How I Went From 0 to $7 Million by 26

I started exactly where most of you are right now. Zero skills, zero income. But today I'm going to tell you the story how I was able to generate $7 million at the age of 26. And I know what you're probably thinking, why is this guy lying about a sickening amount of money? But here's a bunch of screenshots, and at the end of the video, I want to tell you what the profit was. Well, let's start from the beginning. My name is Daniel Fazio. We run a software company, a coaching company, and a recruiting company with 32 team members right now. And here's my entire story of graduating college at 20, starting my first business, losing it all to then making millions. I graduated Florida State at the age of 20 with a finance degree. And yes, I did think it was a good investment and I did get a lot of value. And on the very last week of college, I saw a YouTube video that said, how to make $10,000 per month with Amazon FBA. So I clicked the video, I went to the guy's channel, and I watched every single video that he had on that channel in the span of three days. And on day five, I went to a bank with a check for $8,000 that I was going to send over to. I remember the banker asking me if I was getting scammed, but I absolutely promised her I wasn't. I saved up a bunch of money working customer support for Apple during college. And I worked at a grocery store before then. So this was basically everything I had to my name. And three weeks later, the product comes into Amazon and it was stainless steel beer bottle insulators. Now, I thought I was smart because what happened afterwards, and I didn't conceptualize in the moment, was that it was Father's Day. And when those products got listed, I sold out every single one within two weeks. Now, remember, I was going on a cruise for graduation with a bunch of my friends. By the time I had walked onto the ship at 10am on the day of the cruise, I made the entire cost of the trip in that morning. So this was my first taste of success. An actual substantial amount of money I made for myself online. And because I thought I was smart, I took all of those profits, rolled it back into other products, But I ended up losing all my money, which brought me to my next venture, the first one that was very seriously successful. And I want to tell you how this happened. I was at a bar with a bunch of my friends and what happened was he was showing me on his phone all of these guys who were driving around a Maseratis on Instagram and flexing how much money they made. I know it's cringe, but it actually works. And it's hilarious because it caught my attention. So I followed them myself. And then the next day I went and I looked at all their profiles and I was trying to figure out what exactly were they selling, because I wanted to get into this marketing agency game. It turned out that they were running an Instagram growth agency. But how were they doing this? How were they getting their clients results? And the answer was a method called Follow Unfollow. Now this doesn't work anymore and you can't do it, but it absolutely cooked during the time. So again, I went back onto YouTube and I found every single video that I could conceivably find on how to actually make this work. So I figured out what software to use and I figured out how to actually get results. But I wanted people to pay me money to do this. So how do you get someone to pay you money to do this? I needed proof, because nobody's just going to buy something from you if you don't have proof that it even actually works. So I hit up a bunch of friends that I met in college and I offered them this for free. I said, for three months, I will grow your Instagram for you, and all I want in return is the before and after photos so I can put it on a landing page. So I did this for three months completely for free, making basically $0. And only after those three months, when I was able to get those before and after screenshots did I put them on the website and start sending cold emails to get clients for this. It took me six months after I had those screenshots to take that from 0 to $12,000 per month. And you can imagine as a 21 year old at this point making $12,000 per month. It was an absolutely sickening amount of money. And I was able to do things like take the girl I was with at the time to Miami and pay for my friends dinners. And it was amazing. It was the best thing ever. But then one day I wake up and Mr. Zuckerberg decides that he's going to change the algorithms on this day. And all of my clients got a message on their Instagram that if they continue to do Follow unfollow were going to get banned. So I lost all of my clients in a single day. So what do you do from here? Well, I got all the clients using cold email. I didn't have the offer to sell anymore. So why not just sell what I did to grow the business to a past version of myself, that is Other marketing agencies. So this is when I made my lead generation business. What a lead generation business is is when you go to another business and you offer to grow their business and get them leads and get paid for the leads. So that's what I did. I made a cold email agency I was very successful at. And after running it for about a year or year and a half, I decided to make a Twitter account. And on that Twitter account I called it Cold Email Wizard. And what I was doing with this account was in an effort to get more clients, I decided to make a low priced course called Cold Email Mastery. And this thing absolutely blew up. I ended up making $1.1 million just from that course. But what was happening over time as I was selling this course, I was directing people to use this software app to get emails and then use this software app to send emails. And I figured to myself, why am sending all of this traffic to other people's companies that I don't own? And that is when I embarked upon replicating every single software app involved in the process of sending cold emails. So I made six in total and some failed and some are successful. And after running these, I met my business partners, Andre, Christian and Dan, who now we run together Client Ascension, which is a coaching program that helps people grow their agencies using cold email, which also has a recruitment arm where we will place commission based cold emailers inside of other companies businesses. We have 32 team members for that right now. And if you want to hit numbers, numbers like I showed you earlier in this video, you need to do these four things. One, you need more social proof. Your income is directly proportional to the amount of proof that you have that you can in fact get a client result. So it's the classic chicken and the egg story. What came first, the client or the case study? And the answer is obviously the client for you to get the case study in the first place. Because nobody is going to pay you 3,000, 4,000, $5,000 per month if you don't have proof you can even actually do the thing. And I've so many videos of other people trying to justify why you don't need to work for free. And they do all these word gymnastics around why you don't have to work for free. And it's all absolute nonsense. Everyone who ever makes anything that's worth anything did in fact work for free. No one's paying you $5,000 per month. If you can't even prove that you can do the thing. So, yes, work for free. Get the before and afters, get the case studies. You have to do this. Everyone needs to do this. 2. You need to make more content. You can't be a ghost on the Internet. So let me try to explain this situation to you. Let's say you send a cold email to a company. What happens when somebody gets a cold email? Obviously, their first impression is that you're a scammer. So what does someone do when they get the cold email? They're going to look at your sending domain. They're going to go to your website. What do they see on the website? Do you even exist on the website? Is there a video view on the website to show that you actually are a real business? They're going to Google your name, they're going to Google your company name. What shows up when they do that? Do you have YouTube content? Do you have a Twitter? Do you have a LinkedIn? No one's going to pay you money if you don't exist on the Internet because they don't want to get scammed. It's a completely reasonable thing to ask of you if you want to run anything successful. Yes, you do in fact need to exist on the Internet. And you can't just send a thousand cold emails and get a bunch of clients. It doesn't work like that. You have to stick with one business model. You can't offer switch. I'm going to try selling this. I'm going to try selling this. I'm going to try selling this. Because every time you try to sell something else, you lose all of your compounding effect. You don't need 32 businesses that make $50 per month. You need to get one business to 10, 20K, 30K a month. And the reason why is because you hit revenue barrier. You have to get to 10k for the first time. And by getting to 10k for the first time, you become the person capable of operating something at 10k per month and then the same thing at 20 and the same thing at 30 and the same thing at 500k a month and a million a month. If you never take one business to one specific revenue level, you'll never be able to take any business to any revenue level. Four, and most importantly, you need to stick with something. And this is important because people don't just buy something immediately, they have conversion cycles. You don't just send a cold email, hop on a call, one call, close somebody for $5,000 a month. It's just simply not going to happen. If I were to ask you right now, if you've never made a website before, to go make a website, that seems extremely daunting to you. And the reason why is because of the uncertainty, you don't know what platform to build a website on. You don't know what buttons to click on the platform to get the website up. If I ask you to go film a video sales letter, you don't know what to a video sales letter, you don't know how to film yourself. If I ask you to get on a sales call, you don't even know how to operate a sales call. And why this is so daunting to you is because of the uncertainty. You have never done it before, ever. But when you do something for the first time and you do it successfully, you never have to do it for the first time ever again. Because it's not the absolute amount of work you need to exert to do something successful, it's the uncertainty of not knowing how to do it correctly for the first time. Now, let's talk about profit margins. How much of that was profit margin? So in the beginning, the margin was extremely high. 80, 90%. I was running everything by myself. But what happens when you run something at an extremely high profit margin is you get burnt out and you can't scale. So what do you do from here? You need to get team members, you need to get good people. And good people cost money in the way you need to think of this is not, let's say you're at 10k per month and you want to get to 20k and you're 10k a month. Right now it's just you, you're running at a 90% profit margin. And if I tell you to go hire somebody for $2,000 per month, what you're thinking in your head is that you're going to go from 10k per month to 8k per month. You're going to lose 20% margin by hiring this person. But that's not how it works. The first 10k was 90% margin. The next 10k was lower than that. So as I've done 7 million revenue, the profit margin has gradually gone down. But that's in order to get to 100 and 200 and 300. So all in all, what is it so far? It's about 2 mil. Now, if you want to learn more about business, whether you want to get more clients or you want to get your first subscribe to the Chann and I highly recommend you watch this video. A realistic timeline from 0 to 50k per month. And also if you're a marketing agency or B2B business and you want to learn how to grow your company using cold email, go to the link in the description client ascension.com.