Started My First Company Right Out Of College, Ready For Biz #2

[DavidePaco00]

Hey Davide, that's a good question and I'm happy to clear that up for you.

Basically, I'm saying that I learned by creating a business that's generating revenue/profit, as opposed to going back to school, interning, buying courses, etc. I just started something and learned as I went along.

You could do a similar thing (paid to learn) by working a job in the industry you want to start a business in, but I feel like you'd miss out on 95% of the experience.

Does that make more sense?

Yes! Now I understand perfectly!

Via experience You learn a ton of things. Fortunately there is enough material online to study for free.

I was wondering in this days if learning a complex skill can lead you in earnin more money since I'm starting to see that crreating e-commerces like I'm doing is not so difficult as I expected.

My plan in the future is to lear high ticket skill to help businesses. For now I'lll stick with the ecommerces.

 

[DavidePaco00]

Thanks! All of the products are digital - think Adobe Lightroom presets but in a different industry.

That said, here are the big updates:

First off, revenue has been down lately because I stopped releasing new content in order to restructure how I operated the business. Also, my profits for the year have gone negative because I invested heavily in new products and didn't release anything new for a bit.

Compared to last year (YTD), revenue is still up over 200% and people are mentioning my company in the same breath as the biggest names in the space.

1) I've stopped spending money on advertising

Even with a decent strategy, the ROAS just wasn't there. The best return I got was a lumpy 15% (LOL), but it felt more like luck than a good strategy. Even sponsored blog posts didn't bring any good traffic/revenue.

I attribute this to the tiny niche (very hard to target) and TONS of competition. For example, a few days ago someone posted a "competing product" that's 5x the size of my biggest paid product for free via a Google Drive link. This is why staying away from "passion" businesses is important! People will literally do it for free - or less!

So instead of spending cash on ads...

2) I shifted heavily to outreach...

I built a list of literally every YouTuber in my niche and have been asking if they'd like to feature my product in a video in exchange for a free copy of the product and some additional exposure via my email/socials.

The success rate has actually been decent and this gives me content to share with my email list/following. Revenue has increased slightly from YouTube, but mostly it's free content for me to share, added reach, and social proof. Plus, every once in a while a video will blow up and generate some good sales, which is nice.

3) ...And I went back to basics

When I started this venture, I released too many products too fast without setting up the proper systems in order to sell them. This was a rookie move that made things far more complicated as new products got added to the catalog.

As such, I never really had proper email sequences, funnels, channel attribution, etc. Essentially, I ran headfirst into every problem you could ever imagine from having multiple products that each appeal to a slightly different target market.

After reading Profit First, I realized I was operating like a total idiot and much needed to change. I cut almost 2k from my annual expenses in one day and set a solid budget for the things that I KNEW would produce results.

So instead of spending money on ads, I invested in about 6-8 months of content (paid and free) to slowly leak out on a set schedule - something I have never done before.

This has also allowed me to focus entirely on making one marketing system work at a time. For now, that's email since it's so central to the business. I've mentioned email as a priority before, but now it's my single biggest focus in terms of marketing.

Wrapping up

I'm actually back to thinking this business is fairly limited in terms of revenue. 10k/month is possible but highly unlikely without another round of huge changes. I've tried a bunch of stuff, but again, I feel the target market is just too small and/or expensive to reach for this company to really grow.

My goal now is to increase profitability and keep it as a source of semi-passive cash flow while I test other ideas I've had. I'll likely sell this project once I've established stable cash flow as I'm fairly burnt out on the project, but we will see.

Until then, I'm going to keep chipping away at trying to grow the top and bottom line.

I also want to add that this business was a horrible choice to get into for several reasons I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread. However, the amount that this experience has and continues to teach me is actually mind-blowing.

Makes me wonder what I could do in a different business...

You learnt a ton of things at least!

 

[hobbsie]

$1k profit per month, first company, straight out of college.

That's good going buddy.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[hobbsie]

Thanks for the kind words, I've definitely learned tons!

And now it's time to aim bigger. Way bigger.

I recently read @Kak's post "Think Big, And Then Think Bigger Than That" and it seems I've done a great job at making myself a thousandaire haha.

To borrow from both Kak and @GPM :


With this project, I aimed WAY too small.

My fall-back goal starting out was that I just wanted to earn $100k per year from my own company. I didn't pay attention to the reality of the small numbers in front of me, so I came up short and essentially empty-handed.

Now, I want to focus on building a company or portfolio of companies generating $1,000,000 per month in owner's pay with quarterly profit on top.

That would mean creating something that generates at least 7.5m -11m of revenue/month depending on the margins/structure. Given my inexperience, I'm doubling those numbers just to be sure. (So 14-22m target revenue/month)

I have a few ideas on how to get there - e-commerce, local service companies, real estate, acquisitions, etc. - I just need to make something happen.

Once I escape the "Thousandaire" status I'll say I've done a good job haha.

They're serious numbers.

What industry are you in?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[hobbsie]

Yeah, no more playing little league for me

Won't say the specific industry but the current company is digital eCommerce.

Nice work

 

[thejessecarr21]

Hey all,

I'm 28 years old and started my first company right out of college. In the two years since, I've grown the company to a whopping $1k profit per month with revenues averaging about 2k monthly.

While the amount is pretty laughable compared to other stories I've read here, I'm EXTREMELY happy that I took charge and started my own business. I've learned so much more than I could ever put down in writing, and I'm still learning more and more every day. I consider the two years I spent building as my personal master's program...except I actually got paid to learn all the stuff LOL.

That said, I think it's time to move on from this business, so I'm putting it on autopilot for a bit while I try out some other business ideas and get to know like-minded people. Which brings me to...

It was about a year ago that I read @MJ DeMarco's book Unscripted and it immediately grabbed me. Mostly because it pointed out all the things I was doing wrong haha. Unfortunately, I put off joining the forum until I had spent an additional year trying to squeeze water from a rock, but after registering and reading through a bunch of the recommended posts, I am incredibly glad I joined.

I look forward to talking to everyone and hopefully sharing a success story of my own someday.

It seems I have a similar mindset to you and thought I would add to this because it kind of in a way affected my progress. Not sure if it truly applies to you, but maybe someone else will also get value from it.

Be careful jumping around too much. I am an entrepreneur and always have a mind full of ideas that I want to try. Which is great, but also a curse. I started a marketing agency 3 years ago. Got it to $5k in revenue per month, of course due to the nature of service businesses most of that was profit. Which is great. I was happy with it but then wanted to try something else, so I did. I still managed clients and they still paid me, so I was still making money passively (almost), but I wasn't growing the business.

Worked on the new thing I was interested in for a year. It didn't work as expected. Clients dropped off from the agency. Then was left where I started before the agency. No $ coming in. I went back to work on the agency and found that the entire space has changed in a year. All of my old methods of getting clients didn't work anymore. So it was literally like starting over. If only I would have taken that $5k I was making and expanded my business I would be way further along. I would probably be at 5x where I was and have a full team. But it is what it is. Don't get caught up in jumping from idea to idea or business model to business model. ESPECIALLY if you are only basing your idea off of youtube gurus talking about this "new business" that is so much better than others.

What i've learned is once something works, double down and scale it. Get tunnel vision with that one business. Then maybe once you scale it and have a team in place doing most of the work, then look into adding another idea to the mix. Today I have a different business, but I didn't start REALLY growing until I realized this.

Now if you totally hate the business and don't care about starting over to find something else you enjoy more, that is a different story.

 

[thejessecarr21]

Nothing wrong with thinking big, but how will picking numbers out of the hat help you?

Can’t make more than a few thousand a month? No problem, just build something that makes 10million a month.

What have I missed here?

I feel like this implies that if one business is not making the amount you strive for, then you hop to another idea that you think will make more. But honestly, you should be thinking in terms of, ok your current business is making $3,000 a month. How do I expand this current business and add more value within it to 10x what I am making? Too many people fall into the loop of starting businesses and not scaling them.

 

[xShepherdx]

Nothing wrong with thinking big, but how will picking numbers out of the hat help you?

Can’t make more than a few thousand a month? No problem, just build something that makes 10million a month.

What have I missed here?

1) They're not random numbers, I picked them because they have meaning to me and reflect my goals in life.

2) If I know that's my goal, I need to pick a space where I have the potential to make that kind of money. Not at first, obviously, but eventually.

Like MJ says, you have to look at the numbers. And the numbers on this business just don't equal a Fastlane opportunity.

I can probably turn this into my full-time income ($70k/year) with the business being mostly automated/passive, but anything beyond that just isn't going to happen.

Hopefully, that makes more sense.

I know this thread is basically one big back-and-forth between starting something new and sticking to the existing company. I still don't know what to do but knowing where I want to go has been a big help.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[xShepherdx]

It seems I have a similar mindset to you and thought I would add to this because it kind of in a way affected my progress. Not sure if it truly applies to you, but maybe someone else will also get value from it.

Be careful jumping around too much. I am an entrepreneur and always have a mind full of ideas that I want to try. Which is great, but also a curse. I started a marketing agency 3 years ago. Got it to $5k in revenue per month, of course due to the nature of service businesses most of that was profit. Which is great. I was happy with it but then wanted to try something else, so I did. I still managed clients and they still paid me, so I was still making money passively (almost), but I wasn't growing the business.

Worked on the new thing I was interested in for a year. It didn't work as expected. Clients dropped off from the agency. Then was left where I started before the agency. No $ coming in. I went back to work on the agency and found that the entire space has changed in a year. All of my old methods of getting clients didn't work anymore. So it was literally like starting over. If only I would have taken that $5k I was making and expanded my business I would be way further along. I would probably be at 5x where I was and have a full team. But it is what it is. Don't get caught up in jumping from idea to idea or business model to business model. ESPECIALLY if you are only basing your idea off of youtube gurus talking about this "new business" that is so much better than others.

I really appreciate you sharing your story!

Shiny object syndrome is definitely something I've had to deal with a lot since posting this initially, so I'll keep what you've said in mind.

And definitely avoid YouTube/social media gurus, they'll make you hate your life no matter how successful you are. (Not just in business, but in other areas as well.)

What i've learned is once something works, double down and scale it. Get tunnel vision with that one business. Then maybe once you scale it and have a team in place doing most of the work, then look into adding another idea to the mix. Today I have a different business, but I didn't start REALLY growing until I realized this.

Now if you totally hate the business and don't care about starting over to find something else you enjoy more, that is a different story.

Doubling down is 100% the correct idea when something is working. This is how I plan to go from $1k/mo to the equivalent of a full-time paycheck.

As Steve mentioned in this thread, "When was the last time you ran your best promotion?"

My answer was never LOL. But that's changing ASAP.