Hello Fastlane members and lurkers,
This thread will serve as an introduction as well as a progress thread.
I create this not just in order to hold myself accountable, but also in hope that useful knowledge will be acquired a long my journey, which I will be able to share with you all.
The progress part is to be found below the long introduction.
Who am I?
I am 21 years old and I'm from Scandinavia.
My parents don't care about achieving financial success or owning the latest Mercedes - they only ever cared of having a nice, good and safe family - both working their whole life in kindergardens.
This meant that I grew up with very little money for consuming but never felt that I explicitly lacked anything in terms of basic survival needs.
I attended a private school, which is usually not for the families like mine, but it mattered to them that I got a proper education and wouldn't be slacking around.
This was probably a very good decision, as I was pretty good in school but it also meant that my friends usually came from a bit more wealthier families. Call me spoiled or just a child, but I was always very jealous that I couldn't have all the same toys that my friends had and I didn't understand that my parents in fact couldn't afford it.
So to summarize shortly about me and my family - they are vey non-consumeristic(???) but also never chased money or cared really. They just wanted a better family than what they grew up in themselves, and I believe they succeeded very well with that.
Now where does that leave me?
Due to the nature of family it left me with the belief that I was not meant to be special and in fact I tried to blend in more than standing out.
I played a lot of football but also computer, whereas I became extremely good at a certain computer game.
Call it silly, but it changed my perception of myself throughout my young years as to what I was able to achieve.
This game had a few million players in Europe and I managed to reach top #15 on the European leaderboards and at my peak I played at a semi-pro level.
I felt successful and I would have people add me to their friendlist after watching public matches where I was playing in - I could feel the ego building up during this time.
This led me to throw a very bold and useless, I would say, goal at the face of my family at age 18.
The goal was to very specifically 'Own an Audi R8 before I was 25.'
They looked very shocked, might be because they had no idea what an Audi R8 was or simply because it was a very unorthodox statement coming from me.
Anyhow this all leads me to;
How I quit my job and went all-in.
As all-in as it gets at the age of 18 anyways...
I had my first job in a call center when I graduated high school at age 18 and I worked there till I was 19.
This is where I quit my job to work with one of my friends in order to try and achieve success with affiliate marketing. Of course....
What a better opportunity than affiliate marketing right?
Basic requirements to start with affiliate marketing:
Young & naive - ✓
Loves supercars - ✓
Loves Rolex - ✓
Loves travelling - ✓
Looking for quick & easy money - ✓
I did fit the list for sure!
My friend was working with it already for around 6 months and he was doing okay, and as we were old friends we started to work together.
I created a company and got to work immidiately.
We would work with seperate companies and work as media buying affiliates where we would share profitable campaigns and ideas together.
I went the first 6 months without making more than 500 USD/month at any of those 6 months.
This is very little in Denmark considering that you get paid around 3000 USD/month from a job you can get straight out of high school.
Then tides turned and we found a very profitable angle that we scaled as far as we had the budget to.
I invested all the savings that I am sure my parents worked hard for..
We made good money on these few months - no doubt about it - but overall after a nerve wrecking 1,5-2 years I decided to stop.
Why you may ask?
- Well thanks to MJ here.
I was reading TMFL during the last 6 months of that period, and it became very clear to me - my business was not fastlane at all, even though I sometimes also made money in my sleep, I was not building an asset and it was basically just a very high risk job.
I was also torn apart from the endless thinking of 'What if I don't find a profitable campaign again?' or the worse 'What if this campaign turns unprofitable tomorrow and I have to start all over again?'.
Not even in the good times did I feel good.
It was a never ending hell and I was not building a stable business.
Now this is only approximately 6-8 months ago. So what happened in this period?
- That is to be described in the progress part - read along!
Progress - Where is my instant gratification?
In the last 6 months I have been working fulltime at a sales job to at least save a bit again after my lost savings from the last business venture.
At the same time I have bootstrapped my way to an online based subscription business using the little leftover profits I get from my fulltime job.
This has taken me 6 months to make and I finally started to drive proper traffic to it - as everything is now setup and is working smoothly.
I do still work fulltime though, as I need the stable money at the moment, but I'm not sure how much longer it will be necessary.
I used all my savings during my last business venture - but what did I get for my money?
- Broken down the mental barrier that you cannot make money yourself and you need a paycheck
- Learned a lot of HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript - which came in pretty handy during my last 6 months
- Know which type of comany is not suitable for going fastlane
- Learned to work on my own and not rely on anyone to do things for me (Read: Take responsibility)
Now my subscription went live in mid March and I have since then gotten approximately 50 subscribers.
They all pay 49 Euros a month for my product.
My upfront profit margin is 15% - future months it is expected to be 70-80%.
This is due to the static cost of customer acquisition.
So how do I promote it?
- I use affiliate marketing, as I figured this CAN be a part of a fastlane venture, but you need to be on the right side of the table and always remember which approach to take.
And that is the approach of stabilizing and sustaining revenue and profits, which I expect the subscription based model to be helping with a lot.
So right now I have one affiliate driving traffic to me and he has during the last 2 days been sending me approximately 20-25 new subscribers a day.
I pay him on a biweekly basis, so the good thing is I do not need to pay upfront for my traffic.
At the same time I am currently in the middle of integrating my offer in their network.
They expect to be sending 50-100 subscribers a day, so I hope that will be the case, but I don't expect anything untill I've seen it.
The problem for me is that they wanted weekly payments at first and my settlements are weekly as well, which means that it would be very tight to cashflow it properly. So they agreed on a biweekly payment too for now, which is lucky for me.
So I don't have any issues at all you ask?
Well where should I start...
The day I was starting traffic with my one affiliate was the same day where my whole website - for whatever reason - stopped working properly.
Payments were suddenly not working properly and e-mails were not being sent out etc.
EVERYTHING was shit and for a short moment I had this old thought in my head "It's a sign that YOU cannot do it - it is not meant for you".
If this was a few years ago, I would have agreed, but since I just spent 6 months and all my small profits from my job to create this, I decided to call BULLSHIT and push through.
So what I did was call in sick for 3 days in a row at my job just to sit home and fix everything.
I got it fixed at the end of the first day and it took me the second day to convince him that everything was fine and he would not waste his money on traffic to the offer.
So traffic started on day 3 and I sat home just to follow a long and make sure everything worked fine.
I got 5 customers that day.
I was so excited - finally money was coming in and not just going OUT.
That's untill I get the message from my affiliate that it is not converting very well and he will need to stop traffic. At the same time I'm battling with integrating my offer with the affiliate network as the tracking is not working properly and I feel they are starting to give up on me.
Panic once again - only this time I'm at work and I have exactly 1 hour in the whole day to eat lunch and now fix the conversion rate.
So fortunately I had a lot of time between my sales calls at my job that day, so I was editing the website inbetween the calls.
I changed it and begged him to run some more traffic to it.
He did 2 days later and the conversion rate was indeed better and now profitable.
And that is not even touching on the problems from creating the website and the product in the first place.. Oh the hassle..
But today my affiliate is now driving 20-25 subscribers a day and he expects to scale it unto 100-200/day if he can keep it profitable at scale.
I'm still fixing formalities with the affiliate network in order to get it started there. The only affiliate network who wanted to work with me from all the ones I contacted.
And I contacted ANY network I could find - to be specific I contacted 74 different ones, as I can see from my excel sheet where I organize all the contact and status of mail correnspondances.
For now there is not much more to share!
I currently revenued around 1,500 Euros and I am waiting for the settlement of the first 450 to reach my bank account at this very moment.
I cringe a bit when I think about my old goal of owning an Audi R8 before I am 25.
But the funny thing is, I feel as if it will be way before 25 with the pace that this is taking off. But it would probably be a Porsche 911 rather than an Audi R8 either way, as I find that car way more attractive these days.
Anyhow thank you for reading a long, I will keep the thread updated when I'm not busy working at my job or working on my business.
This thread will serve as an introduction as well as a progress thread.
I create this not just in order to hold myself accountable, but also in hope that useful knowledge will be acquired a long my journey, which I will be able to share with you all.
The progress part is to be found below the long introduction.
Who am I?
I am 21 years old and I'm from Scandinavia.
My parents don't care about achieving financial success or owning the latest Mercedes - they only ever cared of having a nice, good and safe family - both working their whole life in kindergardens.
This meant that I grew up with very little money for consuming but never felt that I explicitly lacked anything in terms of basic survival needs.
I attended a private school, which is usually not for the families like mine, but it mattered to them that I got a proper education and wouldn't be slacking around.
This was probably a very good decision, as I was pretty good in school but it also meant that my friends usually came from a bit more wealthier families. Call me spoiled or just a child, but I was always very jealous that I couldn't have all the same toys that my friends had and I didn't understand that my parents in fact couldn't afford it.
So to summarize shortly about me and my family - they are vey non-consumeristic(???) but also never chased money or cared really. They just wanted a better family than what they grew up in themselves, and I believe they succeeded very well with that.
Now where does that leave me?
Due to the nature of family it left me with the belief that I was not meant to be special and in fact I tried to blend in more than standing out.
I played a lot of football but also computer, whereas I became extremely good at a certain computer game.
Call it silly, but it changed my perception of myself throughout my young years as to what I was able to achieve.
This game had a few million players in Europe and I managed to reach top #15 on the European leaderboards and at my peak I played at a semi-pro level.
I felt successful and I would have people add me to their friendlist after watching public matches where I was playing in - I could feel the ego building up during this time.
This led me to throw a very bold and useless, I would say, goal at the face of my family at age 18.
The goal was to very specifically 'Own an Audi R8 before I was 25.'
They looked very shocked, might be because they had no idea what an Audi R8 was or simply because it was a very unorthodox statement coming from me.
Anyhow this all leads me to;
How I quit my job and went all-in.
As all-in as it gets at the age of 18 anyways...
I had my first job in a call center when I graduated high school at age 18 and I worked there till I was 19.
This is where I quit my job to work with one of my friends in order to try and achieve success with affiliate marketing. Of course....
What a better opportunity than affiliate marketing right?
Basic requirements to start with affiliate marketing:
Young & naive - ✓
Loves supercars - ✓
Loves Rolex - ✓
Loves travelling - ✓
Looking for quick & easy money - ✓
I did fit the list for sure!
My friend was working with it already for around 6 months and he was doing okay, and as we were old friends we started to work together.
I created a company and got to work immidiately.
We would work with seperate companies and work as media buying affiliates where we would share profitable campaigns and ideas together.
I went the first 6 months without making more than 500 USD/month at any of those 6 months.
This is very little in Denmark considering that you get paid around 3000 USD/month from a job you can get straight out of high school.
Then tides turned and we found a very profitable angle that we scaled as far as we had the budget to.
I invested all the savings that I am sure my parents worked hard for..
We made good money on these few months - no doubt about it - but overall after a nerve wrecking 1,5-2 years I decided to stop.
Why you may ask?
- Well thanks to MJ here.
I was reading TMFL during the last 6 months of that period, and it became very clear to me - my business was not fastlane at all, even though I sometimes also made money in my sleep, I was not building an asset and it was basically just a very high risk job.
I was also torn apart from the endless thinking of 'What if I don't find a profitable campaign again?' or the worse 'What if this campaign turns unprofitable tomorrow and I have to start all over again?'.
Not even in the good times did I feel good.
It was a never ending hell and I was not building a stable business.
Now this is only approximately 6-8 months ago. So what happened in this period?
- That is to be described in the progress part - read along!
Progress - Where is my instant gratification?
In the last 6 months I have been working fulltime at a sales job to at least save a bit again after my lost savings from the last business venture.
At the same time I have bootstrapped my way to an online based subscription business using the little leftover profits I get from my fulltime job.
This has taken me 6 months to make and I finally started to drive proper traffic to it - as everything is now setup and is working smoothly.
I do still work fulltime though, as I need the stable money at the moment, but I'm not sure how much longer it will be necessary.
I used all my savings during my last business venture - but what did I get for my money?
- Broken down the mental barrier that you cannot make money yourself and you need a paycheck
- Learned a lot of HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript - which came in pretty handy during my last 6 months
- Know which type of comany is not suitable for going fastlane
- Learned to work on my own and not rely on anyone to do things for me (Read: Take responsibility)
Now my subscription went live in mid March and I have since then gotten approximately 50 subscribers.
They all pay 49 Euros a month for my product.
My upfront profit margin is 15% - future months it is expected to be 70-80%.
This is due to the static cost of customer acquisition.
So how do I promote it?
- I use affiliate marketing, as I figured this CAN be a part of a fastlane venture, but you need to be on the right side of the table and always remember which approach to take.
And that is the approach of stabilizing and sustaining revenue and profits, which I expect the subscription based model to be helping with a lot.
So right now I have one affiliate driving traffic to me and he has during the last 2 days been sending me approximately 20-25 new subscribers a day.
I pay him on a biweekly basis, so the good thing is I do not need to pay upfront for my traffic.
At the same time I am currently in the middle of integrating my offer in their network.
They expect to be sending 50-100 subscribers a day, so I hope that will be the case, but I don't expect anything untill I've seen it.
The problem for me is that they wanted weekly payments at first and my settlements are weekly as well, which means that it would be very tight to cashflow it properly. So they agreed on a biweekly payment too for now, which is lucky for me.
So I don't have any issues at all you ask?
Well where should I start...
The day I was starting traffic with my one affiliate was the same day where my whole website - for whatever reason - stopped working properly.
Payments were suddenly not working properly and e-mails were not being sent out etc.
EVERYTHING was shit and for a short moment I had this old thought in my head "It's a sign that YOU cannot do it - it is not meant for you".
If this was a few years ago, I would have agreed, but since I just spent 6 months and all my small profits from my job to create this, I decided to call BULLSHIT and push through.
So what I did was call in sick for 3 days in a row at my job just to sit home and fix everything.
I got it fixed at the end of the first day and it took me the second day to convince him that everything was fine and he would not waste his money on traffic to the offer.
So traffic started on day 3 and I sat home just to follow a long and make sure everything worked fine.
I got 5 customers that day.
I was so excited - finally money was coming in and not just going OUT.
That's untill I get the message from my affiliate that it is not converting very well and he will need to stop traffic. At the same time I'm battling with integrating my offer with the affiliate network as the tracking is not working properly and I feel they are starting to give up on me.
Panic once again - only this time I'm at work and I have exactly 1 hour in the whole day to eat lunch and now fix the conversion rate.
So fortunately I had a lot of time between my sales calls at my job that day, so I was editing the website inbetween the calls.
I changed it and begged him to run some more traffic to it.
He did 2 days later and the conversion rate was indeed better and now profitable.
And that is not even touching on the problems from creating the website and the product in the first place.. Oh the hassle..
But today my affiliate is now driving 20-25 subscribers a day and he expects to scale it unto 100-200/day if he can keep it profitable at scale.
I'm still fixing formalities with the affiliate network in order to get it started there. The only affiliate network who wanted to work with me from all the ones I contacted.
And I contacted ANY network I could find - to be specific I contacted 74 different ones, as I can see from my excel sheet where I organize all the contact and status of mail correnspondances.
For now there is not much more to share!
I currently revenued around 1,500 Euros and I am waiting for the settlement of the first 450 to reach my bank account at this very moment.
I cringe a bit when I think about my old goal of owning an Audi R8 before I am 25.
But the funny thing is, I feel as if it will be way before 25 with the pace that this is taking off. But it would probably be a Porsche 911 rather than an Audi R8 either way, as I find that car way more attractive these days.
Anyhow thank you for reading a long, I will keep the thread updated when I'm not busy working at my job or working on my business.
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