My story of how many failures finally turned into 1 massive success
To understand my story and how I built a 6-figure agency in 30 days (which I still think is insane), we have to go back to 2017 when I started in the online space.
I was in 12th grade in High school and had just applied to University for Math & Statistics.
At this time, I had a mini identity crisis.
I knew I was good at school and would do alright in a math program, but it wasn’t something I was passionate about.
I did not want to become a Math nerd.
I had a friend who was really into the online money space, and he was telling me how he was making money through Redbubble. Redbubble is a print-on-demand website where you sell shirts, but they do all the heavy lifting for you; you just have to create the designs.
I thought this was super interesting and had a pretty good idea for shirts.
Rappers like Lil Uzi, Lil Baby, and YBN Cordae are widely known, but they all had no website to buy merch. I could capitalize on this, so I created a bunch of designs with them on the shirts.
I wasn’t expecting anything, but the shirts were a hot seller on the website, and I ended up making over $6000 in just 2 months.
I thought, holy cow, this is a thing.
You can make money by not starting a Fortune 500 company or working a 9–5.
I honestly couldn’t believe it, and from then on, I started watching everything I could on entrepreneurship, side hustles and making $10,000/month online.
I became obsessed with making money online, and I started to try all these different kinds of hustles, like dropshipping, Amazon FBA, day trading, and guess what?
I lost money in all of them.
The profit margins for dropshipping were super low, Amazon FBA was insanely competitive, and I thought day trading would be easy because of my background in math.
I was dead wrong.
I was ready to give up and say maybe I just got lucky the first time, and you really can’t make a full-time income online.
But then this video popped up on my recommendations titled “This new business model will make you rich,” and I thought it couldn’t hurt to see what this is.
I watched the video, and the business model this guy described was SMMA.
SMMA stands for Social Media Marketing Agency. The model was to run either Facebook or Google Ads for eCommerce brands or local businesses like Dentists or Landscapers.
You would typically earn a fixed monthly price + a percentage of ad spend.
For example, if a business spends $50,000 a month on ads, you would get $2500 for running their ads + 10% of ad spend, which is $5000 — a total of $7500 a month.
And the best thing is no upfront cost at all.
This sounded like a gold mine to me. I thought I would quickly be making $20,000/Month in only like 4 months.
But what happens when you’re too optimistic without a plan? You don’t hit your expectations. That’s exactly what happened to me, but the reality was way lower.
I was putting in the work, spending 4, 6, and 10-hour days messaging businesses on Facebook, & CEOs on LinkedIn, trying to convince them to let me do their ads.
And I was successful, kind of.
I signed 2 clients for $500 each, and that’s it. I took whatever I could to get the experience, but here I was 3 months in, and I had maybe 10 meetings total, and the hope started to fade.
By the end of month 4, I just thought it was another false dream.
You see, SMMA became a dream business model, and everyone and their moms thought you could do Facebook Ads for businesses and make $10000’s.
This led to an over-saturated market.
So I considered myself a failure, all hope was lost, and worst of all I was faced with a decision & a deadline.
Like most recent graduates, I got into a bad post-college rut. I only had a few choices.
I could either go back to my parents’ house and mooch off them for a while longer, I could start applying to grad school, and 9–5s (not my thing, since I wanted to make a career online), or I could take some time to figure out my next steps.
So I went for the safest option; moving back with my parents.
With no jobs lined up and an unorthodox approach toward my career, dodging my parents’ questions about my plans became a tough row to hoe.
And saying they were shocked to find out about my plans is a huge understatement. At that moment, they must have questioned their decision of bringing me into this world.
After thinking long and hard about what I wanted, I had a fire ignite inside me, and I gave myself a challenge.
I walked into my parent’s room and told them I was confident I could make this online money stuff my full-time job and that I’ll make you a deal.
If I can make $7000 this month, you will allow me to do this full-time and won’t give me any flack about the online money space.
But if I don’t make that much, I’ll stop it for good and find a job.
At first, they questioned it, but they agreed, we shook hands, and time was officially on the clock.
And all I was thinking was, how the hell am I going to make this much money this fast?
You can make a career out of TikTok without the cringe. Don’t believe me? Well, get ready to pick your jaws off the floor.
While I was trying to look up ideas to give a jump start to my dormant career, I came across this ad from an e-commerce company promoting one of their products in a UGC-style video on TikTok.
And a lightbulb hit me.
I know from SMMA that businesses will spend thousands of dollars on ads, so what if I create these unique UGC-style videos for eCommerce companies on TikTok?
I was already using the platform for hours a day, I knew what kind of videos do well on the platform, and best of all, TikTok was new at the time, so there couldn’t be a whole bunch of people doing this service.
Immediately I started emailing CEOs of different eCommerce businesses, messaging them on Instagram & Linkedin.
I sent nearly 300 messages a day without getting flagged too much. And the crazy thing was the open rates on the emails were like 80%, and I was booking calls like crazy.
In a week, I had 20 calls which is insane for any agency.
And in that month, I closed 7 clients for $1500 each.
Which totaled $9000.
I did it!!
With only a few days to spare, I achieved my goal, and I told my parents that I could make money without a full-time job. I was so proud.
But there was still 1 problem. I had no idea how to make good UGC video ads.
Landing clients didn’t mean my problems were solved, I had no expertise in making these videos, and a few of my earlier clients wanted a refund because the videos I was doing were so bad.
I knew I needed to find people who could make these videos for me cheaper than what I was being paid.
Then Upwork proved to be a ray of hope in the midst of my ailing motivation. It didn’t look like a good idea at first, but to my amazement, I got 50+ responses from those that wanted to create these videos for me and had experience doing so.
After screening, you can say that Batman found his Robin.
And Robin’s name was Raza.
I loved this guy, I offered him 10$ for one video, and he was more than happy with it. His work was an art, and my clients were delighted by the products I delivered.
I was getting 1500$ for 30 videos, and this guy was doing that work at 300$ for me, meaning $1200 of pure profit.
It was a massive win-win for me.
So by the end of the month, I had closed 7 clients for $1500 totaling $9000 in revenue but $6900 in profit.
So that’s how I made over $9000 in 30 days. But this was only the beginning. Now it was time to scale this business & make it into a $100,000 agency.
After 30 days, I am now in a position where I am earning big bucks and working with several big boys in the eCommerce industry.
I have started building good relationships with the owners, asking them for testimonials and helping me with the expansion. This created an avalanche of clients because I now had social proof and testimonials.
I signed a client every 2 days.
It was growing crazy. I was created a proper back-end system, so I didn’t need to create any of the videos; I just had other people do it for me. All I did was focus on the messaging and improving the relationships with the companies I worked with, so they would stay on retainer and keep giving me money month after month.
This plan continued to work, and I scaled that TikTok content creation Agency to over $30,000/Month.
Moreover, since every market gets saturated after some time, I decided to avoid that by having 4 agencies in different markets while continuing with drop servicing to fulfill my client’s requirements in every niche.
Although I didn’t have any skills in any of the niches, I had talented and educated people to do the work for me.
Today, I have a total of 6 agencies: 4 are doing over $10,000/Month, and 1 is doing over $25,000/Month.
