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How I first started using a laptop for something else besides games

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How I first started using a laptop for something else besides games

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Hi, This is my first Padlet ever, I have no idea how this works yet but I will just write whatever comes into my mind and I will talk about my online business journey so far.

I am 19 now and I first started working on my future in my first year of high school. At that time I was still a young boy who always liked cars. After watching hundreds of videos of cars I realized that these cars would cost more money than I would be able to make in 2 years at a normal job. That's when I started looking into way to start making some money

My uncle told me to learn how to code and since this was the first real advice I ever got I followed it without even asking. I already learned a thing or two about coding in high school but I decided to go on a different route at home and learn how to create website.

I felt in love with the process, my parents were amazed because I stopped going out and I was just staying at home on my laptop all day long learning how to code. Then COVID came and I believe that I was the person that took advantage about this period the best.

Yes, I didn't focus on high-school at all, but while all my friends were playing games during classes I was working. I had a period of almost one year and a half when I didn't talk with anyone, I was going out just to go for a run. I read over 50 books and worked for 12 hours a day.

I was getting better and better at coding. Learning HTML, CSS and Javascript to build websites. One day I even got a job and I worked with 2 guys at their startup for 3 months. I got paid $50 and the feeling that I felt when I saw that money in my bank account is very hard to explain. The first amount of money that I ever got from my own work.

In the meantime I also discovered something that changed my life for the better forever, Twitter (now called X). I discovered that platform and decided to start posting about what I'm doing there for a few months.

From there my whole life changed but we'll keep this for another padlet :)

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I stopped the last padlet when I started posting on Twitter. As I said this single thing changed my life for the better forever.

I was still working with those people at their startup and I was also working on my own coding projects in the meantime all while also posting about my journey on Twitter.

Then school started once again and I stopped working at that startup unfortunately (because I only went to school for like 2 weeks before we got back online again).

At that point I already hit 1000 followers on Twitter (which was very big for a 16 years old) so I decided to keep working on my projects and document everything on Twitter.

Crazy how after 3-4 months of doing this every single day, on March 8th I made my first ever money from Twitter which came from affiliate marketing. You're probably wondering what's affiliate marketing? Well there are a lot of guys who sell courses and other products online so what I was doing was promoting their product on my Twitter where I already had around 5000 followers and each time someone would buy from me I would get a % from the sale.

From the first ever sale I got $11 and I felt better at that time then when I made $2000 from one single person at once (we'll get to that part later on).

What happened in the next few months was even crazier.

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So in the last post I was talking about affiliate marketing. I did this for almost half a year and I was making anywhere between $700-1000 a month at 16 which was crazy.

I think that's a lot even now but at that time I had no idea what to do with that kind of money. After a few months I got the laptop I dreamed about for years, a Macbook. I stopped asking my parents for money.

Everything was going amazing, my Twitter account was growing, I was making money and life was very good.

The only problem? I couldn't control how much I was making every single month. For example during Black Friday I was making a lot more than in August for example. I tried for 6-7 months to find a way to scale this past $1000 per month and I never could.

Don't get me wrong, that amount of money was still too much for me at that age, I was able to do everything I could at that age without even looking at the price.

I even launched a few of my own products. Some ebooks with some knowledge that I thought was useful for those who were just starting in coding. That didn't work either. The problem? I had no idea how to market myself.

This is what I learned from a guy from Twitter who one day decided to get on a call with me and show me how to make even more money from my Twitter account, and he was right.

All I was doing was making others money and all I was getting was 10-20% of that, sure it was very good for a while but what came next was even better...

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I will be forever grateful for the time that guy gave me. He was making waaay more money than me and somehow still decided to help me and he did.

He told me how bad affiliate marketing is and how I could be making way more money than what I was doing now. He told me that there is a big need for web designers in the market right now and told me exactly what to do. And I listened (as you can probably see by now I never doubted what others said, I blindly followed their advice and that worked very well for me so far).

He told me to reach out to big business owners from Twitter and offer to make them a website for free at first. This was the hardest part, I was working 1 or two days on a website and I was getting paid nothing. But all of the sudden something happened.

3 months in, more than 50 websites built later, 7 of the guys that were using my websites reached out to me and told me that my website made them 10-20x more money than before. My next move? I started posting what they said on Twitter and went to sleep.

Next morning when I woke up more than 15 people messaged me because they want a website from me as well, AND THEY WERE WILLING TO PAY ME MONEY. I was beyond happy because that was the first real business lesson. If you offer a lot of value for free you will get paid a lot in the near future.

And this is how my new web design journey started. I did this for one year and a half and now I was making 3-4 times more. It was crazy. I started hiring a few friends to help me with some tasks because I literally had too much work on my hands.

This all went very well until my last year of high school started and my parents told me that now it's time to focus on school.

I was in a period when the web design business was not working that well anymore, I was not getting as many website orders as before (mainly because everyone was doing this on Twitter).

So I decided to just shut everything down for a while

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This was a really bad period for my mental health, going from working on what I loved which made me money as well to learning and doing math problems was killing me from the inside.

But because I couldn't let my passion down I was still working on my "stuff" how I love to call it from time to time. I got into so many side hustles that I sometimes forget all of them.

I started doing video editing, then cold calling for other companies to get them clients, then teaching people how to grow their Twitter account as well, and more.

I called that year my year of playing around. I got lucky enough and got into a good uni to make my parents proud and once that happened I was back at my work.

I continued working on a few jobs for other bigger and more experienced people then me. That was probably the best decision I made in the past year. Besides all the money that I made from those jobs I learned things that I couldn't find somewhere else online.

My main job for those guys was appointment setting which means talking with people over text and selling them to book a call with the company so they will eventually buy whatever product they are selling.

This is how a funnel works online:

they show some interested in one of your free products where they enter their phone number + email -> you contact them -> you convince them to book a call with you -> they buy the actual product.

For one of the companies that I worked for I brought $6500 in sales in my first month (which made me very confident, maybe too confident haha).

Once my final exams were done I decided that now I need to start a new business, something that I could scale way higher then the web design one that I had before.

I took one week of research and reading to find the answer which was starting a lead generation agency. What's that?

Well... we'll talk about this in the next padlet

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So I literally had one week left before university would start and I knew that once I move to Cluj my whole attention would be split and I won't be able to focus only on business anymore.

So I took 2-3 days off. I talked with no one besides my parents. I didn't go out and I didn't work on anything. I just read a lot of books and wrote down everything that I had in mind. Woke up on the 3rd day and got a new idea.

I have almost 45.000 followers on my Twitter account. I bet a lot of people would like to have as many followers as I do and I could probably help them to do this. Besides this I get 45.000 eye balls on everything I post. I bet a few businesses would pay me to make a post about their business on my Twitter.

And guess what? I was right with both of these things. I started sending messages to people who had only a few hundred of followers on Twitter and to small to medium business I could find on Twitter. And when I say I started I really mean it. I was doing this all day long to the point Twitter blocked me from sending messages for the next 24 hours twice.

One or two weeks later I finally made it. One business decided to pay me $500 to promote their business in the next 2 weeks and one person hired me to grow their Twitter account from 1000 followers to 10.000 for $4000 (they need to pay me $1000 each 2 weeks thought)

This was huge for me. I just recently realised how important my big Twitter audience really was and how much I can leverage it. My Twitter account go me started with this whole journey and this was the thing that saved me from the bottom as well.

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This term "Lead generation" might be new for most people but it's something very popular in the online business field. Lead generation is the process of getting potential clients for a business. So, by knowing this, we now know that a lead generation agency works with other business and brings them potential clients. But how did I bring other businesses clients at 18?

Well, while I was growing my web design agency I found this thing cold email. Cold email is sending emails to a person you never talked with before to sell them on getting on a call with you. But where do you find these people? How do you send a lot of emails daily? Well the answer is very simple: technology

There are tons of tools out on the internet that will give you a list of business with their email so you can contact them and there are also a few that will automate the process of sending those emails so you only have to worry about checking the replies.

This is what I did with my web design agency for the past 3 months to get new clients and that's when I realized that I'm good at this and that I could actually do this for other. So I made the switch. But guess what? This was not as easy as I thought...

The process of sending emails costs a lot of money, for example in order to contact 3000 people I need to pay $400, and from those 3000 people that I email I could only get 1-3 new clients, and since I was new to this I went on and wasted $1200 on this and got absolutely no clients.

I was extremely sad that I left my web design business behind because I thought that this new thing will bring me more success. With my last $700 I decided to give this thing a one more go. With $300 I paid someone I found online who was doing this for years and was getting good results to teach me how to do all this right. With the rest $400 I started emailing another 3000 people

BOOOM

2 weeks later I had 2 clients working with me. I was happier than ever, I thought that all the work I did in the past taught me something and now I'm actually good at this, but I was wrong.

My promise for these clients was to get them 5-10 meetings with potential clients each month. And guess what? I didn't

I simply couldn't bring results for them even thought I managed to get results with my own emails which got me 2 clients.

I kept asking those 2 clients for one more change for like 2 months until they both decided to let me off. This was probably the worst period of my life money wise since I started all this 3 years ago

And the crazy part? This happened just one week before I started university. So I started university with absolutely no desire to go have fun and learn new things. People were talking with me but all I was thinking about was how can I make money, how can I get back up

And guess what? Just a few days ago I did it. Let me tell you how in the next padlet

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I just realised that I went really fast through some very important phases of my journey. I had a period of 6 months when I decided to stop doing anything else and just play around with a few things, get new experience and switch the type of work I was doing a bit.

During this period I learned how to do video editing and I grew a Youtube channel to 1200 subscribers and one Instagram page to 15000 followers with a friend of mine. We were just editing short form videos for a guy who had a course and was paying us to do this for him.

This worked extremely well but this when I realised how hard it is to work with someone else under you. My friend was always lazy, he never did his part like I would tell him and my patience was getting lower and lower until one day when I decided to stop all this. I let him continue this and of course he stopped 2 weeks after doing this alone.

After this failure I decided to do something alone. When one night I was on Netflix I saw this movie called The Wolf of the Wall Street. I watched it and I felt in love. All of the sudden I decided that I want to learn how to sell on the phone. This is when I decided to look for a sales job online. Because of my current network I managed to find one just a few days later. My job was to call real estate agents from America and sell them to getting on a call with the company I was working with.

This was really interesting at first but I slowly realised that my Romanian accent was not helping me at all (at least this is what my mentor was telling me). Even though I worked there for more than 3 months I didn't book anyone and I made $0.

I learned a lot though, and maybe if I had way more patience I could've get rid of my accent with time.

Then I found another similar opportunity to this one, but this new one was through text message. And that was absolutely perfect for me. These guys hired me and in the first month I brought $6500 in revenue for their company which was crazy.

Unfortunately in the second month I realised that they don't have any more leads that I can contact so there was no other opportunity for me to make more money and this is why I ended up quiting.

These were 3 of the things I did those 6 months of me playing around. I did get a lot of experience from all these but I didn't make as much money as I wanted so I decided to get back to my own thing, which was Twitter and web design at that time.

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Now that I've talked about my whole journey from the past 3 years I want to share some of my future plans as well. I know that they say that you need to keep your plans secret but I hope that only a few people will end up seeing this and by now I already started considering this a journal haha.

So right now I'm working with 1 client which I'm helping to grow on Twitter + one business who I'm promoting. But of course besides this I got a few more opportunities that are on my plate, still have no idea which will end up actually happening but some of them are really important and big.

Something that I would like to do in the close future for a few months is work on an online job under someone who has way more experience than me so I can both make money and learn new things. Why? Because what I realised lately is that I don't really know how to run an online business, or a business in general. I'm only 19 at the end of the day and everything I know was learned from online or from reading books. I don't have parents, friends, relatives who ever thought me anything about business so I did all this by myself.

This is why I think that working under someone who's been in this field for years would be very beneficial for me. I don't want to lie and say that I don't care about the money because of course I want to get paid while doing this because I still have a lot of experience in the back that the average 19 years old doesn't have and I think it's fair to ask for more. The plan is to work on this for 6-12 months, stack some money and experience and then get another 6-12 months when I can afford to now make any money and just focus on growing a business.

Right now I have a few more Twitter clients who are on the edge of hiring me. I also have one job opportunity at a very interesting agency who builds communities online. In the online space you get on a calls and people tell you "we'll talk" so you never know if something is for real until you got money in your bank account really.

Anyway whatever happens I'm confident that I will be able to find something that will work for me in the near future and probably come back to this padlet after a few years and laugh at it haha.

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I know a lot of people say that they wouldn't change anything in their whole journey or life but this is not the case for me. I would change a few things from my journey and here I will just talk about them, to remind myself of all the mistakes I made.

1. I would choose one business model, skill, niche and just stick with it. I know I was young and I wanted to see how everything works but that got me nowhere really. I would've been better off if I just chose something and stick with it.

2. Be more careful who I get as friends. After I started making some money I got comfortable and I started hanging out with people who were just bringing me down. Gambling, alcohol, clubs, etc. These things ate my money and mind like crazy. I literally had 6 months of just doing this and going from working 10 hours a day to working only for like 1-2 hours and just chasing some quick money so I could go have fun again.

3. Don't be so niche and naive. I did this both with my friends and people I worked with in the past online. When I was making a lot of money I would always help those around me, buying them drinks, some food, smokes, etc. I thought I would help them by doing this and that they would help me as well sometime. But that never happened. When I had 0 money in my bank account no one ever paid for my coffee, or my uber, or bought me a drink in the club. This is what I realised just a few weeks ago and now that I have some money again I want to change and stop being so nice to those who don't really deserve it. But this also happened with people I worked with online. I got scammed a lot of times from people who didn't pay me for my work, or stopped paying me for something after a months with no further notice.

I think these are the 3 biggest mistakes I made in my journey, and if I could somehow go back in life at 15, these are the first 3 things I would tell my younger self.