How I Turned $0 into $13.2M: A True Rags to Riches Story

How I Made $13.2M Starting From $0: A Rags to Riches Story

From zero to hero: my rags to riches story began with empty pockets and a burning desire to succeed.

Five years ago, starting a business with nothing seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

The pressure to become an entrepreneur has never been more intense than it is today.

But here’s the good news: the landscape of entrepreneurship is evolving rapidly.

Gone are the days when you needed a full-time assistant, an expensive office, or a dedicated filmmaker to launch a successful venture.

The truth is, a new wave of innovators is revolutionizing the way we approach business.

These trailblazers are leading with personal brands, using their unique personalities as the cornerstone of their business identity.

This approach is transforming the essential ingredients needed to attract a paying community.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.

The Founder-Led Business Model

Welcome to the era of the founder-led business model.

This innovative approach allows entrepreneurs to prioritize their happiness, goals, and desires when building a business.

Over the past three years, I’ve been rigorously testing this formula, creating systems to build my own founder-led business: Founder OS.

This business is built entirely around myself – my wants, my dreams, my desires, my goals, and my lifestyle.

Everything I want, nothing I don’t.

And the crazy thing? It works like a charm.

I now have the privilege of living my dream lifestyle while Founder OS generates over $850,000 in monthly revenue.

I have the freedom to work when I want, on what I want, wherever I want, and with whomever I want.

This is the evolution of entrepreneurship.

This is the founder-led business model.

This is how to start a business from nothing, starting with yourself.

The Challenge of Modern Entrepreneurship

In today’s world, starting a business isn’t necessarily the hardest part.

Every influencer and their sister seems to have a product, course, or merchandise line they call a “business.”

The real challenge lies in starting a business and growing it while actively tending to your happiness.

This is where the concept of founder freedom comes into play.

Founder freedom means having full control over the four W’s in life: working where you want, on what you want, with whom you want, when you want.

It’s about achieving time, location, and financial freedom.

The hype surrounding hustle culture has driven many aspiring entrepreneurs into the deep end without the necessary education or tools to navigate this world sustainably.

Even I lost myself while building my first business, Bitmaker, an in-person coding school.

Learning from Mistakes: My Rags to Riches Story

From the outside, everything looked perfect with Bitmaker.

But internally, it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life.

I despised running an in-person, brick-and-mortar business.

It drained every ounce of energy from my soul, and I struggled not to break under the pressure.

However, this experience taught me invaluable lessons about myself.

Looking back, it’s obvious that Bitmaker wouldn’t fulfill my dreams.

But if it weren’t for Bitmaker, I’d never have discovered what I truly wanted and how to avoid what I don’t want.

Your entrepreneurial journey doesn’t have to start with lessons learned the hard way.

Embrace founder freedom and focus on yourself as the founder.

Give yourself clear answers about how you want to live, where you want to work, who you want to work with, and how much you need to make.

Defining Your Founder Freedom

For me, founder freedom meant living between global business hotspots, working wherever I want, and having the freedom to travel and be close to nature.

Once you answer these four crucial questions, you’ve defined your version of founder freedom.

This clarity allows you to start building your founder-led business model – the vehicle everyone must use to thrive in this new age of entrepreneurship.

Every founder-led business model begins with an analysis of the founder – that’s you.

To connect your business directly with your personal needs, wants, goals, and dreams, you must look inward.

My favorite method for discovering your personal niche is the Ikigai exercise.

The Ikigai Exercise: Finding Your Purpose

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that stands for your reason for being.

The Ikigai exercise consists of four different lists: what you’re good at, what you can be paid for, what the world needs, and what you love to do.

I encourage you to fill in at least five things in each of these sections.

The topics that meet in the center represent your unique niche.

This exercise changed everything for me.

Through my Ikigai, I discovered that I love systems, growing audiences, building communities, traveling the world, and helping founders.

This revelation became my niche: helping founders reach $5 million in annual profit using the proven systems I’ve created over 15 years of building four profitable companies.

Becoming the Niche

If I were to simplify my niche down to one word, it would be “systems.”

But I don’t limit myself to talking only about systems.

I discuss my curiosities, the things that inspire me, my travels, my interests, and my strengths.

I can do all of this because I’m passionate about what I do.

I’m passionate about traveling, meditation, cold baths, saunas, nature, and so much more.

At the intersection of the Ikigai diagram isn’t just a business you love; it’s a business where you love the customer.

To communicate effectively with that customer, you need to become the niche.

The Power of Personal Branding

It’s crucial to understand that people follow people first, then brands.

Every brand needs a founder who is building their own personal brand.

Having an online presence establishes you as the true expert in your area.

It gives you a packed pipeline of clients that you can tap into at any moment.

It makes you even more in demand, allowing you to charge more, drive more customers, and build a massive empire.

There are two routes forward with your niche, and both work, but there’s one that I particularly love.

Owning Your Niche vs. Becoming the Niche

First, you can own your niche.

This approach involves picking a subject and going all in on it.

You own a word in the customer’s mind – you become “the productivity guy” or “the habits guy” or “the stoicism guy.”

The positive side of this approach is that it builds a highly targeted audience fast.

You become the go-to expert and the trigger when people hear that word.

People want the solution that you provide.

The downside is that you can end up stuck in a single niche and get a little pigeonholed.

Becoming the Niche: A Unique Approach

The alternative is to become the niche.

Think about it: you’re the only one who has access to your unique insights, curiosities, idiosyncrasies, mistakes, achievements, lessons, tools, and tactics.

There’s no one else who knows as much about you as you do.

This shift alone was a dramatic change for me and helped me grow an audience of over 3 million people around myself.

It also fueled all of my businesses, which are now generating over $13 million a year in revenue.

With this approach, you discuss a handful of related topics regularly, but those topics are more focused on your personal brand than on a single company topic.

You’re trying to make people feel connected to you because, again, you are the niche.

Finding the Sweet Spot

The downside of a person-first brand is that it can become challenging to monetize if you don’t also have a bunch of businesses around you and a clear problem you’re looking to solve for your audience.

You risk people coming to you more for entertainment than to charge for your services.

That’s why I recommend starting somewhere between these two areas.

You’re both going to become the niche while also owning a word in the mind of your customers.

Look at the edges of where your interests lie and see where they overlap with your ideal audience members’ problems and desires.

Then you can create a brand around solutions that address those problems but overlap with who you are.

You’ll have a unique niche and a personal moat around everything that you do.

Embracing Content: Building Your Personal Media Company

To embrace your niche, you need to embrace content.

This is where the system of building your own personal media company comes into play.

There’s still too much of this creator approach to content, whereby you must master all the elements of content yourself.

If you’re an entrepreneur, your superpower is assembling a team, making decisions, and executing a clear vision.

How are you going to do that while making tons of content, building a newsletter, and growing your audience on various platforms all by yourself?

If you’re just starting out, you likely will have to do a lot of it yourself.

But once you’ve landed on your niche and two to three formats you want to pursue, you’re ready to leverage your cash flow to hire some creative weapons dedicated to scaling your brand and your message.

The Numbers Behind a Successful Personal Media Company

Let’s break down the real numbers behind a successful personal media company.

Let’s say you have $12,000 to dedicate to your personal brand.

This investment can be broken down into a couple of options.

Option one is to hire a talented writer as a contractor for around $7,000 and have them handle all your social content and your newsletter.

Then, hire a dedicated newsletter writer to handle a weekly newsletter at around $3,000 to $5,000 per month.

Option two is to hire a full-stack writer as a contractor who can handle all of your social content and your weekly newsletter.

This person would likely work part-time solely on your content and would probably cost around $8,000 to $10,000 per month.

Content Strategy and Execution

If you go with option two, you’ll have a full-stack writer to publish 14 posts per week on various platforms, seven long-form posts per week on professional networking sites, and one high-quality newsletter per week.

You’ll need to ensure that you bring on a writer with loads of experience writing on the platforms you’re looking to grow on.

The strength of this strategy is that it can help you build leverage.

You’re getting help with writing the content so you can spend time on bigger things in your business.

You’re also able to focus your energy on ideation and helping with execution.

The downside is that you still need to be pretty involved in your content strategy.

You need to come up with ideas, edit content, and ensure tight alignment between your content and brand guidelines.

Scaling Your Personal Media Company

With $2,000 to $3,000 more of your business’s revenue dedicated to your personal media company, you can increase the salary of the writer to come up with ideas that you’ll execute on within your content strategy.

You can also employ a social media manager to post all of that content.

This way, you can get off the content hamster wheel entirely.

This is where you move from just being a creator to being the CEO, back into your zone of genius.

You now have four out of the five ingredients of the founder-led business model.

You understand founder freedom, you’ve identified your reason for being (your Ikigai), you’re dedicated to either becoming or owning your niche, and you have the first steps of a highly scalable personal media company to power your brand through content.

Selling Your Offer: Targeting the Right Audience

Now comes the crucial part: selling your offer.

To sell effectively, you first need to target the right audience.

Most founders use a spray-and-pray method, which never works.

You want to move with surgeon-like precision, focusing on quality over quantity.

Find the right people and then draw them in.

There are 8.1 billion people on the planet, and you can’t help them all.

Narrow down your audience to a specific type of person.

If you’re teaching health and fitness, narrow it down further: health and fitness for film industry professionals, health and fitness for working moms, or health and fitness for recovering athletes in the first six months following an accident.

The more specific you can be, the more compelling your online presence will be for the right person.

Passion and Purchasing Power: Key Audience Criteria

Second, go after a topic people are already passionate about.

Fashion enthusiasts don’t need to be convinced to buy the newest pair of sneakers.

Apple fans follow every single keynote and product drop.

You don’t want to have to persuade people that they need your offer.

Find that passion, then direct it towards a specific version of what you’re creating.

The third criterion for your ideal audience member is their ability to buy.

At the end of the day, you have to be realistic about whether or not your audience can actually afford to purchase what you’re selling.

Learning from Experience: The Trail AI Story

About six years ago, I had an idea for something called Trail AI.

It was an AI that would help real estate agents and financial services professionals synthesize all their data and reports and get them to their clients.

I’d get on calls with these folks and get green lights – they were excited.

The only issue was that they weren’t really the buyer; they didn’t have the money or the ability to pay.

I quickly realized that I was building something for the wrong audience, and this was much more of a large corporate play.

Every business owner has experienced this: an audience that’s passionate but has no money.

So, pick an audience that’s ready to spend money, either to solve their problems or to get deeper into what they love.

An audience full of people who are in love with what you’re talking about is the goal.

That audience is a tinderbox of revenue that you need to ignite with the perfect social funnel.

The perfect social funnel consists of a newsletter, strategically placed CTAs (Call To Actions), killer lead magnets, and an irresistible offer.

Create your newsletter on a platform that’s best suited for founders.

You want to create a focused landing page that really sells what your newsletter is and serves as an incredible resource for your ideal audience member.

Your sign-up page should have several key components.

There should be no ability to scroll on the page – all the user can do is enter their email.

Include a bold headline that clearly states the value proposition of your newsletter.

Provide a little more information on why people should join, including a valuable lead magnet.

Finally, include overwhelming social proof from a group of respected individuals in your field.

Your focused sign-up page is crucial for converting traffic since you’ll be sharing it across all of your social channels.

The Call to Action System

I call this process my call to action system.

You want to go on a massive campaign to add your newsletter link to as many places as possible across your social media presence.

There are at least 20 places where you can incorporate your call to actions across various platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and your podcast.

This includes your bios, cover photos, featured sections, end of posts or threads, video descriptions, and more.

Implementing these CTAs across all platforms can significantly boost your email list growth.

The Power of Lead Magnets

If you really want to increase newsletter conversions, I recommend using lead magnets.

According to industry research, companies see a 50% increase in leads when they use a lead magnet compared to companies that don’t.

A lead magnet is a highly useful piece of content that’s gated behind an email sign-up.

It could be an in-depth PDF download, multi-part video series, webinar, workshop recording, email mini-course, specialized insight quiz, ebook, white paper, checklist, free system, playbook, or even a free trial.

Proving Your Authority and Building Trust

You can prove your authority by solving a piece of the problem for the customer for free, with the rest of the solution being an easy purchase away.

My belief is that the more generous you are, the more everything grows around you.

It can be scary creating something truly amazing and then giving it all away for free – it sounds nuts!

But I believe having an abundance mindset always wins.

Reciprocity is one of the strongest forces in humanity: you give, and then you get.

So, I always challenge myself to give away what I know.

Connecting Passion to Profit: The Irresistible Offer

You’re now ready to connect your passion to profit by pitching your audience on an irresistible offer, transforming them into your monetized audience.

This is your most valuable audience, and this is the part I love because you’re already creating a system that automatically builds trust between you and your audience.

What should you actually provide in your offer?

Well, now that you have an audience, they’re probably already telling you what they want from you.

I like to listen to what my audience regularly asks for in comments, email responses, and in-person live events.

I observe the topics that resonate with my audience, and if people are passionate about a certain topic, they’re probably willing to pay for related products or services.

Five Tiers of Offers

If that’s the case, all you have to do is package it up into a compelling format that works for you.

Here are five tiers of offers I recommend:

Low-ticket offers are great because they have a low barrier to entry.
Paid communities are amazing and provide a great form of recurring revenue.
Service-based businesses and consulting have the lowest barrier to entry with great margins.
High-ticket courses can be an upsell from your low-ticket offerings.
Masterminds are ultra-high-ticket products where you do group coaching experiences and education over a longer period.

The Path to Six Figures

The math of getting to six figures once you have a compelling offer is simpler than it appears.

For example, consider 20 people buying a $5,000 course, or 50 people paying $2,000 for consulting, or just over 500 people buying your low-ticket $197 course.

All of these are routes to $100K.

If you mix and match, you can get there even faster.

Creating a Sales Page for Your Offer

Once you have your irresistible offer, it’s time to share it and convert your audience from rented and owned to monetized.

First, create a sales page for the offer using similar principles to your focused signup page for your newsletter.

You’re going to have a bold headline, hero images, and social proof to make it so irresistible people can’t say no.

Then incorporate that link into your profitable profile.

Create an email sequence that automatically launches after they download a lead magnet.

Then launch it to your entire list for the first time when your offer debuts.

Continue to feature it as a main or recurring CTA in your newsletter.

The Joy of the First Sale: My Rags to Riches Story Continues

I’ve created businesses where sales are generated directly from the sales page, but in my experience, the higher ticket your product is, the more likely you’re going to want to sell to the customer directly.

When I was just getting started with Bitmaker, we priced the program at about $11,000.

We’d go on to increase the price of things to around $15,000, but I remember the joy on my team’s face when we saw that first $11,000 come in for the first person that would join our technology school and learn to code.

I don’t know if I could sell anything else that would bring me as much joy as that first sale I got.

The Hardest Money You’ll Ever Make

I think the hardest money that you’re ever going to make is the first time you get to $20K per month.

You have no idea what you’re doing. I know because I’ve been there, and I can tell you this: you’re going to get through it.

You will need a sales system in place, but I’ll let you get started with your business first.

This journey is about building businesses, not prisons, freeing us, the founders, to do what we want in life.

Conclusion: Your Rags to Riches Story Awaits

If you want to do the same and haven’t already started building your audience from 0 to 100,000 followers, now is the time to begin.

This rags to riches story is not just mine – it can be yours too.

The founder-led business model has transformed my life, allowing me to build a $13.2M empire starting from absolutely nothing.

Remember, every successful entrepreneur starts somewhere, often with empty pockets but a wealth of determination.

Your rags to riches story is waiting to be written.

Embrace the founder-led business model, define your founder freedom, discover your Ikigai, become your niche, and build your personal media company.

With the right strategies and mindset, you too can transform your passion into profit and create a business that not only generates substantial revenue but also aligns perfectly with your lifestyle and goals.

Your journey from rags to riches starts now.

Take that first step, and who knows? Your $13.2M success story might be just around the corner.