Peter Szabo narrates his entrepreneurial journey starting at age 11 after family financial loss. He began by trying low-barrier online money methods (PTC/paid-to-click sites), earned his first dollar slowly, and was scammed after investing in a premium PTC plan. He moved to Fiverr (earning up to a few hundred dollars/month), then affiliate marketing, before niching into a marketing agency focused on Facebook/YouTube ads. Early agency growth relied on strong client results (example: Michael Dia, $4,000 ad spend → $48,000 revenue). The agency scaled to six-figure months (agency best ~ $164,000/month; he mentions a best month ~ $220,000 for his broader business) and later launched a course that reached $1,000,000 in its first year. He offers to share more detailed lessons in follow-up videos.
Questions this video answers
11 years old.
It took months to make his first dollar (from clicking ads with payouts of pennies).
$20.
$10 (but subsequent promised payouts were not paid).
Up to about $200–$400 per month.
Chapters
How did I get started in business and exactly how I made my first dollar and then how did I go from there? Hey, my name is Peter Sabo and I was lucky at 11 years old, kind of unlucky and lucky at the same time. Unlucky because my parents invested all the money they had, didn't have into this company and the investment didn't work out. Next thing we knew, we were broke because we had to pay back all those loans. And so that's the unlucky part, right? The lucky part is because my father got involved with these business things and personal development, I stumbled upon this movie called the Secret, right? And I don't think retrospectively it really revealed the secret, but it made me kind of believe naively as an 11 year old kid that you can be, do have anything you want. And I'm glad it did, right, because that's the kind of courage it took for me to think and say to myself, like, look, I don't care that I'm 11 years old, I don't care. I have broken English. Because back then it was really terrible. I, you know, I don't care about all these external circumstances. I'm gonna take my family's financial destiny into my own hands and I'm gonna change it. So I literally went onto Google, typed in how to make money online. And that's literally genuinely how my journey began at 11 years old. Now, the very, very early days, I remember I went on a bunch of forums, Warrior forum, the botnet, there's a bunch of forums, there's a Czech forum. And I started like learning about different make money online methods, right? So it was kind of like a kid in a candy store, like, wow, you can make money with SEO and then affiliate and then pay per click. And this requires no upfront investment, this requires a little, this requires a lot of capital. And so I was introduced to this world of like, wow, there's really a lot of things you can do to make money online. And you know, a lot of them can be also in line with your passion, something you genuinely care about, something you enjoy. And so I was sold, right? And one of the first things I got into, because, you know, I was 11, I didn't even dare asking my parents for any money. So I literally had to start from zero. I mean, no funding, not even a dollar from zero. So one thing I found was pay per click website PTCs, or I think it's PTC, paid to click websites where I would sign up and essentially I would click on ads, you wait, like, 30 seconds to see the ad and literally collect a penny. This is not a joke. This is not an exaggeration or not under. Under talking it, whatever the word may be. You see terrible English kicking in. But what I mean, it was literally pennies that I got for, like, minutes of my time. But there was also, like, a limit. Like, I could only see four or five ads a day. So I was literally making four or five cents a day. It literally took me months to make my first dollar. That then I cashed out to my father's PayPal account that I had to create under his name. And then I kind of realized, like, okay, this is kind of hard, right? Kids were laughing at me in elementary school, literally. I think one of them literally told me that you're working so hard for the type of money I would not even bend over to pick up from the streets, right? Because I was literally working for pennies. So I kind of really felt humiliated and embarrassed, but I kept at it, right? I tried different things. I remember I even tried to invest in a PTC website. Right after I got paid out a couple bucks, I found another PTC website that said that if you. I think it was, like, invest 20 bucks with them for, like, a premium membership, now you can get a dollar per click, not one penny per click, right? And they had all this proof of payouts. Like, yeah, we paid out this guy. Paid out that guy. So I was like, okay, this is my time to shine. So I literally begged my dad. This was, I don't know, 12 or 13. I literally beg him, like, hey, can I have 20 bucks? Which to us, was of money, okay? I come from Slovakia. People make like five, six hundred bucks a month there. Two, three, four dollars an hour. Now it's Euros. So, you know, it's quite a bit of money. So I literally had to beg him. He eventually gave it to me. I go ahead, buy the membership. And I remember I got my first payout for 10 bucks, right? So 50% of my investment was already there, and I still had, like, 70, 80 bucks made in that account that I was ready to cash out. So I request my money, and guess what? These never paid me. So that was the first time I got scammed at, like 12, 13 years old trying to invest into premium membership to get more per click and then get it paid out. And it turns out that they were paying people out, except not in full, right? So they maybe paid out their first payment to kind of get a screenshot to show other people they are paying stuff out but ultimately they would not pay out more than the person actually put in. So it was a scam. So that was a little bit devastating, you know, for me at 12 or 13. But I still kept going. And I eventually knew like, goddamn, these PTC websites are. A lot of them are just shady. They don't pay out. And there's no way I'm gonna create any substantial income by clicking on ads, right? So I evolved onto Fiverr. Fiverr became kind of like my next thing where I actually started making some decent amount of money, like even a couple hundred a month over a period of time. I just started selling my services, you know, like things that I learned as kind of like a geeky kid over the last previous few years, like let's do a little bit of Photoshop, a little bit of video editing. I mean, a lot of these were basic skills, but you know, a little bit of WordPress site creation and other stuff. And that's how slowly I started growing and growing by charging 5 bucks here, 10 bucks here for my mini services. And yeah, eventually I made 200 bucks in a month. I think 400 bucks in a month. So that was definitely a good starting point. And that for, you know, 12, 13, 14 year old was quite substantial of an income in Slovakia. So I felt pretty good about it. Then I kept going and I tried a bunch of different things. I did affiliate marketing relatively successfully for a while. Also made a couple hundred a month from it. And eventually I learned a lot about like marketing and sales over these last few years. So I realized, like, look, I need to really kind of focusing on one thing because I was trying to do like seven different things at once, right? So next to PTCs, next to Fiverr, I was still trying to find this one way to make money that would let me make more with less effort and actually do something I'm really passionate about, right? Because PTC Fiverr wasn't. Wasn't like the best, right? It was a good stepping stone. It was a good place to start. But for instance, fiverr would take 20% of my earnings. I'm like, okay, this is a huge chunk, right? One 20% out of each. You know, every transaction was like a dollar. So I had to move on. I had to find something better. So at that time I realized, okay, what is it that I need to niche down on, right? That was like an epiphany. Everybody kind of told me, but I finally understood it then that people who are generalists typically do not get paid that well, right? Like think about in any area of life. If you go to a regular doctor, you know, they make good money, but they don't make nearly as much as the heart surgeon or as the brain surgeon or whatever, right? Because they're specialized. So I realized like, okay, if I want to take my income from where it's at to where I need it to be or want it to be, I need to specialize. And I started asking myself questions like, okay, what is it that I'm really the best at, right? I've spent all these years learning stuff. What do I know the most? Where do I have the most skill? Where can I provide the most value? What type of problems can I solve the most? And also like, how am I gonna build a business that is okay? I mean, that customers and clients are gonna be okay dealing with a 14, 15 year old kid, right? Cause I was still so young and I still had a pretty, pretty thick like European accent. And I realized maybe it wasn't the best idea, maybe I could have come up with something cooler. But at that time I realized maybe I should start a marketing agency. I knew a lot about Facebook marketing, YouTube marketing. So I decided, okay, let me do that. Let me charge a small, tiny amount. And that's how I went from making a couple hundred a month to my first thousand dollar month, $2,000 a month, 3, 4, 5 to 10, 20,000, and slowly built it up. One of the biggest keys to growing the marketing agency was results, right? So getting the first few clients was really tough. I offered a bunch of discounts, bunch of incentives just to get the first couple on. And the moment I got them results, I turned it into a case study. I documented it. I remember there was one client in particular in the very early days, Michael Dia went from putting in 4,000 bucks in ads and made 48,000 bucks, right? So that's a 10x plus ROI. Significant results. I documented everything, got the screenshots, and then that's how I built kind of like my marketing message around, like how I did this for this guy and how I can replicate these results for you, assuming they're willing to put in the work, open minded to change the marketing message, et cetera, et cetera. So that's how I really started getting clients and stacking the money. 1,000, 2,000, 3, 4, 5. Until I kind of got capped out at 10 or 20. And then again I hit another plateau, did a bunch of other things and kind of scaled up and up and up and up. Up until recently, I think our best month was like 220,000amonth. And that's not in the agency. The best month in the agency was 164. And now we kind of shifted to more, like doing ads for us. Right. Cause we made our clients tens of millions of dollars and. And I kind of realized, like, okay, if I just apply these skills to my own ideas, my own products, my own passion projects, most likely I can make this work. And recently we started selling like a new course, really something I'm extremely passionate about. This mindset stuff that really, truly made the difference in business for the most part. And we took it from zero to a million literally within the first year. Right. And that's obviously an exceptional result. And it's only been possible because I've been in business 11 years and I had a chance to learn a lot over these last, you know, years, the whole last decade. So let me know if this was helpful, whatsoever insightful to kind of understand the journey from zero to getting to, say, 10 20k a month. Most of you may be in that range, you know, starting out, wanting to build up. So hopefully I could at least walk you through my journey. Let me know if this is helpful. If you want me to do another video on maybe some of my pitfalls and mistakes, learning lessons, kind of zoom in on that. If that's helpful, I can do that as well. Or if you want another video like kind of part two, how to go from 10 20k a month and how to get unstuck and kind of take it to fifty, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand a month. That's kind of where I'm at as of recording this video. So I could also record a part two on that. If you're interested, just let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. And if you like this video, just like subscribe, do all that good stuff and speak soon.
