but at $50 per month, I decided to give it a try. I committed to copywriting - seeing as I had way more time than money and felt I wrote at a decent level. It was extremely saturated due to the popularity of HU at the time, and I had to rely entirely on cold email, so responses weren’t great. This was the only venture where I made any money, however.
A woman who ran a Los Angeles-based matchmaking company commissioned me to write up 2 emails to send to her list at the price of $500 ($250 each) where she would then have me rewrite portions of her website if she was pleased with my work. I completed and sent her the first email, which she paid me $250 for, but she held off describing the second email she wanted written and never had me complete that job. I don’t know why - she didn’t criticize the work, and I had several mentors comment on it being pretty good. I remember that a full month after I sent her that email she reached out to me requesting I send it again - indicating that she never even bothered to implement it…this venture faded away when I couldn’t secure any other clients, and when I was presented with the next venture.
This business violated the pillar of Entry - Andrew Tate was the most searched man in the world at the time, and his course was so popular that people were making videos aggravated by the number of cold emails they were receiving from HU students, who all sounded the same. It also violated Need, since copywriting became such a saturated and undervalued skillset. And finally, it violated Time, since any level of success would require me to spend more time writing and fulfilling jobs for my clients - I could not remove myself from the business because I was the business. It did help me refine my copy skills, and served as an introduction to some Do’s and Don’ts of cold email.
Employee Retention Credit
My dad’s friend introduced me to this one, and I didn’t give it much thought until I saw how well he was being paid for what little work he had to do. After the pandemic started winding down the IRS established this credit to reimburse business owners who paid their employees’ wages during the shutdowns. It was free money, provided by the government to business owners, up to a certain limit, and could be claimed by the business owner to be used for whatever purposes - business or otherwise. This seemed like a no-brainer…I ended up coming on as a referral partner to a company that would file for this credit on behalf of the business owner and take out a percentage of their refund as the fee, and only AFTER they received their money.
I saw the money that guys were making in commission from this and hit the ground running pretty hard. I’d spend hours walking around local shopping centers and plazas, cold calling, launching email campaigns to businesses using Apollo as a database, etc. I was running into lots of tire kickers, people who thought it was a scam, people whose accountants told them they wouldn’t qualify, and people who would hear my offer and decide to price shop for places that were doing the same thing cheaper. I had a couple of people who signed on with the company to have us file for their business, but most changed their minds and ghosted me before fully committing. I was starting to see some traction with my email campaigns, but unfortunately, this venture came to a very abrupt halt. Once other companies caught wind of what we were doing, they would replicate it and undercut us or have poor performances that led to their client’s businesses being audited. Due to so many “bad actors” popping up, the IRS put out a moratorium on any new claims until the start of 2024, when they would re-evaluate. When that time came, they decided to put a complete stop to the credit, and the company I worked under pivoted back into providing other financial services for businesses.
This business violated Entry and, more importantly, Control. All I needed to get started was a referral link to send business owners so they could schedule a call with a tax expert who would handle the selling, effectively creating no barrier to entry. This wasn’t a huge issue, because I live somewhere I was not competing with other referral partners, and most business owners hadn’t even heard of the program before my mention. However, I was merely a referral partner of this business - I did not control the selling, I did not control the fulfillment, I did not control anything. I especially didn’t control the IRS's full shutdown of the program. On the positive end, I did learn how to properly launch and maintain cold email campaigns - unsuccessful as they were - and I became more comfortable pitching business owners face-to-face. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “sales”, because I was selling them an appointment, not a service, but it did help me become more comfortable talking to people in a professional setting.
SMMA/SAAS for Mortgage Loan Officers
Which brings us to this most recent foray…I discovered this by watching some random YouTube videos in my feed about these young guys who dropped out of school or “had to make it work” and listened to their stories on how they did it. I’d heard of SMMA before but wrote it off because it seemed like a “get rich quick” scheme marketed to young guys via some course. Yet this time, I wasn’t being sold…I was being informed, for free. I believe myself to be somewhat tech-savvy, and this was an ideal business model; one which could be run from anywhere in the world so long as I had an internet connection, where the boss is me, and rewards those who find ways to improve on what exists rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. I discovered that some of these YouTube creators ran a community focused on SMMA and succeeding in its various niches, and I signed on to that, eventually choosing the mortgage niche. I had experience in this niche, there weren’t many competitors from what I could find, the market is quite large, and it’s an evergreen industry - people will always have the dream of home ownership.
Since I was now working full-time I had to find a way to get leads without having to manually touch them, which is where my experience running Facebook ads came into play. The offer was to run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of mortgage loan officers and have them operate through GoHighLevel to have a transparent view of what I was bringing in for them. However, I had a lot of difficulty selling people this solution; I ran 2 free trials for clients who wanted to get refinance leads in this current market - I could not. I had 1 person agree to the monthly retainer offer, but he changed his mind due to his declining health less than a week later. I had 1 other guy who agreed as well, but to the performance offer, where he would only pay after an applicant files their 1003 with him, but he would pay much more per deal when that happens. I got him more than 30 leads over our first month, with a minimum adspend budget of $33, which I constantly had to turn back on because he could not stop his bank from auto-declining the Facebook charges when he ran it…he complained that only a small handful of the leads were qualified and did not get any deals. Last I checked, most of his leads’ were most recently contacted two or more weeks ago.
So by now, things aren’t working out. Running Facebook ads is getting results, but not the results these loan officers want. They want qualified leads, they don’t want to pay until after close, and they want me to do these things for bottom-dollar prices. Initially, I was going to film video ads and relaunch the offer, since the one thing I was doing well was getting B2B leads for myself. This was when I stumbled across Ali Abdaal on YouTube talking about money, and how he recommended 3 books to read; the first being The Millionaire Fastlane . I ended up binging that book in just a few days, joined the Fastlane forum, discovered Sean’s course within it, and thought a SAAS tool would be a great evolution of this business model - loan officers can run the ads themselves, for cheaper, with automated nurturing, and live support to handhold them through the entire process. I became very excited, especially since this was even MORE in line with my knowledge base of computers and software. I quickly built the systems, brought on HL Pro Tools and UpHex, and set up everything in the backend to run this new offer.
This did not work out…there’s a thread that goes into more depth about what went wrong, but it seemed the market didn’t value this tool. They SAID they did, but nobody was willing to vote with their wallet. My Facebook ad campaign, compared to when I ran this as an SMMA model, dramatically underperformed, and I had barely anybody sign on for a demo call. Between GoHighLevel, HL Pro Tools, and UpHex, I was spending over $700 per month to have this tool up and running for the moment I had a client sign on. I had a small glimmer of hope; this guy in California was already spending a ton on ads - and he could afford to do so because he operated as both the realtor and loan officer in his transactions. He wasn’t concerned about price because a single deal was worth so much to him. He was attracted to my business because UpHex allowed him to break into Google and start running ads there as well…but he wanted to get started after the 4th of July weekend…and then he was sick for a week because of his daughter…and then he wanted to be certain he could start and stop the ads…and then he was asking if he would still have the account and the leads if he decided to pause for a while…and then he needed approval from his marketing guy…and at that point I felt it best to stop holding my breath, and finally turned off all the services to stop bleeding money.
And now I’m here.
I don’t know if I’m done with this venture, but if I had to try and identify what went wrong and what I learned from it, I’d say that it violated Need. This solution, this tool, might do exactly what’s advertised, and then some…but whether I’m not communicating its value properly, or whether I’m not getting it in front of the right people, I’m not sure…but if they needed, or perceived they needed this solution, I wouldn’t be in this situation right now. I learned a lot about how to use GoHighLevel during this process. A lot of knowledge on website setup, A2P registration, DNS records, and many other technical aspects of this had to fall into place to get to the point of running smoothly. It’s just unfortunate that even close friends of mine couldn’t set aside the time to have me onboard them as beta testers for free…
What Are My Skills?
So let me see if I can be objective and identify what I think I’m good at to a level above the average person.
There might be some other stuff, but these are the skills I possess that I believe are above average.
What's Next?
Here we are…the next steps. Truthfully I don’t know what direction to go in. I’ll probably reread this a few times and see if I have any “a-ha! moments”.
Unscripted describes an exercise where you create something of value just for the sake of doing so. I’m thinking I might write up something for the old forum - the one where I first journaled that inspired me to create this post, where I might be able to catalog my self-improvement here to see the progression where I might otherwise think I’m failing when I haven’t yet made money. I’ll probably do that first.
As far as the ideas that are at the forefront of being put into action, I have three that I’m playing with:
My next responses in this thread will either be in response to any of you who commented, or pertinent updates to what I’ve decided to do/how those things are going.
If you’ve made it this far I truly appreciate you taking the time to read through this and hope to give you an even better success story to read as it continues.
Here are links to the other threads on this forum if anybody wants to see my early questions and how I got to this point:
Introduction to the forum
Early SAAS model questions
Signs of trouble
What led to this post
Thank you, truly.
@Andy Black got ChatGPT to write TL;DR if this post looks daunting, so I'll include that here:
The author is a 30-year-old living with his parents, working a part-time job he dislikes, and struggling with multiple failed business ventures, including Clickfunnels, dropshipping, copywriting, employee retention credits, and SMMA/SAAS for mortgage loan officers. He is seeking a way to achieve $10,000 per month to move out, pay off student loans, and help his parents retire. Despite his tech-savvy skills, discipline, and charm, he feels stuck and uncertain about his next steps. He's considering three potential paths: online personal training, dating coaching, or returning to his SMMA/SAAS business. The post is a self-reflective exploration of his past failures and skills, looking for clarity and advice on what to pursue next.
On to the post...
Maybe this is what I need - a place to report on my progress. It worked back when I was in high school, learning to talk to girls, so maybe it’ll work with business too.
Why $10,000 a month? It seems achievable, but at the same time, it’s a lofty goal, being somewhere in the neighborhood of double what most households make in a year. It would allow me to pay off my student loans, move out of my parent’s house, and take a breath without worrying about money for a little bit.
Having just finished Unscripted , I’m sure there’s some irony in making this thread…after all, some could argue that THIS is “action faking” - writing about things I’ve done or things I’m planning to do rather than using that time to do them.
Truthfully, after my most recent adaptation of my business to the SAAS model, and its subsequent failure, I don’t have a direction or know what to do or focus on. I read Fastlane before I switched to SAAS, I read Unscripted after that SAAS failed, and I spent a good amount of time reading through Gold and Notable threads to get some insight and perspective before I came here to write out my own.
I don’t have a direction or a goal yet, so I’m just going to write, and maybe through being brutally honest with myself and all of you I’ll have a moment of clarity - either through some of you noticing things I missed, or through my own “thinking out loud” here.
The Situation
I turned 30 years old a little less than 4 months ago, and as a 30-year-old I’m still living at my parent’s house in Delaware in my original childhood bedroom. Almost 6 years ago I moved back in after leaving my job with a mortgage lender, both because I didn’t enjoy the work and because it became apparent that it was a “churn-n-burn” company where I was unlikely to be employed after another year. When my lease expired, so did my job. That was in October of 2018. I believed I would find new employment and move back out of the house by early 2019…that has not been the case.
Right now I’m working full-time at a job managing a medical marijuana clinic that I originally took part-time to allow me the flexibility to work on my other ventures outside of work, namely modeling. COVID came around and put a stop to that, so now I work 32 hours per week at a job I don’t like, under a boss who’s a prick, in a company that likely won’t be around much longer. He’s already cut back my hours from 40 to 32, and because other competitors are popping up and undercutting our price the business is quickly losing revenue. If I do the math with these new hours I’m making $37,440 per year gross. Currently, my obligations are a minimum payment of $302 on a $20,000+ student loan debt, and I’ve been putting off renewing my LLC license because I know if I cancel I’ll have to prepay the upcoming year’s tax to close it - which will probably be pretty expensive. Plus, I may just continue running the business under this same name.
I’m aging, my parents are old, my brother recently lost his job in New York and is on unemployment, and my sister essentially had a mental breakdown and disowned our family about a year ago. We grew up happy and healthy and my parents deserve to retire and relax. MJ’s books describe needing a strong WHY, so here’s mine:
Move out of my parent’s house, and Delaware as a whole, because I feel like a loser living at home at 30. Retire my parents, they don’t deserve to be worked into the grave because their children couldn’t figure it out. Somebody has to win, it might as well be me.
I’ve got time constraints and I’ve got money constraints, so I need to figure it out - quickly.
Attempted Ventures
Ignoring my work history, which mostly consisted of odd jobs at gyms and a modeling/acting stint that led nowhere, I’ll try to describe the business ventures I’ve attempted and evaluate why they failed as well as any skills I may have picked up from them:
Clickfunnels for Local Businesses
I read Russell Brunson’s Dotcom Secrets and I believe this was the first time I went into business for myself, which is also when I established my business as an LLC and got a license. I couldn’t afford to run Facebook ads for myself so I believe I cold-called local brick-and-mortar businesses that offered services I could adapt using Clickfunnels - ones where I could create an attractive offer. I tried to pitch this service for free in exchange for testimonials, but nobody would take me up on it. I ended up getting only 1 client - a carpet cleaning business, and successfully got him enough leads that he couldn’t handle the workload. He also couldn’t afford to pay me after the trial, so he paid me on a per-job basis, eventually he was unable to afford that either. I made the mistake of attaching his page to my ad account and his card eventually got declined due to insufficient funds, leaving it stuck attached to me. I was working at my local gym at the time and offered a similar service for them to get new members in the door. They accepted and saw some success, but my payment was still my hourly wage.
This failed because it violated several pillars of CENTS - notably Entry and Need. I don’t remember if Clickfunnels was very cheap or free at the time, but that was the only barrier to entry I had to run this business. I could make a half-decent landing page in a few minutes, set up a Facebook ad campaign, and just let it run. I was very surprised by how difficult it was to sell a free service to people, so my offer must not have been perceived as valuable - likely being viewed as “just another advertising service”, except this is run by a kid who probably doesn’t know what he’s doing. This venture taught me the basics of using Clickfunnels, and Zapier and running Facebook ad campaigns.
Dropshipping with Shopify
I fell into this one because it was the flavor of the month, and I was seeing all these kids making a ton of money reselling cheap products from AliBaba. I already knew how to run Facebook ads, so I thought if I could find a winning product I could design a decent ad for it to get some traction. I was still working my part-time job at the gym and pursuing modeling/acting on the side. I saw some success with what I called the “electron cable” which is just a standard iPhone charger but glowed in the dark while being available in a variety of colors. The value skew I went for was that the glowing colors ensure you have a functional charger, removing any doubt about whether potential issues are with the phone itself, or the charger, and that this could be expressed in a wide array of vibrant colors. I had a few orders come in and fulfilled them via Shopify, but then COVID started up and shut down all exportation from China, where many of AliBaba’s products were produced. Not knowing when that situation would change, I closed down this venture as well.
This business’ main violation was Control. I neither controlled the platform where I ran my store, nor the manufacturer who would make these products. When those both shut down, I had nothing - I could not fulfill orders and had to offer refunds because I was not the one creating the product, I was merely acting as a middleman to advertise it after a rebranding. Entry was violated as well since all it took to run this was a Shopify store and some time spent researching and testing the market to find a winning product. This venture taught me how to test the market without overinvesting, though that is something I neglected to do in the future.
Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University Copywriting
I was the perfect mark for this. By this time I had spent the last few years during the beginning of the pandemic working a new part-time job managing a medical marijuana clinic while still working with an acting/modeling coach to get me booked for work. Due to my unwillingness to get vaxinated and boosted, they could not represent me and that was the end of my relationship with my agent. I got home from a particularly lackluster vacation with my family and might’ve had something of an FTE (F*ck this event), realizing that this vacation would be the highlight of my year - and it pissed me off. I went looking for anything to help give me some direction to escape my dead-end job and came across Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University around the time he started becoming popular. I knew of him way before this, but at $50 per month, I decided to give it a try. I committed to copywriting - seeing as I had way more time than money and felt I wrote at a decent level. It was extremely saturated due to the popularity of HU at the time, and I had to rely entirely on cold email, so responses weren’t great. This was the only venture where I made any money, however.
A woman who ran a Los Angeles-based matchmaking company commissioned me to write up 2 emails to send to her list at the price of $500 ($250 each) where she would then have me rewrite portions of her website if she was pleased with my work. I completed and sent her the first email, which she paid me $250 for, but she held off describing the second email she wanted written and never had me complete that job. I don’t know why - she didn’t criticize the work, and I had several mentors comment on it being pretty good. I remember that a full month after I sent her that email she reached out to me requesting I send it again - indicating that she never even bothered to implement it…this venture faded away when I couldn’t secure any other clients, and when I was presented with the next venture.
This business violated the pillar of Entry - Andrew Tate was the most searched man in the world at the time, and his course was so popular that people were making videos aggravated by the number of cold emails they were receiving from HU students, who all sounded the same. It also violated Need, since copywriting became such a saturated and undervalued skillset. And finally, it violated Time, since any level of success would require me to spend more time writing and fulfilling jobs for my clients - I could not remove myself from the business because I was the business. It did help me refine my copy skills, and served as an introduction to some Do’s and Don’ts of cold email.
Employee Retention Credit
My dad’s friend introduced me to this one, and I didn’t give it much thought until I saw how well he was being paid for what little work he had to do. After the pandemic started winding down the IRS established this credit to reimburse business owners who paid their employees’ wages during the shutdowns. It was free money, provided by the government to business owners, up to a certain limit, and could be claimed by the business owner to be used for whatever purposes - business or otherwise. This seemed like a no-brainer…I ended up coming on as a referral partner to a company that would file for this credit on behalf of the business owner and take out a percentage of their refund as the fee, and only AFTER they received their money.
I saw the money that guys were making in commission from this and hit the ground running pretty hard. I’d spend hours walking around local shopping centers and plazas, cold calling, launching email campaigns to businesses using Apollo as a database, etc. I was running into lots of tire kickers, people who thought it was a scam, people whose accountants told them they wouldn’t qualify, and people who would hear my offer and decide to price shop for places that were doing the same thing cheaper. I had a couple of people who signed on with the company to have us file for their business, but most changed their minds and ghosted me before fully committing. I was starting to see some traction with my email campaigns, but unfortunately, this venture came to a very abrupt halt. Once other companies caught wind of what we were doing, they would replicate it and undercut us or have poor performances that led to their client’s businesses being audited. Due to so many “bad actors” popping up, the IRS put out a moratorium on any new claims until the start of 2024, when they would re-evaluate. When that time came, they decided to put a complete stop to the credit, and the company I worked under pivoted back into providing other financial services for businesses.
This business violated Entry and, more importantly, Control. All I needed to get started was a referral link to send business owners so they could schedule a call with a tax expert who would handle the selling, effectively creating no barrier to entry. This wasn’t a huge issue, because I live somewhere I was not competing with other referral partners, and most business owners hadn’t even heard of the program before my mention. However, I was merely a referral partner of this business - I did not control the selling, I did not control the fulfillment, I did not control anything. I especially didn’t control the IRS's full shutdown of the program. On the positive end, I did learn how to properly launch and maintain cold email campaigns - unsuccessful as they were - and I became more comfortable pitching business owners face-to-face. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “sales”, because I was selling them an appointment, not a service, but it did help me become more comfortable talking to people in a professional setting.
SMMA/SAAS for Mortgage Loan Officers
Which brings us to this most recent foray…I discovered this by watching some random YouTube videos in my feed about these young guys who dropped out of school or “had to make it work” and listened to their stories on how they did it. I’d heard of SMMA before but wrote it off because it seemed like a “get rich quick” scheme marketed to young guys via some course. Yet this time, I wasn’t being sold…I was being informed, for free. I believe myself to be somewhat tech-savvy, and this was an ideal business model; one which could be run from anywhere in the world so long as I had an internet connection, where the boss is me, and rewards those who find ways to improve on what exists rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. I discovered that some of these YouTube creators ran a community focused on SMMA and succeeding in its various niches, and I signed on to that, eventually choosing the mortgage niche. I had experience in this niche, there weren’t many competitors from what I could find, the market is quite large, and it’s an evergreen industry - people will always have the dream of home ownership.
Since I was now working full-time I had to find a way to get leads without having to manually touch them, which is where my experience running Facebook ads came into play. The offer was to run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of mortgage loan officers and have them operate through GoHighLevel to have a transparent view of what I was bringing in for them. However, I had a lot of difficulty selling people this solution; I ran 2 free trials for clients who wanted to get refinance leads in this current market - I could not. I had 1 person agree to the monthly retainer offer, but he changed his mind due to his declining health less than a week later. I had 1 other guy who agreed as well, but to the performance offer, where he would only pay after an applicant files their 1003 with him, but he would pay much more per deal when that happens. I got him more than 30 leads over our first month, with a minimum adspend budget of $33, which I constantly had to turn back on because he could not stop his bank from auto-declining the Facebook charges when he ran it…he complained that only a small handful of the leads were qualified and did not get any deals. Last I checked, most of his leads’ were most recently contacted two or more weeks ago.
So by now, things aren’t working out. Running Facebook ads is getting results, but not the results these loan officers want. They want qualified leads, they don’t want to pay until after close, and they want me to do these things for bottom-dollar prices. Initially, I was going to film video ads and relaunch the offer, since the one thing I was doing well was getting B2B leads for myself. This was when I stumbled across Ali Abdaal on YouTube talking about money, and how he recommended 3 books to read; the first being The Millionaire Fastlane . I ended up binging that book in just a few days, joined the Fastlane forum, discovered Sean’s course within it, and thought a SAAS tool would be a great evolution of this business model - loan officers can run the ads themselves, for cheaper, with automated nurturing, and live support to handhold them through the entire process. I became very excited, especially since this was even MORE in line with my knowledge base of computers and software. I quickly built the systems, brought on HL Pro Tools and UpHex, and set up everything in the backend to run this new offer.
This did not work out…there’s a thread that goes into more depth about what went wrong, but it seemed the market didn’t value this tool. They SAID they did, but nobody was willing to vote with their wallet. My Facebook ad campaign, compared to when I ran this as an SMMA model, dramatically underperformed, and I had barely anybody sign on for a demo call. Between GoHighLevel, HL Pro Tools, and UpHex, I was spending over $700 per month to have this tool up and running for the moment I had a client sign on. I had a small glimmer of hope; this guy in California was already spending a ton on ads - and he could afford to do so because he operated as both the realtor and loan officer in his transactions. He wasn’t concerned about price because a single deal was worth so much to him. He was attracted to my business because UpHex allowed him to break into Google and start running ads there as well…but he wanted to get started after the 4th of July weekend…and then he was sick for a week because of his daughter…and then he wanted to be certain he could start and stop the ads…and then he was asking if he would still have the account and the leads if he decided to pause for a while…and then he needed approval from his marketing guy…and at that point I felt it best to stop holding my breath, and finally turned off all the services to stop bleeding money.
And now I’m here.
I don’t know if I’m done with this venture, but if I had to try and identify what went wrong and what I learned from it, I’d say that it violated Need. This solution, this tool, might do exactly what’s advertised, and then some…but whether I’m not communicating its value properly, or whether I’m not getting it in front of the right people, I’m not sure…but if they needed, or perceived they needed this solution, I wouldn’t be in this situation right now. I learned a lot about how to use GoHighLevel during this process. A lot of knowledge on website setup, A2P registration, DNS records, and many other technical aspects of this had to fall into place to get to the point of running smoothly. It’s just unfortunate that even close friends of mine couldn’t set aside the time to have me onboard them as beta testers for free…
What Are My Skills?
So let me see if I can be objective and identify what I think I’m good at to a level above the average person.
- Tech savvy - Good with computers and most software, good at figuring things out when configuring things online. Stuff like Facebook’s ad platform, LinkedIn’s ad platform, Google’s ad platform, etc. I’m often the person my family goes to when it comes to troubleshooting or figuring out something on a phone or computer.
- Disciplined - I’ve been eating the same 6 foods every day, for the past 6 years, and the same times each day, and I cannot remember the last time I skipped a workout without making it up during a weekend. I’m very good at following through with the difficult or mundane if I know it gets me the results I want. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same insight when it comes to money; I don’t personally know anybody successful who could mentor me, and perhaps the fact that I’m disciplined could be a disadvantage because I’m more regimented and FOLLOW a plan, rather than innovate and get creative with own.
- Attractive - I’m not sure whether this would be considered a skill, but I’ve made conscious efforts for self-improvement with my appearance and health - so much so that I’d had a modeling contract pre-COVID. They never got me any actual work, so take that with a grain of salt. That said, I’m tall, in great shape, have all my teeth - quite straight thanks to braces, and have all my hair.
- Charming - I’m very outgoing and self-confident, it’s easy to make friends in new environments. This extends to meeting and dating women. I listen more than I talk, take a genuine interest in people, have a great memory, ask good questions, am relaxed and not nervous, and everything I say and do is direct and natural. So far this has led to me being very good at selling myself, though not necessarily what I’m selling.
- Video games - Maybe not necessarily a marketable skill, so much as a knowledge base. I got into video games when young, and played them throughout my life, I’m good at almost anything I pick up - which kind of builds off the tech-savvy thing. I understand the development process, what makes games good or bad, models that do/don’t work, how communities behave, etc. I had considered trying to break into streaming, such as through Twitch. I thought I might be interesting to watch because I’m a good-looking buff nerd, and thought breaking the “gamer” stereotype could be worth the viewing. However, these audiences take years to build, most streamers are not earning a livable wage, and I’d have to be able to stream on a regular full-time schedule in addition to my full-time job.
- Fitness - Something I’ve been doing almost my entire life, so I’d say I have a pretty good knowledge base for it. Originally I went to school for Exercise Science intending to be a personal trainer for athletes. Post-graduation didn’t align with that, so it was short-lived…I found most trainers had to work a second job to make ends meet, even in affluent gyms, and people would cancel appointments for every conceivable reason. I don’t have a deep understanding of the inner workings of the anatomy; minor muscle groups, nerve pathways, etc that I would have if I were still certified. But I do know how to design a proper diet and I know how to build workouts to achieve a goal, along with variations for potential limitations.
- Writing - I learned this FROM video games…the games I played often had words or phrases that were foreign to me when I was younger. I spent a lot of time reading game manuals, strategy guides, GameInformer, etc. and developed a broad vocabulary and understanding of proper grammar and spelling. Typing classes were part of the curriculum in middle school, and I excelled there as well. All this allowed me to score very high in any writing assignment during school, often procrastinating until the last minute and still pulling out high marks. This skill extended to why I chose to copywrite as part of Hustler’s University - I reasoned that writing well, and quickly, would give me an advantage over most others who would copy-paste basic templates and couldn’t figure out how to word their outreach better.
There might be some other stuff, but these are the skills I possess that I believe are above average.
What's Next?
Here we are…the next steps. Truthfully I don’t know what direction to go in. I’ll probably reread this a few times and see if I have any “a-ha! moments”.
Unscripted describes an exercise where you create something of value just for the sake of doing so. I’m thinking I might write up something for the old forum - the one where I first journaled that inspired me to create this post, where I might be able to catalog my self-improvement here to see the progression where I might otherwise think I’m failing when I haven’t yet made money. I’ll probably do that first.
As far as the ideas that are at the forefront of being put into action, I have three that I’m playing with:
- Online Personal Trainer - The barrier to entry to this is quite low, and it is a VERY saturated niche, with many offering this service at low prices as employees of already-established gyms. The benefit is that the market for this is enormous, though the price a client is willing to pay will vary widely. With apps like Trainerize and MyFitnessPal I’d be able to set myself up online and could help multiple clients without needing to set aside time to come into a physical location; I could record videos of the exercises, design meal plans, schedule workout routines, and provide access to me for support along the way. I’ve had plenty of people ask me for fitness and diet advice. However, given my physique, I do worry that people don’t have a concept of what is/isn’t attainable naturally - I feel like I’d be competing with guys who look like bodybuilders and are chock full of steroids, and look much less impressive by comparison since I’m natural. I could market to my Instagram followers offering to help early clients for free to build testimonials, and go from there. However, this business violates Control - if I were to train through Trainerize or market through Instagram I could be shut down at any moment. For this reason, if I were to pursue this idea, I would have to find a way to build a list to maintain my clients if I were ever to lose access to those services.
- Dating Coach - A much smaller market with a less-than-stellar public perception. “Pick-Up Artists” created a culture nowadays seen as cringeworthy - using personas, tricks, gimmicks, and paid models to sell incomplete solutions. However, the people that I’d be able to help in this market are experiencing massive pain. Currently, the figure is something like 60% of men in the US are single, compared to only about 30% of women - even someone in my own family confided in me that it had been over a year since they had been intimate. How many men are willing to pay to solve this problem I do not know. There are limitations to who I could or couldn’t help. Though out of my above-listed skills, this is one area where I believe I am exceptional - and can help others replicate it. This would be an example of working backward though; rather than finding a problem to solve I’m looking for how to monetize my solution - whether that’s by coaching, courses, books, seminars, meet-ups, or something else entirely. I believe this would satisfy every aspect of CENTS, though I would have to put more thought into Time and Scale.
- SMMA/SAAS for Mortgage Loan Officers - Finally, maybe I shouldn’t pivot at all…maybe I’m THIS close to having a breakthrough after spending all this time in this niche, failing with various business models and ideas. A lot of stuff is still there, I’d just have to turn it back on. However, while I have experience in this industry, I am not exceptional - I understand the mortgage loan process and the pain that mortgage loan officers are experiencing, but not on a deep level…I haven’t BEEN there. I’ve thought multiple times that I had something valuable for them, and multiple times I’ve been wrong. Maybe part of me is looking for somebody to tell me it’s ok to pivot again, or maybe pivoting again is why so many of the above business ventures have failed. Maybe I didn’t give them enough time and effort…but then again it’s been almost a year, and several thousand dollars later, so maybe I have. In either case, if this is the best option to move forward, it’s still all there…I just need to flip the switch and start spending money again.
My next responses in this thread will either be in response to any of you who commented, or pertinent updates to what I’ve decided to do/how those things are going.
If you’ve made it this far I truly appreciate you taking the time to read through this and hope to give you an even better success story to read as it continues.
Here are links to the other threads on this forum if anybody wants to see my early questions and how I got to this point:
Introduction to the forum
Early SAAS model questions
Signs of trouble
What led to this post
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