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Hi everyone, first off sincere apologies to everyone that has read my previous posts on this forum, because I wasted your time, because you've basically read a wantrapreneur's post that did almost nothing about the things I said, I am pretty confident that won't be happening ever again as I'll explain in the post.
First off, let me talk about what happened from 2024 to 2026.
Right after my last post, I got to working on my specialized skills ( DR skillstack of (copywriting, email marketing, retention, LTV optimization, basically I chose a skillstack I liked doing, and part of it was at the time I had no courage to learn anything that is top funnel related i.e. paid media, lead gen etc because A) I was affraid of loosing money of my own which I had not a lot of and B) I would've been sick to my stomach if I lost someone else's money on ads.
The skill acquisition thing went great if I may be honest, learned a ton, very valuable skills from my perspective, and then after a while of outreach I landed a B2B contract with an eCommerce development agency that I did the service for as a white labeler ( they had the clients, I had the service I charged the agency for, and they baked in their cut on top of my fee ), it was a year long contract. $150K/yr at 10 clients, which is astoundigly low if we look at it from an ACR ( average client retainer ) perspective so it comes out to be $15k/client/yr.
Didn't make "much money" from that deal because :
A) I made the mistake of working with that agency in the first place :
1. They were not qualified to work with me even tough they had clients ( their overall churn was very high, they had unrealistic expectations that I didn't manage from the get go and those expectations poured over to their client pool aswell )
2. The clients I did the service for as a white labeler were also far away from being qualified for the service ( i.e. poor unit economics, higher then normal refund rates, paid media strategy, penny pinching etc )
B) Even tough I was aware of every single thing mentioned under (A) I still accepted to dive into it just so that I can make money
C) Because of my poor thinking and going into that partnership I f*cked up on actually charging what I should've charged so that my service has at least 75-80+% gross margins so that I can scale and not rely on one partnership.
Well, here's the aftermath of said poor choices :
Mar 2024-Dec 2024 :
- Revenue : approx. $100K
- COGS : Since I would've effectively had no room for hiring real qualified people, I hired the cheapest freelancers which in turn not only ate at the revenue, but cost me a shit ton due to me having to find freelancers.
Approx: $70K for freelancers, + tools/software
"Profit" : approx $30K ( The word profit doesn't do this situation justice, real businesses make profits, what I did is paid myself 60-70% below the average salary of an entry-mid level remote job in that same sector while providing a service that requires both far more experience and knowledge that that which is required for the remote job at entry level )
The morning after NYE, Jan 1st 2025, I woke up, saw like 30+ messages from the agency, the clients saying all saying things along the lines of "let's crush 2025, let's scale our brand to multi 8 figures this year" (meanwhile their "brand" at the time was doing $50-60k/month with less then 10% net margins, bad CAC and overall bad processes) and I felt sick of everything and everyone involved, and decided to pull the plug.
Called the guys at the agency and said I am done for good, they said okay, we moved on in a week or two after I helped them transition withoit me and I felt reliefed and I was thinking of doing the same service just on my own, or if I decide to go the WL route I better stick to highly qualified people, and then that whole January I spent mentally pondering the questions of saturation, luck, talent/innate abilitied etc and did 0 work.
I do wish to explain something that I have come to realize about questions I was pondering such as market saturation, luck, talent etc and I firmly believe that what I concluded is 100% true about them.
- Market saturation - Can't physically exist in any growing industry mainly and my arguments for it is there will always and I mean always be room for anyone to dominate if they start out from the get go with the plan in mind to do a better service,better experience for the customer, and working on iteratively improving the processes and not just going for "make money/scale".... *this one kept me from starting for like 2 years, and I only started working on my idea in Jan 2026, but I've had it from Jan 2025, and all I thought was it'd be impossible cuz of saturation etc*
- Luck can't exist as a magical thing, outside of our control. If it exists, then it's probability based and as those who've read MJ's work they know about conditional probability and I am 100% sure that's what matters a lot, and I have lots of scenarios that I've thought about on this, but the most basic one is if even before starting we make a decision to only build a business around demand, that's why saturation isn't a bad thing in my eyes anymore, if mediocre competition exists and there are players doing multi-millions, in my opinion the probabilty of someone who enters that space, treating the process iteratively as a constant feedback loop is doomed to make the money the top 1% of that industry makes in due time if not even more.
- Talent/innate abilities - I could write a whole post on why this doesn't ring true to anyone with critical thinking, I firmly believe regardless of your genetics/circumstances, an average individual can excell in any human endeavor wether it be science, business, sport.
A quick analogy I'd use is since I recently got my degree in engineering ( which I have almost 0 passion for, slight interest is about all I have for certain topics in engineering) and here's what I want to say.
As a young kid, I had an awesome maths teacher that taught maths well and since I was pushed to practice I was very good at solving math problems during elementary school. When it came to high school, I barely passed mostly beacuse I lost interest, didn't like the way I was taught and most importantly didn't deliberately practice on my own, so I learned math solutions by heart and would only know the answer to problems I memorised the solutions for ( never understood any of it btw )
When I got into uni ( ranked higher on the accepted list, because I memorised tons and tons of problems/solutions and passed the test to get accepted easily ) but that world would quickly be over.
As the semester started, I saw how difficult the classes were, maths, physics, but I hoped I'd just be able to memorise the stuff and just pass, well nope not a chance.
If anyone of you is familiar with Multivariable Calculus, Differental Equations, Differential Geometry you'd know nobody can pass that just by memorising, because every problem is "unique" in some regard. So I practiced tons and tons of problems from basic maths to advanced subjects and only then when I learned all that I passed test easily ( even then I half-assed the practice because I didn't learn the theory properly, but knew enough to pass every test problem easily ).
Same happened with BJJ. 3 years ago, I had 0 experience. When I first started I got paired with kids ( 12-14 year olds ) who literally wiped the floors with me every training session for a while, and last year I won a silver medal in my category in a European BJJ amateurs tournament, and was promoted to a brown belt in December, 2025 ( which is "highly" unlikely for anyone that started 3 years ago, but as I said luck has nothing to do with it, I put more time deliberately practicing and constantly improving and asking for feedback from my coaches which increased my probability to almost "guaranteed" level )
Moving on to what happened in 2025, I did a whole bunch of wantrapreneurship idiotisms to "get rich quick" :
- Onlyfans managment agency : Scaled to $5k/week in my first 10 days working with a girl I knew and completely ditched the whole thing as I hated the work, hated the industry and everything about it, didn't even take my 40% cut, just left everything to her and left that venture
- Growth operating ( i.e. finding influencers who have digital products and helping them with making more money ) - Did it for 2 months, made around $60k in profit in total for those 2 months, but the niche I went in is called "bizop" ( basically get rich quick gurus ) and since I hated doing it, and I hated helping snake oil salesmen make more money I quit that venture aswell
Had like $60-70k at that time to my name, and I wanted to start a B2B product business for CNC machines ( selling & distribution of machine parts, tools, and servicing of those machines ).
Invested almost $50k in that business for small storage facility, buying inventory and specialized tools for servicing/repair before even "thinking" about demand for this ( not even stopping for a second to think hey, you can't do this without having tons of licenses and certificates that meet regulations/mandatory standards ), when I was setting all this up and ordering inventory I had not even thought about that for one second, and I found out that'd cost an additional $70-80K... so yeah shoved money down the drain pretty hard right there, and was cleaning all that mess I made up to november 2025, and took a two month break to relax and take a step backwards.
So in January 2026, I launched what I was affraid to launch in jan 2025 which is a retention optimization agency ( bottom of funnel service that solves problems I already know many have, but I'll also be learning more intricate problems as I continue to work with clients on a day to day basis ) for a niche inside of ecommerce, and still working on that daily and will continue to work on it until the processes start to work again so that I can improve them.
Altough an exit or a high cashflowing business is the long term intention, for now working on improving and fixing lead generation/acquisition process first. Once I figure that out I'll have basic life needs met and all cashflow above that will go back into the business, and then I'll be focusing on iteratively improving the service delivery so that the churn is low and that it is productized enough for scaling and that will be the third phase (scaling) I also have ideas on how I'd "scale" it past being an agency, but that's wantrapreneur thought wanking at this moment, so yeah, I am off to working on the lead gen side of things for now, will reply/check back on forum when I have time.
Thanks for reading.
First off, let me talk about what happened from 2024 to 2026.
Right after my last post, I got to working on my specialized skills ( DR skillstack of (copywriting, email marketing, retention, LTV optimization, basically I chose a skillstack I liked doing, and part of it was at the time I had no courage to learn anything that is top funnel related i.e. paid media, lead gen etc because A) I was affraid of loosing money of my own which I had not a lot of and B) I would've been sick to my stomach if I lost someone else's money on ads.
The skill acquisition thing went great if I may be honest, learned a ton, very valuable skills from my perspective, and then after a while of outreach I landed a B2B contract with an eCommerce development agency that I did the service for as a white labeler ( they had the clients, I had the service I charged the agency for, and they baked in their cut on top of my fee ), it was a year long contract. $150K/yr at 10 clients, which is astoundigly low if we look at it from an ACR ( average client retainer ) perspective so it comes out to be $15k/client/yr.
Didn't make "much money" from that deal because :
A) I made the mistake of working with that agency in the first place :
1. They were not qualified to work with me even tough they had clients ( their overall churn was very high, they had unrealistic expectations that I didn't manage from the get go and those expectations poured over to their client pool aswell )
2. The clients I did the service for as a white labeler were also far away from being qualified for the service ( i.e. poor unit economics, higher then normal refund rates, paid media strategy, penny pinching etc )
B) Even tough I was aware of every single thing mentioned under (A) I still accepted to dive into it just so that I can make money
C) Because of my poor thinking and going into that partnership I f*cked up on actually charging what I should've charged so that my service has at least 75-80+% gross margins so that I can scale and not rely on one partnership.
Well, here's the aftermath of said poor choices :
Mar 2024-Dec 2024 :
- Revenue : approx. $100K
- COGS : Since I would've effectively had no room for hiring real qualified people, I hired the cheapest freelancers which in turn not only ate at the revenue, but cost me a shit ton due to me having to find freelancers.
Approx: $70K for freelancers, + tools/software
"Profit" : approx $30K ( The word profit doesn't do this situation justice, real businesses make profits, what I did is paid myself 60-70% below the average salary of an entry-mid level remote job in that same sector while providing a service that requires both far more experience and knowledge that that which is required for the remote job at entry level )
The morning after NYE, Jan 1st 2025, I woke up, saw like 30+ messages from the agency, the clients saying all saying things along the lines of "let's crush 2025, let's scale our brand to multi 8 figures this year" (meanwhile their "brand" at the time was doing $50-60k/month with less then 10% net margins, bad CAC and overall bad processes) and I felt sick of everything and everyone involved, and decided to pull the plug.
Called the guys at the agency and said I am done for good, they said okay, we moved on in a week or two after I helped them transition withoit me and I felt reliefed and I was thinking of doing the same service just on my own, or if I decide to go the WL route I better stick to highly qualified people, and then that whole January I spent mentally pondering the questions of saturation, luck, talent/innate abilitied etc and did 0 work.
I do wish to explain something that I have come to realize about questions I was pondering such as market saturation, luck, talent etc and I firmly believe that what I concluded is 100% true about them.
- Market saturation - Can't physically exist in any growing industry mainly and my arguments for it is there will always and I mean always be room for anyone to dominate if they start out from the get go with the plan in mind to do a better service,better experience for the customer, and working on iteratively improving the processes and not just going for "make money/scale".... *this one kept me from starting for like 2 years, and I only started working on my idea in Jan 2026, but I've had it from Jan 2025, and all I thought was it'd be impossible cuz of saturation etc*
- Luck can't exist as a magical thing, outside of our control. If it exists, then it's probability based and as those who've read MJ's work they know about conditional probability and I am 100% sure that's what matters a lot, and I have lots of scenarios that I've thought about on this, but the most basic one is if even before starting we make a decision to only build a business around demand, that's why saturation isn't a bad thing in my eyes anymore, if mediocre competition exists and there are players doing multi-millions, in my opinion the probabilty of someone who enters that space, treating the process iteratively as a constant feedback loop is doomed to make the money the top 1% of that industry makes in due time if not even more.
- Talent/innate abilities - I could write a whole post on why this doesn't ring true to anyone with critical thinking, I firmly believe regardless of your genetics/circumstances, an average individual can excell in any human endeavor wether it be science, business, sport.
A quick analogy I'd use is since I recently got my degree in engineering ( which I have almost 0 passion for, slight interest is about all I have for certain topics in engineering) and here's what I want to say.
As a young kid, I had an awesome maths teacher that taught maths well and since I was pushed to practice I was very good at solving math problems during elementary school. When it came to high school, I barely passed mostly beacuse I lost interest, didn't like the way I was taught and most importantly didn't deliberately practice on my own, so I learned math solutions by heart and would only know the answer to problems I memorised the solutions for ( never understood any of it btw )
When I got into uni ( ranked higher on the accepted list, because I memorised tons and tons of problems/solutions and passed the test to get accepted easily ) but that world would quickly be over.
As the semester started, I saw how difficult the classes were, maths, physics, but I hoped I'd just be able to memorise the stuff and just pass, well nope not a chance.
If anyone of you is familiar with Multivariable Calculus, Differental Equations, Differential Geometry you'd know nobody can pass that just by memorising, because every problem is "unique" in some regard. So I practiced tons and tons of problems from basic maths to advanced subjects and only then when I learned all that I passed test easily ( even then I half-assed the practice because I didn't learn the theory properly, but knew enough to pass every test problem easily ).
Same happened with BJJ. 3 years ago, I had 0 experience. When I first started I got paired with kids ( 12-14 year olds ) who literally wiped the floors with me every training session for a while, and last year I won a silver medal in my category in a European BJJ amateurs tournament, and was promoted to a brown belt in December, 2025 ( which is "highly" unlikely for anyone that started 3 years ago, but as I said luck has nothing to do with it, I put more time deliberately practicing and constantly improving and asking for feedback from my coaches which increased my probability to almost "guaranteed" level )
Moving on to what happened in 2025, I did a whole bunch of wantrapreneurship idiotisms to "get rich quick" :
- Onlyfans managment agency : Scaled to $5k/week in my first 10 days working with a girl I knew and completely ditched the whole thing as I hated the work, hated the industry and everything about it, didn't even take my 40% cut, just left everything to her and left that venture
- Growth operating ( i.e. finding influencers who have digital products and helping them with making more money ) - Did it for 2 months, made around $60k in profit in total for those 2 months, but the niche I went in is called "bizop" ( basically get rich quick gurus ) and since I hated doing it, and I hated helping snake oil salesmen make more money I quit that venture aswell
Had like $60-70k at that time to my name, and I wanted to start a B2B product business for CNC machines ( selling & distribution of machine parts, tools, and servicing of those machines ).
Invested almost $50k in that business for small storage facility, buying inventory and specialized tools for servicing/repair before even "thinking" about demand for this ( not even stopping for a second to think hey, you can't do this without having tons of licenses and certificates that meet regulations/mandatory standards ), when I was setting all this up and ordering inventory I had not even thought about that for one second, and I found out that'd cost an additional $70-80K... so yeah shoved money down the drain pretty hard right there, and was cleaning all that mess I made up to november 2025, and took a two month break to relax and take a step backwards.
So in January 2026, I launched what I was affraid to launch in jan 2025 which is a retention optimization agency ( bottom of funnel service that solves problems I already know many have, but I'll also be learning more intricate problems as I continue to work with clients on a day to day basis ) for a niche inside of ecommerce, and still working on that daily and will continue to work on it until the processes start to work again so that I can improve them.
Altough an exit or a high cashflowing business is the long term intention, for now working on improving and fixing lead generation/acquisition process first. Once I figure that out I'll have basic life needs met and all cashflow above that will go back into the business, and then I'll be focusing on iteratively improving the service delivery so that the churn is low and that it is productized enough for scaling and that will be the third phase (scaling) I also have ideas on how I'd "scale" it past being an agency, but that's wantrapreneur thought wanking at this moment, so yeah, I am off to working on the lead gen side of things for now, will reply/check back on forum when I have time.
Thanks for reading.
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