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Ryan Deiss had 180 websites and was drowning in debt. He wrote his entire business model on a napkin to figure out what actually mattered. He kept six sites, killed the rest, and made over $1 million in the first year.
Ryan Deiss had 180 websites and was drowning in debt. He wrote his entire business model on a napkin to figure out what actually mattered. He kept six sites, killed the rest, and made over $1 million in the first year.
I remember looking up and I saw this stack of cocktail napkins sitting in front of me, and I remember just grabbing one of them and looking at it and being like, there's no way that you could do that right now. There's no way you could describe how your business works on one of these napkins. And that's probably the problem. And so I remember sitting there looking at that napkin. I made myself a deal. I was like, all right, Ryan, if you could describe how your business works on this napkin, then maybe you got something worth fighting for. If you can't, then you just need to kind of accept failure, see if somebody can cover your bar tab for you, you know, go to bed, wake up, confess what you've done to your wife and declare bankruptcy and see if you can get a job. And so I just remember looking at it and thinking, okay, how does my business work? And on a napkin, I still have the napkin to this day, and so I remember just writing on the napkin and looking at it and being like, that's it. What if I just did this? Like, what if this is the only thing that I did? And I went from, at that point it was around 180 different individual websites, and I shrunk it down to just 6. The 6 that were just following that little plan on the napkin. I focused on the stuff that was working, and long story short, I was able to dig out of that incredibly deep hole that I had dug for myself. That was the first year that I generated over $1 million in revenue and was able to pay off all that debt and basically get back to— get back to zero.
