If I Had To Start a Business From Scratch, I'd Do This

This is exactly what I did to make my first $10,000 online. And I'm going to walk you through how I got my first 10 customers, what I did right, what I did wrong, so that you can copy me. So I had always been into fitness from the time I was 13, 14 years old. I was already lifting weights and was really into it in college as the vice president of the powerlifting team. And then I had my consulting job and I talked about fitness all day long. I read articles all day and so much so that the people I worked with were like, dude, if you don't get into fitness, we'll front you the money to do this because you don't stop talking about it. And so I annoyed enough people around me that I was like, okay, maybe Maybe I am going to do this. And so that's what created the free training project. And so the idea was I would ask people to donate $500 to $1,000 to the charity of their choice, and in exchange I would train them for 3 months for free. It was free because they didn't pay me, but they still had to donate to something they cared about. But the thing that really made it click for me where I was like, you know, I'm going to do something here, is that there was this lady at my gym named Sandy Smith, and she saw me working out. And I was on the powerlifting team in my local area, and I was competing, and I had other guys who were competing there too. And it was clear that we knew we were doing something well. So she asked me because I looked the least intimidating because I was the most jacked. That's why I looked the least intimidating. She said, hey, can you help me with my food? And I was like, sure. And she said, well, meet me at, uh, a pizza shop and you can talk to me about food, which is just hilarious. I meet her at the pizza shop and we talked for like an hour and a half about, you know, it's like, hey, try buy these things instead of that, you know, maybe get more protein in. This is the stuff that I like. I walk through everything and I was happy to do it because I just like talking about fitness stuff. And at the end of the conversation, she reaches down to her purse and she puts her purse on the table, and then she reaches in and she She grabs her checkbook and she writes a $100 check to me. And the check was literally this big. It was a clown check. And I was like, why are you a clown? Why am I a clown? Is this a joke to you? Is this my passion? Something that means nothing? No, I'm kidding. None of that was true. But she wrote me a check for $100 and she was like, thanks so much. And she slid it across the table and she gave it to me. And then she walked out and I remember being like, holy shit, I can make money doing this. I was like, that's pretty cool. And so that was like the light bulb moment for me to say like, I'm going to actually go from this is a passion to I want to make this something I make profit from. So there's 4 stages that I went through in order to get to my first 10 customers. So the first stage I started with was homies. Reach out to the people who know you and like you. And so for me, honestly, all I did was I took out this amazing piece of technology, which is my phone, and then I looked through my contacts, leads, reached out to a handful of my friends, and I got about 6 of them-ish to say, yes, I will let you train me for free because we're friends and you need before and after pictures. And that's pretty much all I did. It wasn't really that hard because people knew that I loved fitness and I just said, I'll help you for free and be a homie. And they said, sure. And so the reason I started with homies specifically was because I needed before and afters. I needed testimonials. I needed results because I figured if anybody was like me, they would think, well, sure, maybe you say that you can do that, but why should I believe you? And so I solved really over the top. And this habit, maybe I lucked into it the first time, but I have done it with every single business I have ever started, which is get proof before anything. Like, if you have 100 pieces of proof and a terrible offer versus an amazing offer and no proof, the guy with 100 pieces of proof is gonna win. You don't even need that many pieces of proof for people to believe you. You need proof that is similar enough to them that they will believe that what you did for that person will also work for them. And so the testimonials that I had, I had one guy who lost 50 pounds, I had a girl who lost 50 pounds, I had a guy did like a recomposition, he stayed the same weight but like looked crazy different afterwards. And so that kind of like covered a handful of different avatars for me later. Now that wasn't on purpose, that just kind of worked out to who responded. Wanted to me, and they all had different goals, but it worked to show that I knew what I was doing. After I had my homies, this took me like 6 months. So mind you, it's like I will take 3 minutes in this video to explain it, but it was 6 months of my life. And if you're like, man, I want to get rich in 6 seconds, that's amazing. Wait for stage 4 because I'll tell you how— what I would have done differently to make this happen faster. But the second step I did was I asked them for referrals. Referrals are the most important type of marketing for a variety of reasons. Number 1, referrals are free. And so if you are poor, great place to start. Number 2, referrals have higher likelihoods of buying at higher prices. So that means you— these leads are worth more than every other type of lead because they have a higher conversion rate and at higher prices, which is banger. Third reason that they're also more valuable leads is that people who come from referral are also more likely to refer. And so the way that you come in is the more likely way that you will get somebody else to come in. For all those reasons, referrals are sweet. The big picture reason that referrals are so important when you're starting is that if you're not getting any, it means you're not that good. And so you don't want to let more people know you suck. So instead, you want to let as few people know that you suck until eventually people find out about how good you are, which is the right thing. Then you can pour gas on the fire and do all the other ways of advertising. And so for those of you who are starting out, who are really just at the very beginning here, then I want to give you what I wish I knew. And believe it or not, we're actually running this as a little experiment inside of school right now, and the results are astounding. I'm not going to share the stats yet, but they're really good. We took the rule of 100 for warm outreach and we've actually kind of like broken it down into something, a 3-step process that's really tactical. They're calling it the rule of 300. And if you don't know what the rule of 100 is, which I talk about in my $100 Million Leads book, it's the fundamental process of applying 100 repetitions to any of these things. So 100 warm outreaches means you need to reach out to people who know you. Mind you, it doesn't have to be your homies. Like you probably have 300, you know, friends on Facebook and 500 followers on Instagram or whatever, all, you know, 300 people inside of your cell phone. Like those are all the people you know. You reach out one-on-one to 100+ cold prospects, people who don't know you. You spend 100 minutes making content and then you post that content. To be clear, you don't just spend 100 minutes making content and do nothing. You post it. And then finally, you can spend $100 a day on ads at minimum. All right? That's how you get started. Now, obviously, you can spend more on ads, but you should spend at least 100 minutes making the ads, researching, looking at hooks, recording, et cetera. But if you do that every single day, you will get customers because you will let people know that you exist. Now, the rule of 300, it's really just taking the 100, the rule of 100, for warm outreach and breaking it down into 3 steps. So I'll break down all 3 for you right now. So number 1 is you post content. Just make a post. All right. One piece on one platform. Very simple. All right. You don't need to overcomplicate this. After you make the post, you do 100 comments. All right. This is really big. Now, the comments, my recommendation is you do it inside of a group or community. Now, the reason that we do it inside of a group is that, one, it's going to be a pool of all of your ideal customers. And the goal of the comments is to make the best comment. All right, so if you look at all the comments that are on someone, when you make it as a comment inside of a group, there's two benefits that you haven't— might not have thought of. One is that inside of a group, you're not competing against everyone. You're now just competing against everyone inside the group. Secondarily, you're not competing against everyone even inside the group. You're competing against everyone in the comments. And so it makes you look like you're super good even though you're just this much better because you actually took a minute to make a comment rather than just like, cool stuff or awesome, right? That's not going to do it. You have put out a thought response to each post. Now, the posts that you do, you should just use them as prompts. So it should be a lot easier for you to come up with comments than to come up with content. All right. So that's the second step. Now, the third step is that we now basically apply the rule of 100 to our new warm list. You're like, what's the new warm list? So this is like a— it's like lukewarm. It's like right between cold and warm. And so what it is, is everyone who liked your post Anyone who commented on your post and anyone who liked any of your comments. Now, this is going to be a pretty big one, or replied to your comment. All right. So that basically gives you 4 different sources to find the leads that you do your one-on-one outreach. So this should hopefully solve the big, like, who do I reach out? These people, these people. And the reason we did this, and this is key, the reason that we go after these 4 people is because these 4 categories have all done one thing which changes them from strangers. They have taken an action. They've indicated interest. And so the point of advertising, which I define in The Leads Book, is to go from an unengaged lead, which is just a person you can contact, to an engaged lead, which is a person you can contact who has shown interest in the stuff that you sell, or at least has shown interest in you. With that, this sounds really minor, but it's huge. You can then begin the conversation by saying, hey, saw you liked my content. What about it drew you in? Or like, what made you do that? Or, oh, that was so cool of you, whatever. Hey, I saw you commented, or thanks for that comment and question, right? Don't just say thanks for the comment. That's not going to start a conversation. Ask a question. What made you do that? Are you looking to get in shape, clean your house, get organized, whatever the thing your content was about? Hey, I saw that you liked my comment. Are you looking to— right? And so anybody who's following the type of content that you're commenting on, by the way, duh, comment on— like, if you're selling dog stuff, comment on dog stuff. Don't comment on, you know, crypto make money stuff and try and find dog people. Now then again, who knows? But if I'm going to pick where I'm like— if I'm going to pick where I'm going to make my comments, I'm going to target posts that already have the types of people that I want to sell to commenting and posting on it. All right. And then finally, people who reply to your comment are going to probably be some of the warmest leads because they've already read the thing, took the time that they already basically messaged you in a way by, by replying to your comment. So this, if you think about this, is like we only need 100. If you make a post and you get 25 likes, it's like, boom, there's my first 25 reachouts. Then I've got people commented, maybe I've got 3 or 4 comments. Okay, there's another 3 or 4. Then I make my 100, remember? Remember here? So let's link these up. So these two go to this, and then these two go to this one. Let's see if I can cross the chasm here. There. So if you then do 100 comments, you're going to at least get 100 likes or responses. Because if you actually take that much time, the person who you even— who made the post on will likely take the time to like your comment because they want to encourage other people to leave long thoughtful comments like that. This is 101 lead gen for you not having any audience. So it's gone. Like you have no more excuse. This works. And the results that we're getting are fucking awesome, which I'm really stoked about. I'll share the stats later. We're doing this as a big experiment. And there's one more reason that I think this is really sexy. Comments on a big post will get way more reach than your initial content. Especially if you're starting from zero, because you basically get to piggyback on the reach that other people's content gets. And so it's in a weird way, it's almost like you running mini ads. Now, to be clear, you want to have thoughtful comments. You don't want to say like, buy my shit. Like that will one, probably get you blocked by the person whose content it is, but also you look like a shithead. So don't do that. So you want to have a thoughtful response and this will take time to be clear. Like, well, how many hours a day will this take? And notice I mentioned hours. A day, it'll probably take you 2 to 4 hours to do this every day. But objective number one when you're starting out is let people know you exist because no one does. So I asked my homies after getting them results. So I provided value first and I said, hey man, I've got your before and afters. I need like a few more. Can you send me some friends that have seen your results? And a lot of them had like people were telling them like, dude, you lost 50 pounds, you look awesome. Or like, hey, you look— you have a bikini now. Like you didn't even want to go outside without covering yourself up. Like, this is great. And so I got probably another 6 to 10-ish referrals from those first 6. And a totally different thing happened here. These people didn't know who I was. They just knew that I had helped their friend out. And these people cared way less about like helping me and cared way more about just helping them, which unsurprising, fine. But the thing that happened was because it was free, none of them really did anything. And so that became a problem. And so then I was like, shoot, that whole thing didn't work. So then I moved on to stage 3, which was The Free Training Project. And so that is the title that we owe this section to. And so what I did was I said, hey, now when you refer someone, just donate $500 to $1,000 to the charity of your choice. That way you still have skin in the game, but it's still effectively free in that you're not paying me. And so I was then public about it. People were like, this is awesome. And then a lot of people came in to support the fact that I was kind of doing this for charity. But long-term, I wanted to find a way to turn this into something that I could make money from. And so the next phase of customers, this gave me everything that I needed to then transition to paid. And so from there, I went to the Skinny to Swole project. Now publicly, this was a year later. And so this was where I asked new people to pay $200 a month for 12 weeks to go from skinny to swole. And I had all these great transformation pictures from my friends, from the people went through the free training project to then do Skinny to Swole. And I was able to transfer— and this is a key point— I was able to transfer people from the free training project into Skinny to Swole without really losing many of them. I just said, hey, you know how you paid for 12 weeks to this charity? Why not pay me instead whatever you paid them? And they were like, sure. I didn't really care because again, all these people, they came because their friends got results. They were like, this is weird that this guy is making me donate to a charity, but I guess it's fine. They just cared about getting in shape. But that was me overcoming my own, like, fear of charging for making money. And so that is when I got to my first 20 clients in Skinny to Swole. Which is me posting and then reaching out to everyone else I knew with all the testimonials from the first 3 stages to say, hey, I'm now officially launching this thing. And I got 20 guys to pay $200 a month. And that was my first $4,000 per month. And that was for 12 weeks. And that was my first $12,000. Now, you might be like, wait, where's the— so what do I do if I'm you? Well, let me tell you what I would have done if I knew everything that I know now. So here's bonus number 5. I'll put a little with little stars around it. What would I have done if I knew what I know now? Great. So that's what this section is. There are a lot of different businesses that you can potentially start. The reason that I think for beginners, starting an online service business is the easiest one to start is because it costs the least amount of money and it has a lot of good economics around it. Meaning it costs almost nothing to deliver. There's low recurring overhead. You can do it from any place in the world. If you're watching this video, You already have all the technology required. And so like basically everything is there for you to start and you get to learn all of the mistakes that you're going to inevitably learn on a low stakes business first. Hey, and I wanna write you a check real quick and not just any kind of check, but one that you can actually take to the bank. And this is about starting a Skool community. The reason that I decided to become a co-owner and made a massive investment in Skool, the platform, is because for 4 years I was looking for what is the easiest business online that I can help people get started because I have a massive amount of my audience are business owners that, you know, do 1, 5, 10, 100 million plus a year. And that's who watches my stuff. And I have a lot of deeper content for really tactical stuff once you're at 20 employees, 50 employees, 100 employees, 250 employees. But if you're just starting out, then it's like, yeah, that stuff's amazing, but what do I do today? And so I want to give you this check because this check is what the average school community that's paid and monetized on the platform makes in recurring revenue per month. And so no, this is not a bazillion dollar check. This is not going to get you to be the richest person in your neighborhood, but it can help get you started. And so the tactics that I outlined earlier about the rule of 300, we're doing this right now for people inside of school and it's murdering. And so I recommend that you start because the coolest part of this whole thing is that you can start absolutely free. And so if that sounds at all interesting, I take a call every single Monday. You can go there, school.com/games. I'm sure there's some links somewhere. Just let me know that you're new. I I hop on, I answer questions. We walk through basically what we saw after studying thousands of communities that are paid and doing well. And we just tried to reverse engineer and boil it down to like, what are the actions they took? And so the instructions are very much like, do this X times per day, do this Y times per week. And if you just follow the instructions, you will get an exceptional result. And so to be clear, I stayed in this box for over a year. I just kept reaching out to people asking for referrals because I didn't even know what the word advertising really meant. I was just like, I'm just going to tell people that I have this thing and hopefully they'll want to buy it from me. But after a year of doing stage 1, talking to homies, stage 2, getting referrals, stage 3, doing the donation stuff, stage 4, that is when I moved on to here. All right. Which is that I actually made my first content post. And so I'll read it to you because I think there's a lot of actually decent parts to this post, especially like being my first advertising post ever without being in this internet marketing world. I was just a consultant in Baltimore. Everyone, for those of you who know me, you know two things. One, I'm terrible with all things technological. Not that much has changed. For example, I just heard about Spotify a few weeks ago, seriously, and people at that point have had it for like a decade already. Two, I love training, nutrition, and fitness more than, well, a lot. So today's sort of special because it marks the day where my love of training vanquished my fear of technology, which by the way, many of you should hopefully get to that day sooner, which is that you should be willing to deal with some discomfort in order to get what you want. So for the better part of a year, I've been taking part in a free personal training project with the idea that I would give away free personal training to anyone who was willing to give some of their $500 to $1,000 to the cause of their choice. This way they wouldn't have to motivated with the same thing as me, but be motivated to give it their cause and benefit themselves. When I first introduced the idea, I was happily surprised with the amount of positive support I received. So almost a year later, for my first client, I now have a website, all right, to formally show some of the transformations that have gone underway using my programming and as a formal means of contacting me about setting up. Basically saying I'm open for business, all right? And so I put it in caps. I currently have a few slots on my roster, so drop me a note quickly if you're interested. Thanks so much. Take out a second to see some of the ridiculous transformations in record time. Check it out. That was my post. And that was the post that got me my first you know, 20 or so customers. I had been posting fitness-related stuff for almost a year, but then when I finally was like, "Hey, I'm open for business," that pretty much like got me the customers I needed. By the way, you can actually model this post to a great degree. The intro doesn't really matter, but the main thing was, is kind of want to say, what do I mean? Because I probably could have cut the first part of that post and just say, "For the last year, I've been doing this," which is just inherent proof. "And I would like to make that same offer to you, and here's more proof." So if I did it better, I would've probably just been like the images of the transformations, 'cause a lot of people are not gonna make the click. So I wanna increase the likelihood people click or respond. And so I probably would've made it an image post or a carousel with that. And then the CTA at the bottom saying DM me or comment or whatever. And at the end of the day, we all know that anybody who likes, comments, or DMs, we're gonna respond to anyways. I would just try and get as much engagement on this post as I could. I would probably text the post and links to the post to everybody I knew as well, because then that link would already have all the embedded proof. And notice I didn't have an offer here. I probably would've put an offer in if I wanted to do what I did. What I know now. But this is a great place to start, which is proof and some sort of CTA. If you put an offer in there, it would be better. If you do some sort of bonuses and reverse of risk, you do even better. If you say it's for a certain period of time, it does even better. Only do that if it's true. If you're like brand new and you like have no customers, then probably you'd be willing to take customers whenever. So maybe don't say that at first. But I said I have a few slots open, which is true, but I also had a lot of slots open. I say this because I'm proud of that kid who decided to make that move. And I think for many of you, you can skip to this step much faster, especially if you follow The Rule of 300, which is just Rule of 100 broken down into 3 things, and you'll be able to get started a lot sooner than you think, and you can do it for free. Like, to give you context, when this happened, like, Instagram was barely a platform. It was like new, and it was just like this image thing. Like, all of this influencer world, like, didn't really exist. And so the world's changed. It's never been easier than it is now. And in case you're wondering why I'm in this narrow hallway, believe it or not, this is the narrowest hallway in my 36,000-square-foot headquarters. But this was supposed to be as close to as possible as the closet videos that I made at the very beginning of my YouTube journey. Shout out to the OGs who have been there since those early days with a webcam. So I told you at the beginning of this video that I'd be sharing the lessons that I learned along the way. So this isn't like a how to start your first business. Obviously there's things you can model, but I think the, the real things are what did this allow me to learn so that I could move forward in my journey as an entrepreneur. So the first one is walk the walk. And this kind of always seemed obvious to me, and maybe it's because I was born in the real world and not the influencer social media world, but like if you're fat, it's going to it's gonna be hard for you to sell weight loss. If you have terrible teeth, it's gonna be hard for you to sell dentist stuff. It's kind of what I call the big obvious that a lot of people just like choose to conveniently leave out. They're like, hey, people aren't buying my investing advice. And it's like, yeah, 'cause you're poor. So maybe don't sell investing advice 'cause obviously it hasn't worked. You wanna be able to answer the obvious first objection before you even get it, which is you should be the biggest walking billboard of whatever it is that you sell. And I was able to succeed without knowing all the stuff about offers now and guarantees and reversing risk and scarcity and urgency and how do you create value. I just knew at least at the most basic level, if I had gotten results for myself and gotten results for other people, that people would believe that I could get results for them, at least on some level. So I'll also encapsulate that into proof over promise. It's good to have a promise and it's good to have proof. But if you had to pick one, go for proof. Now the next thing that I did in terms of what worked was I lived cheat All right. Now the reason that this is so important in my opinion is that it allows you to go on the offensive, right? Like I lived on, I think, $1,200 a month at the time, and I was making a consultant's income and I basically spent no money and saved everything I had. And I had saved up over the first 2 years of consulting about $50 grand, which is not bad for 2 years of work, like post-taxes. I was pretty proud of it. And so with that money, I was able to then say, you know what, I have the, I have the cash to quit my job and actually go all in on this thing. It still took me like 6 months to do it. Don't get me wrong. Like it was a painful process. 'cause I was so afraid. But at the end of the day, I had the money and I knew that I could live on $50 grand for at least 2 or 3 years if I had to. Saving money won't make you money, but it'll give you the security to think further out and take bigger risks. 'Cause if I had to make money the next month, I would never have been able to quit my job. But I knew that I had 2 to 3 years of runway that I had bought myself through saving so that I could basically give myself more shots on goal. At this point, I was a consultant and made decent money. I was able to save $50 after taxes with that income. So like I was living pretty cheap. But the big thing that I did was was I only bought food at Costco. I meal prepped all of my food. I never ate out. I didn't go out, which some people might see as sad or whatever. I actually lived right above the bars of a college town and basically never went to any of them, which was like weirdly sad for me. But anyways, that was it. I remember, I remember going to a gym and they said the membership was $29 a month and I was like, a month? Like, what are you guys crazy? And so I went to a different place that was like $19 or $10, just to show you like how I thought about money at the time. And so I just didn't spend money. Like, I guess, I guess it was really it. It's like I bought food and I paid rent and that was it. It was all I did. And I paid for gas in my car. I didn't buy new clothes. I just didn't, I didn't spend money. That was all it was like. I saved money by just not spending it. That was it. And I was working all the time because I was either working at my job or the rest of my time I was working on my next thing. And so for me, the biggest hack of all for saving money is to work more because working more makes you money in two ways. One is you get paid for the work you do. Second, you don't have time to spend the money you make. So the next thing that worked was, and this is a big one that a lot of people somehow like miss out on is start free. All right. So I, I did free, honestly, probably longer than I should have or needed to, but I was one, I didn't need to make the money yet. So I wanted to give myself a lot of prep, a lot of runway. I kind of haven't changed. Like whenever I go into something new, like I want to be over-prepared. I want to know I'm going to win if I'm going to do it. And so for me, with the start for free, most of you guys aren't that good yet. And so the easiest way to get proof is start free so that you have proof so that you can show that you walk the walk and that you have helped other people walk that walk too. Here's the cool thing with free is that there are many things that someone can do to make you money. Only one of them is them giving you money. But if someone gives me a banger testimonial, I will likely make more money from that testimonial than whatever they paid me. And so think about it. If I can guarantee that, that will actually make me more money just over a longer period of time. And so basically in the beginning, you're stacking yourself with all of these things that are worth more than the price you could charge so that you can cash them in later for money. And so testimonials are worth more, feedback is worth more, referrals morals oftentimes can be worth more. And so all of these things are things that are non-monetary that someone can do to compensate you for the work that you did. And so it's not that I worked uncompensated, I just didn't ask for money. I followed Chick-fil-A's philosophy with pricing. It's either full price or it's free. I never discount for a number of reasons, but the biggest one being I don't negotiate with terrorists. And so the price is the price. They either pay it or they don't. And I can make the decision as a business owner that, okay, strategically I'm not getting the take rates I want, I will strategically lower the price. But to lower the price to get someone to buy communicates to them and to every single person they that your prices are not true, that everything that you have is up for negotiation. And if you want the rest of your life to be a haggle, by all means discount people and make one-off deals for everybody. But in my experience, I have a standard price that I have thought a lot about why I price at this price, and that is what it is worth to me. And if you would do it for less and you still make money, then do it for less. Don't do that, but if you want to, go for it. I would prefer to say either our trade is non-monetary, it's free, and you will do these things, or you will give me money and I will do all of these things for you and you don't have to do any of to do this stuff. And if you choose to, it would be great, but I'm not going to force you to. So one of the other things that worked is that I had a templated one-to-many solution. So I worked for, you know, that year to figure out what everyone liked eating. And so what I did was I remember spending like, I want to say like 200 hours, which was a huge amount of time for me at the time, on this monster Excel sheet that I could type in someone's weight, their goal, etc., and then it would calculate out the macros and then the grocery lists for them for 100 different meals. And so then I could do consultation with someone, and then like I purposely would take longer and send it to them like a week later. But it would take me like 10 minutes to prep it and make it, you know, format it, make it look nice, and only select the meals that I thought they would like. So I had 100 meals I could pick from, and then I would just pick the ones that I thought they would be cool. They're like, wow, he like really thought through the grams of every single one of these meals that they would add up to my total calorie intake with the macros, etc. And so it was very valuable, but it didn't take me a lot of time. And so I think during this free period is where you invest invest in the future. You're investing in the future to get referrals, reviews, feedback, and build out the— okay, I keep having these same 6 questions. Okay, let me give out really, really— like maybe I include that in the onboarding. Maybe I make— I spend one-time time now so that I never have to do it again. I solve it right so I don't have to solve it twice. I helped a couple girls lose a lot of weight. I helped a guy lose a lot of weight. I helped another guy lose a decent amount of weight. And then the rest of the guys were like recomp or getting act. Now, when I did my Skinny to Swole project, which is where I finally monetized, I can't tell you why, but I can tell you that the thing that everyone responded to was people who looked like me and who wanted to look like me. And so I ended up niching without trying into Skinny to Swole because that's what I also wanted to work on. Like, I preferred helping guys get jacked to helping girls lose weight. Niching down can help just because your solutions become more template it. And so if everybody's going through the same goals and having the same starting position, you can provide in real way more value to them that also costs you less. And so it's a double hitter. It costs you less because everybody has it, so you can template out a lot of it. It is more valuable to them because you're being way more specific to their problems with way more depth of solution than if you had to generically make or personalize it at a low price for many people. You wouldn't be able to put that much attention to it. It just You couldn't, right, unless you charge a lot more, which I recommend. And so the next great thing that I stumbled into was that this was a recurring business model, all right? And so this was something that would pay me month after month after month. Now again, I didn't like think through this like, oh, what type of— I just was like, oh well, fitness, a lot of people need to pay me this month, next month. And so I just made a recurring business model to start with. What I made a mistake for was that I sold 12 weeks and then I didn't sell them again. I went to go find other customers. And so I didn't like have another offer prepared or say, hey, you want to go on maintenance? Like, I didn't do any of that. I was just like, cool, now I have to go find another 20 customers. So that was dumb, but you live, you learn. So that's all the stuff that I learned that worked well in me making my first dollars. So now we'll go over what didn't work. So the first thing that didn't work is I didn't ascend anyone. So I didn't have a second offer or some sort of way for them to continue to pay. So I would say, number 1, have another offer. Now, if you're like, shoot, I don't know I don't know what other offer I would offer them. Let me tell you what I should have done and that you probably should do. Offer them more of that thing they just bought. So if they just bought Skinny to Swole, guess what? They probably still want to be skinny and swole or more swole than they are. So I haven't met a guy who added 30 pounds to their bench and then was like, I'm good. They're like, I'll add another 30. I could go for more, right? Just make the offer. And I just didn't do it. So don't make that mistake. The next thing, and this is a big one, I stopped opt for new. So what does that even mean? So I had a business that was making $4,000 a month in profit online, nomad lifestyle, 2013, before the internet even fucking existed. Not really, but before a lot of these online businesses became kind of like the vogue or the norm. Like there were basically no like online coach, like I said, it just was, didn't exist. And so I thought that the business I had was not legit. And so I saw my online business, which took me 4 hours a week to do that was making me $1,000 a week as not legit compared to me spending all this money, signing a 5-year lease, investing into a brick-and-mortar location to start a gym. And so I knew that I ultimately wanted to have a gym because I didn't know another way that was legit. So if I were coaching me right now, I would have been like, wait, so you're making $1,000 a week working 4 hours a week? What if you worked 40 hours a week and made $10,000 a week? That would be not that bad. And you'd immediately be in the top 1% of earning as a 20-something-year-old working wherever you want with no, like, no cost. And why do you not want to do that? But instead I was like, oh, now that this worked, I should stop doing that immediately and do something brand new that I've never done before. Don't do that. So the next thing that I did that was messed up is is that I didn't have a good offer. So I had no offer, which was dumb. If I had had an offer, I would have been able to make way more money. The next one is that I had no sale. So when I did this, I actually didn't like hop on the phone. I just like literally just sent people links to buy, which was stupid. And I should have got on the phone because I would have then been able to charge more, right? I mean, I was basically offering personalized everything for $200 month. And part of the reason that— this is going to sound ridiculous to you if you're listening to this— part of the reason that I probably didn't keep doing the thing, it wasn't making as much money as I wanted. So $4,000 a month, like, I was like, I just made that doing a consulting job. So I'd want to make more than that. And so even though my first shot immediately matched what I was making before, I didn't think, oh, I could just raise my prices to make more money. I was like, oh no, I should just start a brand new business. Like, just dumb. But yeah, because I didn't have an offer, because I didn't have a sales script or a sales process, process, I wasn't able to charge more, which then caused me to stop something that otherwise was an amazing business. I would say the other thing that I did that was dumb was that part of the reason that I stopped this other thing was judgment, right? And so I'll explain what I mean by this. But basically, you heard me say it, like, I didn't think this was legit, right? Like, this isn't a legit business. If you sell a product or service, if you exchange goods and services for money, you have a business, period. So I didn't, like, define terms. And like, a lot of that stuff came much later for me, but I made really huge life decisions based on perceived judgment of people who weren't even thinking about me. Like, I was thinking, I honestly was obsessed about thinking about what my classmates thought about me at the time, the guys that I like went to school with, you know, obsessed about what my dad would think. And all of this kept me poor. And so one of the biggest mistakes that I made is that there was no YouTube world that had all of these like courses and trainings and videos like this. So I didn't get help. I did this all solo, which is why I think it took me a lot longer than it has taken a lot of people who follow my stuff. And I mean, and honestly, that's the point. Like, I hope that like every generation stands on the shoulders of the generation before. And I hope that people who are younger than me make more money than I have made by the time I'm 30 or they're 35, right? Otherwise, it means that I have failed. Like, I haven't been able to transfer the knowledge successfully because I'll die. No one will remember me. It won't matter. And so the only like real good that I think that people can do to leave a legacy is to pass on the learnings. And so that's why I try to do what I do. But I didn't get help until later. And when I got help is when my, you know, my income went way up. So I got asked to give advice to a group of entrepreneurs who were doing this little test that I was telling you about in school. And they said, "Hey, do you have any like words of advice for everyone who's starting?" And so I was in a writing mood at the time. And so I actually ended up sending up this massive Slack message that has now been seen by like 4 million people. And so I will share with you right now. These are the directions I told them when they were starting. Number 1, follow instructions. Number 2, when you reach something you don't understand how to do, Google first. The amount of people who like post immediately the moment they have friction, the amount of people who message me and say, hey, where do I find your books? I usually just respond, where do you normally find books? And then they're like, well, Amazon. I'm like, did you search? People go for an easy button rather than just like take the second step. Take the second step. Do the one Google search before then thinking, oh, I will then stop working. Because that's basically what happens. As soon as you send a message, you say, I have reached a This is a point that I cannot cross. I've reached a chasm to which no man has ever been over before. Google it. Third, when you figure it out, post it. Other people may have struggled there too. And so this is a way that you add value in content to whatever community that you're in. Four, actually follow the Rule of 100 daily. And this is a big one because people get distracted really, really easily and they're inconsistent. And so the thing is, is that their business is becoming inconsistent because they are inconsistent. So businesses themselves are machines for consistency. If you have consistent inputs, you'll have consistent outputs. But if you have inconsistency in business, it either means that you are not consistently putting the inputs in, or you need to put more inputs in. So for example, if you do 10 reachouts a day, then you might get your 1 sale every 10 days. It will feel volatile, but it just means that 100 inputs equals 1 output. So if you want it to be less volatile, then it means that you put those 100 inputs per day and get 1 per day. And so really just means that you're extending the time horizon on the results that you want to get. So do more faster, more consistently, and you will get more faster, consistent results. 5: You will be excited for a week, then the excitement will they're off. That is when the work begins. And so this is like a key point that has helped me a lot, which is work starts when excitement ends, not while you're excited. I don't even count it as work while you're excited. The work starts when you have to confront the reality that you have way more stuff to do that you don't know how to do. And that's not fun because you will suck, because most people doing things they don't know how to do aren't good. But you being able to walk that bridge of discomfort is what will separate you from the mediocre masses who stop at the chasm and then just say, I don't know what to do, help me. 6, your work works on you more than you work on it. You are the product that's getting built more than your community. Remember, this was for school people. So remember that, like, you are the product. And so I had this tweet that got completely bombed and no one cared about it, but I will tell you what it was. So I have this really weird trippy thought the other day, which is in prisoner of war camps throughout history, one of the psychological torture mechanisms is that they would have people do manual labor. And one of the particularly nasty ones is that they would have them dig holes and then at the end of the day, fill the holes back up. And so the point was to try and drive the in the meaninglessness of life, the meaninglessness of work, and it just breaks them down psychologically. What I found interesting about that is that every day I go to the gym and I pick up weights and I put them exactly back where I was before. And so in both instances, there is physical labor that's happening and everything looks exactly the way it was. But in one instance, it's seen as psychological torture, and the other, it's seen as self-care. And so it really just means that these things occur and then we describe them as labels. And so if you are the asset that is getting built, everything happens happens for you rather than to you. 7, and this is a big one, everything is unscalable in the beginning. That's the point. It's how you learn every single piece of it. And when you learn every single piece of how something works predictably, that's called mastery. That's how you learn a skill. When you learn lots of skills put together, people are like, wow, that guy's good at it. That is how you describe someone who is more skilled. And so the pain that you have to go through when you're reaching out to all of these colder prospects, not getting responses, what happens is you're like, man, there has to be a better to do this. And then as soon as you do experiment and do figure out a better way to do it, you have gotten better. And so that pain creates the catalyst to learn better ways of doing the same stuff. And that's how, in a very real way, you gain leverage. Skills give you leverage. If two people start the same thing and one gets way more results, that guy did it with more leverage. They did it with more skill. And the pain is the catalyst to making that happen. So don't run away from the pain, run towards the pain. Learn how to deal with it by getting better. 8, the pain of repetition is what forces you to seek improvement. When you figure out ways to get more for what you do, you have gained skill. 9, if you complain, you are dead to me. Not really sure what to add to that one. When you complain, you expend effort for no result. And we complain because we have been rewarded for complaining in the past. And so rewards typically come in the form of affection, attention, and approval, meaning other people pay attention to you, they give you affection, say, "Oh, I'm sorry," right? And sometimes they give approval, which in this instance, when you go for pity parties, approval doesn't come in, but you do get attention and affection, which is why some people like to be sick, because people pay attention to them, they give them affection. And so that's how those cycles begin. But I will give you a quote that Papa Hormozy gave me in my wee days. He said, "It is better to be envied than pitied." And so when you complain, functionally, the command that you give your audience is pity me. And I don't know about you, but I didn't get in the game to pity. 10. Literally thousands of people have succeeded. You are not special. Repeat the same actions they took to get the same outcomes they got. And if you repeat the actions that they took and you do not get the same outcomes they got, then it means that there is a variable that you have not identified yet. It doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means that the way you did it wasn't the complete way. And so if you build a bridge and there's 10 bricks across the bridge and you put 9 in, you can't say building bridges doesn't work. You say, I don't know how to build bridges the way he builds bridges. I think he only did these 9 steps, but it's clear that he is getting people across this bridge and I am not. So I have to further study what specific things he did that I do not do that is creating the discrepancy between his outcome and mine. 11. Write down every reason that you're going to stick with it. Put it in front of you, tape it to your mirror, put it behind your laptop, put it wherever you're going to do the repeated boring work. And revisit it when you need to remember to stick with it, because motivation will fade very quickly. And so having— I love this term— a big bag of whys is a great way to remind you why you need to continue. What are you running away from just as much as what is your— what you're going towards? And in the beginning of this video, I said use what you've got. If you're not super passionate about getting started, but you do know that you hate being broke, you hate your current situation, then write all the things you hate and say, this is why I'm doing this, 'cause I'm sick of this. I don't want this anymore. 12, business is shockingly simple, but surprisingly hard. The hard comes in the form of consistency. The moment you don't wanna do it or just skip today is the day that you realize what hard actually feels like. And that's where you have to overcome. The hard is not in the complexity. What makes it hard is being consistent. That's always like, fitness isn't hard. Eat less than you burn, move more. Like, that's it, right? Like, and add more over time. It's not complex, it's just hard to do because you have to keep doing it. And you have to keep doing it far before you see a result for the work you do. And so this is a practice in being able to further disconnect what you do and what you get. The weakest, most impotent people on earth are people that must be immediately rewarded for the work they do. It's how social media addicts the masses. They get rewarded immediately for hitting the button, for checking their notifications, for looking at their likes, for looking at the comments. They get immediate rewards, and that is how they weaken you. The people who are the most potent are able to do big things because they know it takes a long time to do them, and they will have to work today for something that will happen a year or 5 years down the road. Imagine a competitor that you'd compete against where one guy has to get a result for what he does in the moment or he stops. And imagine the other competitor who's able to do it for a year straight without seeing result. Who do you think will win? Obviously the one who waits a year. Be that competitor. Number 13: just win. Because once you win, one, you'll get addicted to winning. Second, everything else that you did to get to there will fade. And so I'll tell you a weird analogy. If you've ever drank too much and had to throw up and had a whole night of throwing up, when you think back on it, you don't actually remember all the hours of throwing up. You just remember it kind of sucked a little a little bit, right? And the thing is, is that pain fades in time. So that's something that is behavioral not just to humans, it's across species. So punishment fades. And so the reason that you get hungover and the next day you say, I'm never drinking again, but the next weekend you go out with your buddies and drink again, is because the benefit of drinking stays. And so the reason that you have a past relationship and you're like, man, I remember the good old days, is because the punishment from that relationship fades. It's why people keep revisiting these toxic relationships. They go back and as soon as you get back into it, you're like, why did I do this? I forgot about all this stuff. And so the pain that you were going through right now will fade, but the result that you get will stay with you. And so that disparity between pain and reward for me has been one of the biggest unlocks of life. Just simply understanding that this pain will pass, but what I get for it will stay with me. An achievement stays with you for life. What it took you to get there only stays with you in your mind as long as you choose to give it attention. So that wraps the lessons from the free training project of how I got my customers made my first online business. In the next video, you can click here to learn all the stuff that I learned from scaling my brick-and-mortar gyms. And if that video isn't out yet because we're doing this in sequence, click this video here to learn even more stuff about making dollars.