Ryan Deiss made millions in sales but went broke because all revenue went to ads and a $250,000 credit line covering the gap. Free Google traffic disappeared, he never calculated real customer acquisition costs, and his business model collapsed. He pivoted to a new venture called Idea Incubator.
I was sitting at a bar at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas, and I realized I'm completely broke. I have no money. My credit cards are all completely tapped out. What I didn't realize is that I wasn't actually making any money. Basically, all the revenue I was creating, I was spending in ad revenue. And I had a $250,000 line of credit that had been completely tapped because anytime my bank account hit zero, it would just pull from the line of credit. And I wasn't watching what was happening. And so all this money that I was spending, I'm like, oh yeah, it's making money, it's making money, 'cause I'm looking at my sales. I'm not looking at my actual take-home. I had to acknowledge that my business model was broken. My business model was based on a world that no longer existed, a world where Google was just going to send me free traffic directly to a sales page, and I didn't actually have to pay for customer acquisition. I had to completely reinvent the business, and that was when Idea Incubator was born. Again, another super stupid name. I'm terrible at naming businesses.
