Episode 028: Dan Dasilva - From Felony To 7 Figure Entrepreneur At 22

Legacy of Monsters An Apple original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh my God.

Go, go, go.

Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV. Plus.

Hold music. You want to avoid it and so do your customers. So say goodbye to holdmusic and hello to faster, smarter support with Salesforce. Make service more personal and agents more productive using built in trusted AI. Then watch costs and wait times drop and satisfaction soar. Support customers in a whole new way with Service GPT. Learn how@salesforce.com ServiceGPT.

This is the Rise of the Young podcast, bringing you insights from the most innovative entrepreneurs and influencers of this era. Hosted by 17 year old entrepreneur, author, public speaker and branding expert Casey Adams. Now let's get right into the show.

Welcome to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we got the homie Dan Da Silva from felony to seven figure entrepreneur at 22 years old. Dan, he's a 22 year old e commerce entrepreneur and like I said, seven figure earner and he's helped over 250,000 people get started in e commerce and runs one of the biggest e commerce training platforms online. So that being said, Dan, welcome. Thanks so much for coming on, man.

Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. It's always great to be with like.

Minded people for sure, man. Yeah. So for my audience that kind of doesn't know you, I'd love to just start off with a question like, who is Dan and how did your journey start?

All right, so who is Dan's probably the coolest person you'll ever meet on earth, so. No, I'm kidding. So basically I started. Oh goodness. Okay, so I got into, I got into E Com because of the fact that I actually sold a ton of drugs when, when I was young in high school. So it's not like I was super, super young. It was a few years back.

So.

So I got started selling drugs. And it's funny because everybody who talks about crypto now, I actually was involved in crypto buying bitcoin because I was using Silk road to get SR 1.0 to actually get all of my drugs delivered to my best friend's house where I lived at the time. And it was funny because I was buying bitcoin, it was like just peaking, I think like 100, 200 bucks, something like that. Like people were freaking out and I just find that Pretty crazy. So that's kind of where I started. I ended up selling drugs, and I. I was living with my best friend. I was emancipated, so I wasn't living with my parents. I was living at my best friend's house. They gave me a room in their house, and I heard. So I was sitting in my bed, and I heard a knock. And it was literally just something like. And I was like, I don't want to hang out right now. I'm busy. Like, I think I was just sitting there reading a book or something, and then all I heard was. I was like, yo, if I. If I come into the door, I'm gonna. I'm gonna slap one of you. I literally said that. I screamed, and all I heard was the bang got louder. So I go, like, all angry to my door. I'm like, all right. It's not like somebody. Somebody's getting hit. Like, I told you guys, I don't want to hang out. And next thing I know, there's dogs, there's cops, detectives everywhere. And it was the most quiet thing ever. I see my best friend. Well, he's actually downstairs. I can see downstairs two. Two stairways, and I can see down past the rails. And there he is, just, like, super quiet on the couch. And they're like, just telling him, be quiet and whatnot. And they basically. Basically tell me, you know, put your hands on the wall. They go through everything. They seized my best friend's house, his parents house. So everything got. Everything got seized. And I ended up going to jail that night. And they found. It was. It was like. It was like, straight out of a movie. They sat me down in a room, and they started, like, black and white photos of me selling drugs. Like. Like you see in a movie. The stere.

Typical.

We have evidence of you doing this. And it's funny, because the evidence that they have. I was only robbed one time ever, and it was at gunpoint. It was that night that they were taking all the photo evidence. And I just found out so wild that out of all the evidence they can use, the only thing they ever had was the first. Only time I was robbed at gunpoint.

Okay?

And so basically, the house was seized. I ended up sitting in jail. Next thing you know, the. My bail was. My bail was set to X amount of my own, remember, at this point. But it was my baila set. And then one of the cops came in, he opened it. It was before I got transferred to a county jail. So it was the. It was the municipal jail before I got transferred to county and all that, but I never ended up going to county because my bail was posted. And. And the. I guess the cop, the detective opened the door, he said, you're free to go. And I was like, what? He's like, I have a message for you though. I was like, what's the message? He's like, your father said you can come home. And it's like I didn't talk to my parents and just to get that out of the blue, I was like, oh my. They've been watching this whole time. So like a. So like kind of like a bad dog with his tail between his legs. I went right back home. It was freezing out and I was in shorts and a T shirt and I walked home. It was about a mile and a half, I'd say, I give it about a mile and it was freezing. So I was there, I was home. Ended up back in my parents basement and they helped me pay for a lawyer. And you know, I feel like 40, $50,000 later. Yeah, it was, it was two hefty charges of. Two felony charges of possession, distribution. So this all comes back to how I got started into E comms because I need to pay my parents back. I was like, all right, what am I going to do? So I ended up going on a form meeting with somebody from primary from Israel out of all places. And he. I think it was a hack forms. We met on the hack forms and he had like servers and he had. He was selling VPNs or something like that. He was selling something. And because he was like 14 at the time, he wasn't allowed to actually have money in his PayPal. And I was above age, so I was able to move his money around legally with when he couldn't. Plus he was in Israel. So for him to even have a PayPal, I don't even know if he can because of where he is geographically. So we kind of got started and the whole E Commerce thing, we. It. It took off, I think the very first like month. And then in the very first month, not I think but in the very first month we're from. He started it up and I learned all from him. He started up. He went from zero to $500 the first day and then two weeks in, he went to a thousand dollars a day. On the 31st day, scaled up the store big enough and on the 31st day he sold it for $30,000. And that was profit to him, so. Or profit for us at that point. And that's kind of where The E Commerce journey got started. Unfortunately he's, he's fallen off. He actually made a lot of money and then he unfortunately went to Thailand, blew it all, got involved with the wrong people and, and I progressed from there. I kept growing and got a mentor and just became a, you know, somebody that people turn to in the marketplace for, for advice. I've worked with countless well known people. So it's been, it's been quite a journey, that's for sure. So that's kind of my background for sure.

That story is like I didn't even know that about you, man. That's, that's super dope how you've gone from. And I feel like a lot of people just, whenever they're in that negative standpoint, they're always just, they think they can't get out. So like regarding like your situation towards the next question, like I know how you said that's how you discovered E Commerce and that's how you got into it, but what was the biggest pivot point from that situation to now? Doing your own thing, creating your own brand in that sense, what was the pivoting point for you?

So the pivoting point would have to be. Well, I don't like my parents basement, that was for starters. But my pivoting point was my girlfriend at the time I wanted some, I envisioned a life where everybody that I was surrounded by, whether it was friends, parents, girlfriend at the time and it was more so for her I wanted to become great. So and just. And I don't want to put money as the aspect because I feel like too many people when you put connotations of money when, when you're wealthy and you, and you look at or if you're part of poor and you look at somebody wealthy or not poor, but you know something, you're not well off as a wealthy person. Money's this like sacred thing that nobody really talks about. So when I mention, you know, wealth and whatnot, my idea of it isn't Warren Buffett, Bill Gates status. My idea of it is nice car, house, never having to have my spouse work, kids are taken care of. That's my idea and that's what I want. What I was working for am still working for and, and now it's changed a little bit for legacy building more than anything where I don't want to just make a lot of money and then die and then that's it. I want to make a lot of money, do something really cool in the process of doing it. So the biggest factor back to your question would have to be I was doing it for us. And then the hardest part was that I think I lost focus in, in what I was doing it for and then started really looking at the whole money thing. That's why, you know, when a lot of, a lot of people, when they, when they see me just in public events, whatnot, they ask me a lot of money questions. It's never like, you know, lifestyle, because I nailed down one, one part of my life which is making money. But I kind of realized later on that, or even now at this point that you can make so much, you can have everything and have nothing. So I guess it's a really black and white answer to your question is I did it to achieve a certain lifestyle. I got the certain lifestyle, but the people who I was doing it for aren't there with me. I don't have the original friends, don't have original girlfriends. So vision changed. Kind of more clarity now on want to go for sure. For sure.

So when it comes to E commerce in general, I know, like, tons of people listening this podcast as well as your viewers as well. Like some people either just started, some people are having success. But for the people that are just starting off, like, what's the initial starting point that you'd want to give to yourself as well as the people that are listening that are just getting started off in E commerce, the initial starting.

Point is, and it's going to sound so cliche, but it's more so learning as much as you possibly can and then scaling out. Whether it's to a mastermind, whether that's. Whether that's buying a course, it's investing. Yeah, yeah, that's somewhere. Okay. You can't escape it. Whether or not it's investing into a course that teaches you about Shopify or investing in a mastermind about Shopify, investing into Shopify itself, investing. It doesn't have to be money as well. It can be time. Okay? Investment comes in a lot of different ways. I never had a lot of money when I started. Actually, I had no money when I started. I was negative around 40, $50,000 when I started. My investment was time. That's what I had a lot of. So I invested my time to figure it out. If you can sit there and invest your time and then eventually what's going to happen is you're going to figure out ways to get money somehow, some way you're going to make money. It's inevitable. You sit there for days, weeks, months, years on end. If you're Just twiddling your thumbs, playing video games. No duh, nothing's going to happen. But if you're looking, if you're persistent and you're trying to go out there and let's just say you need a thousand dollars to start and you have no money. Go out there, learn everything you can, your skill set that you learn. Okay. No matter what it is, whether it's creating a store you can go to like a Facebook group or upwork and then create a store for somebody for a thousand dollars. Guess what? You have the knowledge. You just don't have the money to do it yourself. So you do it for someone else. You get paid. Once you get paid, you do it for yourself.

Yeah.

So a lot of people miss that big, big factor. That big picture is, I don't have enough money. I guess I can't do this. No, you can. You're just being a lazy for sure Daisy guy for sure. So, yeah, that's my biggest tip is invest in yourself. Because the, the biggest form of ROI ever is yourself. You can put as much money you want anywhere. You'll never get the same returns as you would investing into yourself. The very first thing I ever invested in was a yacht Mastermind. It was hosted by the owner of Zappable. And Zappable is just a mobile app. You know, it's, it's not like huge.

Yeah.

But the person who was on there that I wanted to meet was Comm Mirza. I don't know if you're familiar.

Yeah, I've heard of him.

So, yeah. So I mean I've met with Comm multiple amount of times.

Okay.

And that was the first time I met common. I spent $30,000 to get onto that mastermind for three days.

Okay.

Now I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it wasn't worth it. I'm gonna sit here and tell you I got what I needed. I, my, my goal was to get comms brain. And that year from, I think I was, I think I made like a hundred something thousand. The following year it was like a 6X, like 600,000 because of what he taught me with automating, scaling up. And then I found other mentors that helped me. And then I just took his principles and just kept scaling. But I will admit that 30,000, it's not like I was making 600 when I invested the 30. Yeah, it was like a hundred something thousand. I invested the 30. That's a pretty big chunk out of 100 something thousand. Yeah. So it's not like, you know, I was rolling in the dough, I decided to take a chance. And that ROI was more than I could ever picture it would be worth. It opened up a lot of doors. And so yeah, I'm a big believer in self investment because guess what? Unless you're willing to put in the time you're not getting, you're not going to get any results. Unless you're willing to trade off time for money, then you need to treat money for time. It's one or the other 100%.

I tell people all the time about like the investments yourself. So like me, for example, I went to San Diego, I got invited to an event to speak. I wasn't paid to speak at all. And I feel like everyone listening, like I got this opportunity to go somewhere, whether that be an event, to speak in an event or whatever. I invested my money and my time to go there without the knowing what would come after it. Sort of like you did, like you knew you wanted to go there for something. Because I knew all the people that were going to be there. Flew across the country at 16, first time ever, going to Cali, met four or five people. And then a month later from those people, I was getting flown out to LA like once a month to network, to grow with them, to talk about the certain businesses that were, we were working on in a sense. But I just feel like a lot of people just don't have that risky mentality, you know, you didn't know what we were going to get from that mastermind. But looking back, the puzzle makes sense, you know, but like, I think a lot of people don't have the outlook of like, they see, they don't see a clear like vision looking straight. So they just hesitate, you know, oh, a hundred percent.

And you know, one thing you have to realize is that there's a lot of young people that follow us. There's a ton of young people. I'd say like 80% of the audience is, or 90% is super young. The way my mentor, my current mentor tells me all the time is I'm a huge risk taker. I mean, if I make a million dollars, I'll blow a million dollars on, on like just like crypto, for example. I'll put like $900,000 in and what, what happens with what happens then, right? Here's the thing that you need to realize is as a, as young kids as, as we are, what's the worst thing? If we lose it all, where do we end up? You're gonna end up at your mom's house. I'll end up in my mom's basement. With what? With the resources we have right now. With the resources that I've built up. So the worst thing that's going to happen is you lose it all, but you still have every. You lose a bunch of money, and then you restart. Guess what? It's part of the process. You just restart with. With all the resources you have. Now, if you're 40, 50 years old, three kids, a wife, a mortgage, and you need to put your kids through school, you make a million dollars. Damn it, you better keep a million dollars. Okay, so there's a big, big difference. And, you know, I guess I'm really big into. Into a lot of those kind of like. Like, quotes. And somebody told me, I don't remember what it was, but it was in. In our 20s or not 20s, but in your youth, you trade your health for wealth.

Oh, you.

And then once you get older, you treat. You kind of reverse it and then trade your wealth back for your health.

Yeah. And you'll spend all the wealth in the world to get back your health, but you'll.

Exactly.

You'll sacrifice all your health to get the wealth and then just turns the table.

Exactly.

Yeah. And.

And that's so true because I probably sleep, like four or five hours a day, if that. At times, there's days where I stay, like, three consecutive days. And it takes a toll on your body. But I know once I'm 30, 40 years old, life's gonna start dwindling down. I need to get on the ball now. I mean, it's not like. It's not like, you know, things are just gonna happen randomly.

Yeah, for sure, man. So, yeah. Moving on to the next question. When it comes to your journey, you said, like, if you fail during the process, you just. Like you said, if you're young, you can. Mom's house. So for you, what has been, like, the biggest failure? Because I know a lot of young entrepreneurs, they'll see the cars, the success, the traveling, and some people, like, for me, for example, when I first started, it's like you just. You get kind of get lost. And for me, I feel like the biggest failure was trying to do everything and not one thing. So for you, like, what's been, like, your biggest failure setback during your process, after overcoming the initial, like, coming the cops came to your house, all that stuff happened and had to make the money back. What's been, like, your biggest setback in that end?

So. Biggest setback. It would have to be. It would have to be Focus. I'm very, I'm all over the place. I have my hands in a lot of. In a lot of things. Some things you'd be like, wait, really? You're part of that. So I have my skill set, and I know my skill set now, and I know that I can utilize my certain skill set in any market. But when I was really trying to find where I was, you know, fitting in, my biggest, my biggest pivotal falling point was the fact that I didn't remain focused. And you cannot become successful without focus. It's impossible. Literally, it's impossible. You cannot. And not having clear focus is going to be the reason why most people don't succeed. If you don't have focus, don't expect to succeed at all. And it's a harsh reality and something that I had to get as well. And a lot of people say, oh, that's not true. I can be on focus if I want. No, that's not true. Because if you take a look, you know, the most hungry people that I see are actually university entrepreneurs. People that are in college, in a university and want to achieve something. They're dreamers, right?

Yeah.

But they're not action takers because they have this big freaking thing called school that's blocking them. And I'm not saying drop out of school, okay? I'm not saying that at all. But your focus keeps. You can't have your main focus being on building a company and then your other main focus, passing school. You can't do it. It's.

It's.

Again, focus is, is something you need. And Onyx and Gal, one of, one of my current mentors right now, he yells at me all the time. He's like, focus, focus, focus, focus. He's like, do what you're good at. Focus, focus, focus. And he's right. Focus is, is what was my biggest hindering point and hindering point for a lot of people.

Okay. For sure, man. Dude, that's fire, man. Because I feel like even for me, like for my. I get all the time because I'm still young, I'm 17, you know, still in high school. But when it comes to, like my initial starting point, like all the opportunities that people see online, all the different people people follow, I just felt like there's a lot of stuff to lose focus at. And then like, that really just comes down to self awareness and like, you have to really understand yourself before you try to go out there and build something magnificent. You have to really first kind of understand what you need to focus on because of Your strengths because of your talents and stuff like that. So when it comes to you and coming, like you said, you're 22, so you've been on your journey for what, how many years now when it comes to the three tips that you would give to, like I said, we talked about earlier, like giving it to someone in E commerce. But when it comes to your overall, if you had nothing today, what would yourself now want to know and give yourself if you had to restart everything?

Do you ever hear the story of ten feet from gold?

Oh yeah.

That is what I would.

Greg Reed.

Yep. That's exactly what I would tell myself in way back when a lot of people fail and give up right when they're about to hit success. Yeah. So and, and that was. I actually read that and think and grow riches. I tell myself you're 10ft from gold. Keep on going. Persistence for sure. Persistent.

Yeah. I met Greg, I met Greg last year at the event in San Diego. That was like one of the first people I met. And like I read his book after I got back and the three feet from gold, that's definitely been a huge game changer for me for sure. So when it comes to like your entire story, wrapping up the interview, man, like if you, when it comes to the E commerce side in general, like tactical advice for people wanting to get into E commerce, what would you give to someone that's like, really? If they're like, dude, I'm lost. I don't know what I'm doing. I've tried this, I've tried that. What would you give to them as a practical thing for them to do?

Practical advice is build a brand. Okay. Build something that people can relate to. So if you take a look at, let's just say loci bracelets, right? Loci. People look at it as, you know, this random bracelet. Actually, it's not just a random bracelet. It's a story behind it. Any big brand has a story. And if you know how to build a brand properly, you can build a drop shipping store around an entire brand. Learn how to sell with stories. And you actually taught me this when you were here in Jersey with Instagram. And I never really put two and two together. You see, my strength is selling, whether it's through Facebook ads and on an E Comm store, whatever it is. I thought to myself, wait a minute, you just, you sell through your Instagram, you sell through social media and I do it through advertising. I do it in a little bit of a different way, but it's all story based and Kind of building a brand. So it's all, it's all universal. And the practical advice is to go out there and really figure out from the start what you want the end goal to be and then reverse engineer from the end goal, you know? And I even said this in the video that we recorded on how people go out there and always keep going for the sale, like the new sale, not worrying about the customers they already got that either love them or hate them at that point. They either love them because the product is great or hate them because they forgot about them. Focus on the customers that you get. They're the ones that are going to be the ones that always keep coming back and purchasing from you.

Okay, perfect, dude. That's solid, man. Because I feel like, especially a lot of people that are young, like, they just, like you said, three feet from goal, they give up too early. They're not persistent. So that being said, man, from all the knowledge that you've gained, I know that you said three feet from goal, but do you have like two books that you'd recommend to someone listening as something for them to just take from you, man?

Oh, yeah. Think and Grow Rich and how Successful people think. For sure, for sure. I think it's John C. Maxwell with for sure, man.

So, man, that being said, where can people learn more about you where they can. I know that you're big on YouTube, man, so go ahead and let them know where they can find more stuff about you, man.

Yeah, definitely. If you just go to YouTube, just type in Dan De Silva, first channel there, Instagram. Just type in Dan to sell them all. I'm on social media, Twitter as well. So you guys can just, if you really want a fast response, definitely just me on Twitter or just write a comment on Instagram, one of my images. Those will be able to find me there rather quickly. For sure.

Well, boom. That being said, everyone makes you go check him out. All of his info will be in the links in the description. That being said, guys, see, he talks about a lot of things in this interview, but like, if you don't actually apply it and you're just listening passively, nothing's gonna change. Like he said, it's all about what you do with it. And I actually told my brother this last night. It's like, if you don't have money, you have time, but once you get money, you don't have time. So whichever standpoint you're in, focus on whether that be the time you have. And then in the same flip flop, if you have money focus on how you can diversify and make more, in a sense. So, that being said, thank you so much for tuning into the Rise of the Young podcast. Make sure you subscribe, make sure you drop a review, leave a rating, send me a dm, let me know what you think, and I will see you guys in the next episode.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place. It's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh, my God.

Go, go, go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.