Hello, fellow Unscripted entrepreneurs!
On September 2019, I'll be three years into my entrepreneurial journey.
I haven't read The Millionaire Fastlane , but I've listened to Unscripted start to end at least three full times. It got me through some rough patches.
What's my background and How did I start?
So I'm from Riga, Latvia. It's a small country in the Baltic states (Northern Europe.) Our population is roughly about 1.8million, and most of the young folks are still emigrating to other EU countries due to the relatively poor economic state.
On August 2016. I graduated with a bachelors in physical therapy (physiotherapy), and I started working as a physio in March that same year.
I was making five euros (with some change) for every hour that I spent with a patient. If I was at the job but didn't have a patient, I made nothing.
Rather quickly, I realized that my finances aren't working out the way I expect them to. For the first six months, I was making roughly 380 to 400 euros a month... and I had figured that my ceiling is 800 (spending 160 hours one-on-one with a patient.)
At the same time, I had this gut feeling that this isn't what I want to do for the rest of my life.
And I realized that no matter what I do, or how hard I tried, there is a limit to what I can make in this market.
Even before that, I started dabbling in internet marketing. I learned about this copywriting skill that has the potential to resolve my money problems.
So as I kept getting more depressed, I just said the F-with this, I quit.
And I did.
As you can probably imagine, all of my family and relatives had their opinions. Everyone, except my dad, was pissed. He's been Unscripted his whole life, so he understood, but couldn't or wouldn't support me. I was on my own.
I had some money saved up that would last me almost a year, but I was very positive and naive, so I thought that I would make it... How wrong I was.
Since I was very passionate about helping people resolve their back pain problems, I found an online course by a doc in New Zealand who had an info product on the subject.
I studied his sales page, built up a page on Facebook, wrote a free report on back pain, then wrote an email campaign that promoted the product, built a landing page and started running Facebook ads.
After all, that's what the gurus had told me to do, so it has to work. I'm gonna be an overnight internet millionaire...
So I launched it, spent about $300 on that promotion, chickened out to spend more, got like 120 leads on that list, sold 0 products and was back to square one.
Ok, so what am I going to do next? I'm out of cash...
Luckily for me, my mom had a construction project, where I helped her out for that summer and made some money (this was one year in.)
Then came the fall and a close friend of mine was building an e-commerce store (not a Shopify dropship with suppliers from China.) But a real store, with real merchandise that they shipped out themselves or sold in an office.
He's 8 years older than me, and we've been friends for a long time. He was out of the country and needed me to get the merchandise (shipped to my apartment) and start selling it through classified ads (our local version of Craigslist.)
We didn't agree on a particular amount of money for the job nor the specific hours or job description. We just had an agreement that everything's going to be ok. Big mistake.
Rather quickly, my apartment was full of merchandise, I was hustling his products and after about 1.5 months I had made 500euros, even though we'd agreed on 800. He just didn't pay me and told me that we had a misunderstanding... hmmm, okay.
Around that same time, I learned from yet another guru, that you could sell lead generation services to businesses. And I figured that I knew how to generate leads from Facebook (even if I didn't quite convert them to customers previously.)
So I jumped in.
This was January 2017. So roughly a year and a half in.
The first client I got was from a Facebook post. I wrote a post about how I've been dabbling with Facebook ads and would help anyone get clients off of Facebook for free. Just spend 100 euros on ads.
My first client was the sister of one of my acquaintances. She's a make-up artist and wanted to work at weddings doing the make-up and hair for brides and bridesmaids.
We got about 13 leads for 80 euro ad spend, and she managed to close 2 or three clients.
The thing I learned from that campaign was that you need to have a high customer lifetime value (at least $1000 over the lifetime) or it's not economically viable to advertise.
The next campaign was for a friend of mine who bought 6 or 8 canoe boats and wanted to do a boat rental.
The mistake we did in that campaign was that he didn't have a person who would handle the leads on the phone (I should have hustled and sold on the phone.) So we had a landing page with a phone number and people could subscribe to get the offer in the email, and many (about 25 did) but there was no follow-up, no way to convert, other than slapping a phone on a webpage with some sales copy.
(I ran into a problem - I got the message that something went wrong, so I posted the rest as a first reply, I hope it's ok)
On September 2019, I'll be three years into my entrepreneurial journey.
I haven't read The Millionaire Fastlane , but I've listened to Unscripted start to end at least three full times. It got me through some rough patches.
What's my background and How did I start?
So I'm from Riga, Latvia. It's a small country in the Baltic states (Northern Europe.) Our population is roughly about 1.8million, and most of the young folks are still emigrating to other EU countries due to the relatively poor economic state.
On August 2016. I graduated with a bachelors in physical therapy (physiotherapy), and I started working as a physio in March that same year.
I was making five euros (with some change) for every hour that I spent with a patient. If I was at the job but didn't have a patient, I made nothing.
Rather quickly, I realized that my finances aren't working out the way I expect them to. For the first six months, I was making roughly 380 to 400 euros a month... and I had figured that my ceiling is 800 (spending 160 hours one-on-one with a patient.)
At the same time, I had this gut feeling that this isn't what I want to do for the rest of my life.
And I realized that no matter what I do, or how hard I tried, there is a limit to what I can make in this market.
Even before that, I started dabbling in internet marketing. I learned about this copywriting skill that has the potential to resolve my money problems.
So as I kept getting more depressed, I just said the F-with this, I quit.
And I did.
As you can probably imagine, all of my family and relatives had their opinions. Everyone, except my dad, was pissed. He's been Unscripted his whole life, so he understood, but couldn't or wouldn't support me. I was on my own.
I had some money saved up that would last me almost a year, but I was very positive and naive, so I thought that I would make it... How wrong I was.
Since I was very passionate about helping people resolve their back pain problems, I found an online course by a doc in New Zealand who had an info product on the subject.
I studied his sales page, built up a page on Facebook, wrote a free report on back pain, then wrote an email campaign that promoted the product, built a landing page and started running Facebook ads.
After all, that's what the gurus had told me to do, so it has to work. I'm gonna be an overnight internet millionaire...
So I launched it, spent about $300 on that promotion, chickened out to spend more, got like 120 leads on that list, sold 0 products and was back to square one.
Ok, so what am I going to do next? I'm out of cash...
Luckily for me, my mom had a construction project, where I helped her out for that summer and made some money (this was one year in.)
Then came the fall and a close friend of mine was building an e-commerce store (not a Shopify dropship with suppliers from China.) But a real store, with real merchandise that they shipped out themselves or sold in an office.
He's 8 years older than me, and we've been friends for a long time. He was out of the country and needed me to get the merchandise (shipped to my apartment) and start selling it through classified ads (our local version of Craigslist.)
We didn't agree on a particular amount of money for the job nor the specific hours or job description. We just had an agreement that everything's going to be ok. Big mistake.
Rather quickly, my apartment was full of merchandise, I was hustling his products and after about 1.5 months I had made 500euros, even though we'd agreed on 800. He just didn't pay me and told me that we had a misunderstanding... hmmm, okay.
Around that same time, I learned from yet another guru, that you could sell lead generation services to businesses. And I figured that I knew how to generate leads from Facebook (even if I didn't quite convert them to customers previously.)
So I jumped in.
This was January 2017. So roughly a year and a half in.
The first client I got was from a Facebook post. I wrote a post about how I've been dabbling with Facebook ads and would help anyone get clients off of Facebook for free. Just spend 100 euros on ads.
My first client was the sister of one of my acquaintances. She's a make-up artist and wanted to work at weddings doing the make-up and hair for brides and bridesmaids.
We got about 13 leads for 80 euro ad spend, and she managed to close 2 or three clients.
The thing I learned from that campaign was that you need to have a high customer lifetime value (at least $1000 over the lifetime) or it's not economically viable to advertise.
The next campaign was for a friend of mine who bought 6 or 8 canoe boats and wanted to do a boat rental.
The mistake we did in that campaign was that he didn't have a person who would handle the leads on the phone (I should have hustled and sold on the phone.) So we had a landing page with a phone number and people could subscribe to get the offer in the email, and many (about 25 did) but there was no follow-up, no way to convert, other than slapping a phone on a webpage with some sales copy.
(I ran into a problem - I got the message that something went wrong, so I posted the rest as a first reply, I hope it's ok)
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