I Started A Business From Scratch To Prove It's Not Luck

I'm on a mission to start a brand new online business and get it to 3 to $5,000 completely from scratch. And for most people, this process will take months and months. But what if I told you that I plan on doing this in the next 30 days? So let's make some money. Here's the plan. So the specific business model that I'll be starting is what's called a lead generation agency. And pretty much how it works is I'll be connecting businesses with their potential customers or clients. And how I'll be doing that would be doing something called a cold email. So, so use this as an example. Let's say there's a website development agency and they obviously build websites for, let's say, lawyers. What I'll be doing as a lead generation agency is I'll be working with a website development agency and basically connecting them with lawyers who want new websites. And I'll be doing this completely by using something called a cold email. And pretty much a cold email is essentially a sales pitch that is sent over an email basically telling the lawyers to, hey, here's what we'll do for you. If you're interested, why don't we set up a time to chat? So that's what I'll be doing. And this is the same business that I started back in October 2022. And by starting my lead generation agency, I was able to hit my first $10,000 month within my first three months and I was actually able to scale it to consistent 50 to $60,000 months. Now, in complete transparency, I still run that lead generation agency, but this time around, I'll be starting with a completely brand new business name. I'll be picking a niche, I'll be writing my own cold emails, I'll be taking my own sales calls, and I'll be starting from scratch. So no team members, no employees, and I'll be basically doing what anyone else would be doing if they're starting a brand new lead generation agency completely from scratch. The reason I'm doing it is because I kind of just want to prove to myself that literally anyone can start a lead generation agency and sign the first client and get to three to $5,000 in the next 30 days. And I'll be documenting the entire journey step by step. So today's day one of the process. Again, I have 30 days to actually do this or else I failed the challenge. And pretty much what I did was I actually put together a list of all the things I need to do within the next 30 days in order to actually start this business off the ground and sign my first client. So here's actually the list that I put together. As you can see, I put day one and what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be picking a business name. I'm just setting up the email automation software, picking a niche, conducting the research, creating the offers, cold emails and doing the leads list. And these are all things that could be very easily done probably by today to be honest. And I'll be walking you through the entire process. So I actually got a head start because today is January 8th, but right before the New Year's I actually went and actually already bought completely brand new domains. I actually set up the email accounts here. I'm inside of Smartly and as you can see, I set up 30 email accounts and they're actually all warming right now. Right. And as you can see my email campaigns, I started it on December 28, like the warming process and I could technically use them 14 days after that, which would take place coming Friday. Now you might be wondering what exactly is the warming process? So pretty much how you want to think about it is because what we're doing is we're using cold emails to number one, reach out to businesses and land a client for ourselves. But in order to actually cold email successfully, what we have to do is get to do something called warming. Because you can't just buy a bunch of domains, a bunch of brand new email accounts and just start blasting cold emails from day one. What you got to do is you got to slowly ramp up those cold emails, basically stimulating what an actual email would look like if you were just doing it from scratch and just manually doing it. And pretty much I'll be using an automation software called Smartly AI to actually do this. So basically that warming process, it takes two weeks, it takes 14 days. And basically my goal is to build up the rest of the business and do everything else. And in between that 14 day period and spoiler, it really doesn't even take 14 days. This is a process that if you have one to three days, probably a couple hours, you're actually able to build out the entire business and you're just basically waiting for the emails to finish warming. And as I did set up 30 email accounts, it really didn't take me that long. I think it took me around an hour to actually do this. 30 minutes to an hour to actually do this is actually a pretty quick and simple process and that's basically what it is. It actually did cost me around 250 to $300. I'm in Canada, so, so it cost me around $300. But to be honest, I think that's a pretty good ROI because if I can make back at least $3,000 in the next 30 days, I'm essentially turning $300 into $3,000. So basically a 10x ROI. But what I'll be doing for the rest of the day is picking a niche, conducting research on the niche, writing an offer, writing a cold emails, and building up my VSL, my video sales letter. And right now it's actually 1249. And what I'll be doing is I'll be proving to you that you're actually able to do all of these things by, you know, within a few hours. And my goal is by the end of today, by 5 or 6pm, I'm gonna have all of these things done, meaning that, you know, it'll take me three to four hours of just sitting there doing the stuff at my computer to actually build this business. And I'll actually be doing this at a coffee shop just to show you that you don't even need to be doing this completely at home. If you have a laptop, you have an Internet, you, you'll be able to do this. So let's get it going. All right, so I actually just made it to the coffee shop. If it's a little loud, that's the reason why. But pretty much I'll be working here for the next few hours and just really just bang out the foundations of the business. And to be honest, I really don't think that this is a process that'll take a really, really long time. Probably take me two or three hours to do that and I'll be documenting that entire process right now. All right, so right now it's 3:47pm so I've been working for literally the last two to three hours and I actually got a lot of stuff done right. And I pretty much have the fundamentals of what it takes to get this business get my lead generation agency off the ground. So let me just show you real quick what I was actually working on over the last two, three hours. Let's, let's see. So pretty much this is all of the stuff that I was able to do today, right? So I actually built up this document and over the last two to three hours, I actually put out everything right. So I picked the niche, which is going to be marketing agencies. I'm just going to be selling to them. I did some research, right? A lot of those stuff with the market size, the growth, stuff like that, how much they charge, I think that's a pretty important thing. I did a lot of research and I actually built my offer, which is essentially a sentence of what I'll be doing for marketing agencies and how I get specifically helped them. And I actually wrote out my cold emails that I'll be using, right. So I'm actually going to be sending five cold emails to them because obviously the first cold email over here and a bunch of follow ups, but that's pretty much what I've been doing. I also built my leads list, which is a list of marketing agencies that I'll actually be selling to. Here's kind of what that looks like right over here. And I was actually able to build it and I actually got started on, on my video sales letter, which is essentially a marketing sales letter that I'm going to be filming that kind of walks through my service and how I can, you know, help these marketing agencies out. And I know maybe this looks like it is a lot of work, but really it really isn't because I'm actually leveraging a lot of AIs like ChatGPT, things like that to really expedite my process, right. So I'm not just like manually typing all this stuff out. I'm literally using ChatGPT to help me so I could get that background information to make sure that I succeed with this and I'm not just, just wasting a ton of time, right. It's about working smarter, not necessarily about working harder. So my next step, and that's pretty much what I have done today for day one of building my lead generation agency. My cold emails are actually warming and I'll be able to start sending my very first cold email out coming Friday. Because I started my email account on December 28. Took me like an hour to set that up and I haven't really done anything since. Right. So what I'll be doing is to tomorrow I'm going to be finishing out my video sales letter again, right, the marketing letter, the sales letter, the sales video that I'm going to be creating that walks through my service and my products and how I can help these marketing agencies. And I'm just going to be filming it and I'll be getting everything ready to go for my cold email campaign that I'll be launching Friday. So that's pretty much what I had done today. So this is day one. So I'm actually just walking back to the car right now from the coffee shop and kind of the purpose Why I am creating this series or this video is just really to show people and debunk the myth that it really doesn't take that much time to start a business. Right. A lot of people think that starting a business is like, it takes like 40 hours worth of work and you know, you know, all of these different things, but it really doesn't take that much work, especially if you know what you're doing. Right. So that's kind of like the purpose of why I'm filming this video with where what I'll be doing next is I'm just going to be going to the gym, getting my workout in and I'll see you on day two. And while I was walking to the car just now just noticed there's a ton of bird poo on my car, right? So I live in Toronto and you know, these birds be going crazy. Like I clean my car like literally like every two or three days and there's always bird poo, which, you know, kind of sucks. Hey. So today is a new day and pretty much what I'm about to do today is I'm going to be filming what's called a video sales letter. So essentially what a video sales letter is, is kind of like a video that I'm just going to film one time where I'm just walking people through my services who I help, which no, for my niche, I'm going to be selling lead generation services to marketing agencies. So pretty much I'm just going to be filming kind of like a video where I walk marketing agencies through my entire service how I can specifically help them, like how the code emo stuff works, just all of this other stuff. And I'm literally about to film that video. It's like, I think it's going to be like a 30 minute video. I'm literally about to film it. I have like my camera, my laptop, stuff like that set up and let me actually just show you really, really quick what that looks like. So here's actually what that presentation looks like. As you can see, it's literally just a bunch of images and stuff like that. And basically I'm just going to be walking people through how like my entire system works, like the specific step by step process. As you can see, like I have like the camera set up, like that's literally me right there and I have the camera set up and I'm literally just going to be sharing my screen and I'm going to be talking about this and that's basically what that is going to look like. So I'll see you guys once it is finished filming. So I actually just finished filming the vsl. I had it like edited through like cap cut. It took me like, like I basically don't edit my videos. Maybe the one you're watching right now, I actually do edit it. But pretty much most of my other YouTube videos I don't really edit it. And including this video sales editor that I just filmed, that's going to help me with my lead generation agency. It's a very raw video and I'm not doing any editing to it. I filmed it, it was like a 30 minute video and I just slapped it up to YouTube and let me just show you what that kind of looks like right now. So here's actually my YouTube channel. As you can see, you know, I'm almost close to 10,000 subscribers. I guess depending on when you watch this video, maybe I would have passed that mark. But here's actually my vsl and right now this is a unlisted video. I think I'm going to keep it unlisted just for the purpose and the fact that my YouTube channel is more geared towards teaching people how to start a lead generation agency. While this VSL video over here is going to be more towards business owners, right? Because I'm going to be selling to marketing agencies and I really don't want to, you know, have it on YouTube and you know, confuse a bunch of people and stuff like that. So I think I'm going to keep that video unlisted. I think the other thing too, right, more importantly is I'm very certain that this video sales, that it will work and it will not only work but it'll click really, really hard. And you know, I just don't want like 2,000 people, 3,000 people. However people, many watch this video, I just don't want them to just blatantly copy me, right? And make this, you know, make basically this not work anymore, right? But I am sharing it with the people that I am working with one on one, helping them build up their own lead generation agency. I literally share with them the bsl. I broke it down for them as well. Where I play it minute by minute. I'm like, here's what I'm saying, here's why I'm saying it. So if you want to see specifically, I actually do have a consulting program and you should probably join, right. If you want to follow me along for this challenge and see specifically what I'm doing. My research under niche, the specific quota emails I'm using, the specific VSL and specific sales calls recording. I might upload the sales call recording onto YouTube, but I might not. I don't know. We'll see, right? It's kind of, kind of too soon, right. Uh, we're actually starting the cold email campaign tomorrow, so I expect to probably get a reply. Probably my first sales call from this business, probably sometime next week. Uh, that's kind of my expectation for this. Um, and hopefully get my first client within the next, next seven days. I'd say, right. Today is Friday, January 10th, so hopefully a week from now I would have my first client with this. Right. And what I will say as a caveat is if you're watching this video and you're seeing me do all of these things, they're honestly not super hard to do and it honestly doesn't take that, that much time either. But the caveat is I've also done this before, right? Like I currently have a lead generation agency that's making 50 to 60 grand a month. Right. My best month was 80 grand. Right. So I very clearly know what I'm doing and that's why it doesn't really take me that long to, let's say, make this, you know, presentation for the video sales editor and also record it. Because I've just done so many of them and I know exactly what the market wants, how to position what I have, and more importantly, how to sell it. Right. So you might be watching this video and you could probably figure this out and get some results, but just don't expect to be able to get the results the same way I am. Just because I actually do this for like a full time thing and I've been doing it for the last few years and I just know what I'm doing, right. I have a knowledge and I know exactly how to implement it. But that's basically today we filmed the bsl. Tomorrow I'll be setting up the Corey Mode campaign and getting it ready to go live. And I'll see you tomorrow. All right, so Today is day three. Today is Saturday, January 11th, and I literally just came back from the gym around an hour, two hours ago and I spent like the last 30 minutes just setting up my cold email campaign. So just to give you another update on what I've been doing ever since two days ago when I went to the coffee shop, pretty much I built out like I figured out my niche, I built my offer, I wrote my cold emails. Yesterday I filmed my video sales edit. So the letter, the video that I'm gonna film one time that I'll be using to send to people to really sell my service. And pretty much what I've done since today is for like last 30 minutes. All I did was just set up and get my leads list I downloaded off of Apollo. I scraped it, I verified it, all of that stuff. And I literally just took the cold emails that I wrote from the other day at the coffee shop, I copied it and I moved it into smart lead. And pretty much I have my cold email campaign and it's actually gonna start sending tomorrow, which is a Sunday. So a lot of people ask me, jimmy, do you like to send cold emails on the weekends? The answer to that is I like to send cold emails just 247 because at the end of the day, reaching out to someone, even if it's on a Saturday or Sunday, you're still gonna yield better results than not reaching out to people at all. And that's kind of my overall mindset around this topic. So actually, let me just show you really quick. So here's actually my campaign that I set up. It's called January 2025 B2B Campaign. I literally set this up like literally like 30 minutes ago. And my campaign is going to start tomorrow on January 12th at 9am EST. Right now I got around 2000 leads. I could have went more, but I was like, you know what, I'm pretty sure I'll get some results with just 2000 leads. Let me just move that in first for the sake of time. And pretty much I was able to just set up this whole campaign. I'm probably not going to just share, you know, exactly the cold email copy and what the words I'm saying is using. And so pretty much what I'll be doing from here is my code email campaign is going to start sending tomorrow at 9am so first thing in the morning I'm set it at sending 300 cold emails per day again. Right. I'm not manually sending these cold emails. The software that you see is called Smartly AI. It's pretty much an automation software, meaning I don't have to like I'm not the guy basically just sitting there pressing send every single day for all of these emails. It kind of does it automatically for me. And pretty much once this campaign gets going, tomorrow is a Sunday, but I should start getting some replies. You know, I'm sending three cold emails. I'll probably get somewhere between 10 and 15 replies, maybe some positive replies, and maybe book a sales call headed into the week. But that's obviously also not my expectation because it is a Sunday, but it's going to start tomorrow and it's going to continuously send over the, over the coming days, over the coming weeks. And, and my goal for this campaign, this first campaign, is by the end of this week. So right now it's Saturday. By the end of seven days from now, next Saturday, I want to have at least one legitimate, qualified sales call with someone I don't know about, close the person. But my expectations to have at least minimum one sales call, most likely it should be more, but I'll just set it at one for now. And that's basically what it is. So pretty much that's basically how the business just kind of works, right? Most of the work. I think there's two components of it. The first type of work is kind of just setting everything up. So setting up the email accounts, that's probably going to take 30 minutes to an hour. You know, picking the niche, writing the offer, writing the code, cold emails, that's probably going to take one to two hours. Writing the video sales, that are the actual VSR that you're using, that might actually take a while. So I think it took me two or three hours to put that together. And then obviously setting up this code email campaign, which literally took me like 30 minutes to do. And I think all in all, that was probably maybe like somewhere between five and like seven or eight hours worth of work spread across like three or four days. Right. And it's very, very manageable if you are like watching, you know, you're working a job right now, a very demanding job, or you're in school or you got like, just a bunch of other responsibilities. You really don't need to spend 40 hours in a week in order to set this up. Right. It literally takes somewhere between 5 and 10 hours in total just to get off the. Get this off the ground once. This is going to. Pretty much the only work left after that is just replying back to emails and taking sales calls and then signings on clients. And I'm working directly with those clients, and I'll be documenting this every step of the way. So I'll see you tomorrow. All right, so Today is Monday, January 20th. And you know, I've just been kind of busy over the last few days and I kind of just forgot about like, these vlogs. But then I woke up today, and my cold email campaigns have been going on for roughly a week now. So it's been sending for a week. We started last, last Sunday and it's looking pretty good so far. So just to give you a little bit more outlook. What we're doing with the cold email campaigns is I'm targeting marketing agencies. I'm sending them a cold email basically, hey, if you're a marketing agency, we can help you build sales calls by leveraging our cold email process. And then we're looking for replies and then the people who do reply, I'm sending over a video. So that VSL that I put together two weeks ago. Last week, two weeks ago. And if people are interested, I then book them in for a sales call. So far it's pretty promising. I actually had two sales calls this morning. Unfortunately couldn't close either of them. They're kind of duds. So one guy was, one of them was just asking me for a proposal and the other one wasn't looking to add a cold email into his business for the foreseeable future. He wanted to do this later this year in like Q3 or Q4. And that's just the way it is, right? That's called sales. Right? You can't close every single person. But I still have one more call later today and I also have a call tomorrow. So so far in the last week I booked four sales calls for my own lead generation agency. And let me actually show you really quick what that KPIs for the cold email campaign is kind of looking like. All right, so this is my cold email campaign. I launched it on January 11, 2024. So today is Monday, January 20th. And as you can see, I sent 4,000 cold emails. In total, I got a little bit over 58% open rate. So 2,500 people opened it. I got 107 replies. Of that, 17 people replied back positively. So 107 people just emailed me saying oh yeah, not interested or out of office. 17 people wanted to see the video sales letter and I was able to book four sales calls from this cold email campaign that I literally launched last week. So then the overall goal for this upcoming week is to sign our first deal, right? Because we sent 4,000 cold emails so far. I got four sales calls and I'm very confident that we're going to close a deal. Usually speaking if I talk to 10 people, I'm probably going to close three or four of those people onto a closed deal. I think what I'm going to charge is I'm probably going to charge 2,500 to $3,000 upfront USD. That was from table 2.5k USB up front. Again, I'm not leveraging any case studies, any experience Any testimonials? So it's obviously going to be harder than if I purposely went out of my way. I was like, oh yeah, I worked with this company and that company. But again. Right. I think there is beauty in the process of starting for the very first time and just getting things going. And I'm very confident that by the end of this week. So today's Monday. By the end of this week, I would have my first closed deal for my own lead generation agency, meaning I would have made money within my first month of starting my own lead generation agency. So I'll keep you guys updated on what's. What goes on in the sales call that's happening in literally 1512 minutes from now. And hopefully that's the one. I'll talk to you guys soon. So our entire service, it's $3,000 just to set everything up. So it'll be $3,000 right now. So where we like to go from here, Vanessa, I guess we can start today. Are you sure? Yep. All right. We just closed our very first deal for my brother brand new lead generation agency. It took four sales calls to do that. I signed my very first client literally one week after I launched my cold email campaign. I launched it last Sunday, so actually eight days to be more specific, but basically a week. Right. And I started this brand new lead generation agency literally at the beginning of January. Well, actually I cheated a little bit because I set up all the email accounts and domains and stuff like that on December 28th. But honestly, I just, I didn't do anything other than set up those email accounts and buy them and stuff like that. And I didn't do anything until the first week of January. You guys were here for along with the journey. And I just signed my very first client for $2,500 USD. And just to prove this to be true, I actually have my stripe over here. And let me see, let me just refresh this and hopefully the zooms. Give me a sec. Okay, cool. So as you can see, $3,000 Canadian, right? The currency is pretty bad here in Canada, but it is 2.5k USD converted over to Canada. That's, you know, my stripe because again, I am from Canada, so automatically does the payments and we just signed our very first clients. So you guys were here along for the journey and you guys kind of witnessed everything that I did, right? And I would say in terms of hours, I think in total, I probably spent maybe 10 to 15 hours on total. I think in terms of the hours breakdown, most of that was spent up front. Right. Just, you know, just setting everything up. For example, writing out the cold emails, researching my niche, which is marketing agencies. That's who I selling to. Coming up with my video sales letter, actually filming it and just taking four sales calls where I actually wanted them, no showed. So I took three live sales calls. Each of those sales calls are between 30 and 40 minutes long, depending on, you know, what I was talking about and stuff like that. And I would say it was all between 10 and 15 hours worth worth of work spread across, you know, over the course of literally the last three months. Today is January 20th, so it's literally been three weeks, right. And I made literally 2.5 K. And if I was taking this very, very seriously, where this is my very full, like my full time business and is my primary vehicle to make money, I'd be just ramping this up and just signing way more clients because one client is paying me literally 2,5k. So. So if I only get three or four more of these, I'll be at $10,000 per month because that's the beauty of this business model. A lead generation agency, I don't need to go out and you know, sign 20 different people or you know, sell to 50 different people in order to make a decent amount of money. One client is 2.5 K. Two clients, that's literally $5,000 a month. Four clients, that's 10 grand. So where do we go from here? So the very next step is to actually deliver the service. Now obviously that's more of a long term arrangement and what I'll be doing is I'll be moving this new client over to my actual lead generation agency, the one that I've been running for literally the last two years. The one that consistently makes between 50 and 60 thousand dollars per month, simply because we do have the infrastructure. And you know, the purpose of this video was for this challenge where I literally started a brand new lead generation agency and signed my first client within 30 days. And you know, honestly we beat that by quite a, quite a large amount. Right. And what I will say is, hopefully this video proves to you that literally anyone can start a brand new Lead Generation Agency. 0 case studies, 0 testimonials, 0 reviews, and sign the first client that literally pays them a few thousand dollars. Right. Now, as a caveat, what I will say is I obviously know what I'm doing, right? Again, I run an actual lead generation agency. I teach people how to start their own lead generation agencies. So obviously I know exactly how to do this. I've done this Hundreds of times, signed hundreds of clients, helped my students help the people that I help start their lead generation agencies, help them sign all of their clients. So obviously I know what I'm doing. You know, I've been in the game for two years and I kind of understand the value of just moving quickly and doing the right things in the right order. And that's basically the result, right, of doing the right things in the right way, in the right order, without wasting unnecessary time. I was able to sign my very first client literally in less than 30 days, right? Going from 0 to, to 2.5k in literally 20ish days from starting my actual lead generation agency. So that's basically the challenge. Hopefully you guys liked it. If you guys liked it, make sure you drop me a, like, make sure to drop me a subscribe. This entire YouTube channel is talking about how you can start your own lead generation agency. A lot of the things that I did in today's video, the things that I actually did in order to make money, I teach them for free on my YouTube channel. Teaching you, literally, if you wanted to learn completely for free, you could go and start your own lead generation agency literally today, right? And that's basically what it is. But if you are watching this video and you decide that you want to start a lead generation agency, you're serious about this, you're going to make this work, and you want to work with me in order to do so. The first link in the description down below will lead you to a website where you will have the opportunity to set up a call with me, directly with me, or maybe someone from my team, you know, depending on, depends on when you're watching this video and we'll just chat to see if I can actually help you start your own lead generation agency. One of the businesses I do run is called Inbox Lab. It's more of a consulting slash mentorship style of business. And pretty much our entire mission is to help regular people start their own lead generation agency and get to 5 to $10,000 per month in literally the first 90 days. Right? Obviously I went from 0 to 2.5k in 20 days. And, and if I was committed to running this business for literally three months, I'm very, very confident, very, very certain. Really, that'll be well over $10,000 per month. Right? So that's basically what it is. If you don't want to work with me, that's completely fine. Again, I have tons of resources on this YouTube channel. Just watch some of those YouTube videos and as long as you take action, you'll be able to make it. But that's pretty much it for today's video. Hopefully you guys did enjoy it. It did, you know, it did require a lot of filming over of the. The course. Course of like many days of a couple weeks. And hopefully you guys enjoyed it and found value in this video. I'll see you guys in the next one. See ya.