we're going to talk about the ethos of the digital oil wells really looking at why digital oil wells are what Kevin and I both think are the best businesses on the planet at this point in time and to do so we'll probably dig into our stories a little bit so first Kevin why don't you share your story a little bit through starting your businesses online the different things that you've done and how you came on this digital oil well idea yeah so um well it's uh It's tricky because you know um I've been doing this for quite a while so I started my first internet business in 1997 and so I don't necessarily think I have to go all the way back to there um because you know people were mailing me checks at that point so I don't know that some of it is is there there are certain relevant things but I think for for this conversation I can sort of maybe just hit the high points and then get to the point of the realization that I had so for several years I did a lot of different things testing this this um new thing that we had called the internet at the time and I was doing all sorts of different things from service type stuff where I was installing uh intranets and back-ends for businesses to lead generation to um e-commerce uh I even actually tried to build YouTube back in 1998 which was a massive failure uh but story for another time um but the big idea uh came to me so so in the early 2000s like 2003 and four I had gotten into e-commerce and was selling um a bunch of different things had lots of different sites that I built a couple of them were pretty successful one was about airsoft guns which were a big thing back then and I actually had the number one airsoft gun on website e-commerce site online at that point and that led me into a partnership with some guys to do a uh uh and I guess it would be an agency we were we were running uh paid traffic and doing SEO for big e-commerce friends and I mean uh companies like Swiss Army Patagonia people like that we were doing um you know it's a lot sometimes it was contract work sometimes it was obtainer work that was ongoing uh different things but um what I figured out I did that for about a year and a half and I hated it I absolutely I mean these are as good clients as anyone could ever hope to have right I mean you know you definitely these are like the the feather in your cap type clients that people would dream of having but what I found myself doing was being on the phone all the time time and and you know I was on sales calls I was on delivery calls up you know I was doing all this sort of stuff and after about a year and a half of it I finally um just decided I'd had enough and I quit and I gave my partners my part of the business and um and so luckily I had some money in the bank and had some time to sort of think about what I really wanted to build um up until then I had sort of just you know curiosity would lead me down a rabbit hole which would lead me to building an e-commerce brand you know and and and uh and I was good at it and I was good at traffic I was figuring you know I've got sort of this ability to to go deep down a rabbit hole very quickly and and figure out sort of the little nuanced things that make something work and so I learned how to do Google AdWords really well and had already spent a bunch of money my first um my first seven figure year online was in 2003.
And I've done seven figures or better every year since then um but what I came to and this was in 2006 was the realization that I could take this thing that was like the greatest opportunity of my lifetime and turn it into just a traffic source for a crappy job you know I could I could jobify the internet and I realized I didn't want to do that you know like the this this the freedom and the creativity that you're afforded with the with this new medium that we had it it just clicked to me that I was only using like one percent of the available uh world that that was there for me and so I sort of took about a six months sabbatical and just started thinking and and you know uh trying to think about okay what's the pros and cons of this business model and this one and this one and this one and um and then one day I was in the um bookstore and I happened to walk past a section of the bookstore and saw some books there and it gave me an idea for a product so and it was a digital product but it wasn't tied to like me being the face of it which I didn't really want to do I didn't want to Guru type business um and I and it it just spurred this you know um new way of thinking about okay I can do this and build this and have me not be on the hook to be the brand but but also not have to be like a physical products business which was difficult because the cost of goods sold was I was an I was what's called an authorized seller I don't know if they still do it that way but back then I was an authorized seller so I only made 35 of the sale price of say an airsoft guns so if it was 100 bucks I only had 35 dollars to play with which made pay-per-click very difficult so long story short not possible at this point I guess um I uh I I started playing around with this took me several months to crack it but I got it cracked and I built a business that was doing six figures in sales a month and took about an hour a day of my time to manage and then eventually got it down to where it was taking you know about an hour a week and uh so for eight years I had a seven figure a year business that you know it didn't make me Rich but I put 30 to 40 Grand a month profit into my bank account net net net net after everything and um and got to live my life and didn't have to deal with any of the other stuff you know didn't have client calls or sales calls or any of that junk so and it's the I guess one of the big ideas or if I was to try to themify this it's like okay so we're going to take time to build businesses online okay that's just obviously that's what we're doing um I can create just about anything right like I literally can go build anything I want to you even thought about doing like a YouTube type alternative you know Big Ideas small ideas which we just have a plethora of ideas but if we're going to put in the time and the energy to build something why not build something that has like maximum amounts of Leverage and minimum amounts of like inputs like ongoing inputs required and or ongoing inputs from you required right like like being the figurehead or being the person on the brand and so if you're going to take all the time it's front loaded to build any type of business online might as well have really good margins which is kind of why you went digital on this one and something where you don't necessarily need to be uh hitting the feeder bar for 17 hours a day hitting the phones for 17 hours a day and yet you can still realize similar or better worse moderate in between gains um but just you know uh life-altering types of income money is that kind of the gist of it yeah and and you know at the time I didn't really have all of this uh codified in my head right I I didn't have it it all figured out but what I did know was what I didn't want that I was pretty clear and and so so when I started my internet business I I uh in 97 I just quit bare Sterns and um that job you know I was making good money like 250k a year and um for a 25 year old you know that's pretty good when when 250k met something that's right and um and so um the the interesting part in my Revelation about it like I quit a job where I was on the phone all the time and then you know here I was eight years later I created a job where I was on the phone all the time and I hated being on the phone when I was at Bear Stearns that was you know part of the hassle of it right and and so I I think we sort of can easily fall into these patterns that are very bad especially when the money might be a short it might be a shorter path to the money but the the thing that I that came to realize is that um there's a big difference between like linear earnings and and something that is more of uh um you know exponential or logarithmic or you know like something that you can put in a smaller amount of work on the grand scheme it might be a lot at first compared to what you're making but over time it becomes a very little amount and then and it and it continues to make sales for years years and years down the road right without you having to continue to put in singular life units to it like one life unit per you know x amount of dollars that that I figured out that sucks right and it's so going from Trading dollars for hours to literally creating and selling slash marketing assets right building assets essentially because an asset would have a sales and a marketing component because that asset can be uh grown by other people it can theoretically you know in a digitally deliverable thing it could scale a thousand sales a day 10 000 sales a day the technology doesn't really change that much uh with what we're working at so when I when my wife and I really started to gain Traction in our first business so we started that blog together um in 2009 really started to gain traction with the organic marketing the search engine optimization stuff um a few years later and I was posting on social media uh just screenshots of our analytics our month over month growth you know the the orange line and the blue line and people were like hey can you show me how to do this and at the time I hadn't really cracked the the direct response marketing code with our brand with what my wife and I were building so all I kind of had were vanity metrics um and I didn't really understand how to really really craft offers all the digital oil well stuff that everyone's learning in this course I didn't have those things dialed and I got all this out hey miles can you help me I got a coffee business I'd love to get more traffic on my website or I need a WordPress website and I was broke and I was like yeah I'll do it so I spent about three years kind of growing a pseudo WordPress slash local marketing agency and I hated it like passionately it was painful um scope creep uh clients decide that oh yeah by the way I want it this way at the 11th hour and they expect for no additional change in fees to totally rework the project and and I realized ultimately that I had replaced a boss from a corporation with a boss from a client and I was I was absolutely right exactly 100 and and and and I would say even less intelligent bosses because they didn't understand my realm like at least my boss and the corporation kind of understood what I was doing but but these folks they really didn't understand the complexities um and it was challenging so I did keep those plates spinning because um it covered my lifestyle and helped me pay off my student loans which I had fifty thousand dollars in student loan debt but while doing that I discovered what I like to call the mailbox money approach the multiple streams of income approach where my wife and I were then able to create and we can we can use all kinds of different language patterns and through through all these videos we will reference them differently right is it just a funnel is it one front end funnel that has a series well yeah it kind of is is that a standalone asset yes is it a totally separate brand sometimes but but sometimes it's not sometimes it just lives within the same brand and ultimately we my wife and I started really focusing on growing an email list sending offers to that email list and building little front-end funnels that allowed us to grow the email list profitably and when we put those things together in my wife's business Bingo everything has just absolutely rocketed from there and now we have uh physical products we've got uh membership recurring monthly fees and so so once we've branched out from there and I think what I did is I I um I drank the Kool-Aid of of direct response marketing and this kind of leveraged business that allowed me to make a thousand sales from a couple of emails um so we just tested a new offer recently we sent one email out and it did about 6 500 in 24 hours and that was a test right like huh I wonder if this is gonna work it seems like our people would like that we send it out Bingo an extra six grand while we were out goofing off and this leveraged income is is where we're guiding you to right this is the goal is to get everyone there um so you've mentioned your your digital business that you created and help me with the timeline because you've got your your physical business the the golf The Hustler secret was that before the Hustler secret or what is the the organization of those two on the timeline those businesses first again so Hustler's secret was already gone and was was doing fine and was selling um uh the I hadn't really automated it at that point and so um you were literally filling the cans and you were literally mixing in the green color you were doing all of the physical work here's uh here's the actual thing and uh there's the stuff so um uh yeah so how it was working was um I had uh um uh an assistant named amp and she uh was actually uh the one filling the cans and she ended up quitting actually uh about a year later because she's like my hands will never be dry again they're too moisturized she's like I can't fill any more cans we were selling you know uh 10 20 cans a day and and you know that's a lot of Vaseline so and there's Deep dive videos on these products like we're gonna we're gonna go into this more but it's just just from that broader level of the evolution right so trading dollars for hours doing client work which is essentially like a job it's a fast way out of the traditional job but it's just literally replacing it's it's the same type of income right it's the same actual earned income then you went into the physical products and the physical products they were selling it worked it was a unique thing but it required all of this fulfillment the creation the the and there's ways to automate that stuff that we obviously and we will get into the Weeds on that because I have some physical products that we sell very very regularly they're 100 fulfilled by other companies but then really shifting into the digital world to that it's the most freeing business model there is and I want to kind of ask you a leading question and hopefully if not I'll grab the Rings and I will point us in the direction did the experiences build on each other was the fact that you you did break out on your own to do the non-scalable work in the beginning to then test the the e-commerce and the other worlds of this did all of what you learned and what you did lead you to that kind of breakthrough of the most free type of income of course yeah so the the big idea was like when I quit bear Stearns I was uh so we were taking a bunch of companies public right and so um you know like big companies like Netscape which people watching this might not even know who that was but they were a big deal at the time they were the first browser um all the way to some like really dumb company ideas and I met some of these guys and I'm like yeah what am I doing here on the phone call calling old dudes in Missouri when you know I went to Georgia Tech I'm a nerd at heart the the like my Industrial Revolution is happening here and I'm missing out on it being stuck in this office so so I didn't have a plan of like what I was going to do when I started I just knew that I had to jump in I knew I had to like this was this was happening and I was going to miss it if I didn't do it and so um so so I so there was a period of Discovery there still is right but but especially back then there was a period of Discovery like oh what about this what about this and to your point about direct response you know I started studying all the great uh direct response copywriters the direct mail guys all the you know I was building I had sales from being on the phone for 10 hours a day but I didn't have marketing skills right and so I started learning marketing skills and I also started testing business models and trying things and uh fell into some by accident like lead generation you know my wife is a lawyer and had her own law firm and so I was trying to to get leads for her Law Firm which they would never call um and uh and so you know I just discovered a lot of different things and some of the the things were better than others uh like you know the e-commerce stuff was great but but with higher ticket selling things the customers had lots of questions and there were you know and this was early on before a lot of the Outsourcing stuff was available that's available today as far as like hiring people 24 7 demand the the chat and questions email and all that sort of stuff so a lot of it just sort of fell to us but but to your question yes like like you know I never would have learned AdWords if it weren't for you know some of these other businesses I never would have learned SEO I never would have you know like we were doing SEO before because there was there was no paper plate right so so you had to try to do it and we didn't call it SEO we just were trying to get visitors you know so I was doing I was doing everything I you know I was a spammer spent like the best traffic source for a long time was spam I mean like sending bulk unsolicited emails stuff you know so so you just learn all these things as you go and and Technology makes it easier is what would happen like we were working so hard uh doing all this stuff like keyword stuffing and and all this stuff to try to get our stuff to come up to the top at like you know hotbot and all these old Alta Vista and all these old search engines and then all of a sudden we found a one a buddy told me about it called go to where you could pay to be at the top and that was like huh you know I pay a nickel to be at the top yes please I'd rather do that than work for three weeks to do it um so all the skills stacked for sure and and you also or I also learned the things I didn't like during that period of time like okay well I don't really like this I do like this I want more of this or whatever you know and uh and so it was it was a it was a fun time in a lot of ways to be doing it because there were like you know like terms of service for most of these companies weren't even hardly written you know so you could try everything you know right and it still is I think we're still in that age like I do believe the internet's still in its infancy and although attention shifts around in different places the big the big idea that that I'm really wanting to kind of like repeat for the viewer is that this is a process it's a process that often starts with unscalable things it's a process that forces us to build new skills through testing all kinds of different ideas and then we get lots and lots of feedback and some of that feedback is going to be like holy [ __ ] I made a sale right like that's some of the feedback and then some of the other feedback is like I if I have to do another phone call like this I'm done like in fact I'm just done like so some of the feedback is kind of like personal emotional what am I willing to do and then the other feedback is you know in that direct response sense um did they click on my ad did they click on my buy button did they complete my checkout page can I actually get this thing fulfilled do I actually want to create skin care or skin cream or physical products or do I want to do digital products so it's it's a process and it's there's points on the path even working in fun even in this like in the world that it's dialed right the digital products world with some great ads running through a great proven funnel there's still stuff in it that's a pain in the ass that we have to get involved in you lose a teammate oh man they did all kinds of stuff negative a higher like there's it's never perfect the the idea of true like passive income you do nothing forever you're swinging a hammock for you know just drinking my ties that's kind of a lie but we can get you 80 90 of the way there we can get you to build we can get you to build out systems and products but it's going to take a lot of testing for you to see what are you good at for you to take time to build the skills what are you willing to do what are you not willing to do and it's out of that process it's a process that will get you to where you want to be and as Kevin just said he really enjoyed the process it was the wild west and I'm gonna tell you right now goddamn YouTube ads are the wild freaking West like Facebook ads still great right now but like like it's not the wild west that it was in 2016.
But YouTube ads is 100 the wild west Tick Tock ads um I mean we've got Snapchat ads are like there's there's all these ad products out there there's all these ways out there to capture to get your message in front of your best audience super quick super easy and it's a game it's a puzzle do these people want this thing if I communicate it like this if I present it this way are they going to take action on this thing and once you find out one of these little systems that starts to generate sales and it takes very little amount of your time and that thing's spitting out a few sales a day a dozen sales a day whatever it is we go build more of them and so like Kevin and I are addicted to creating these things I have in the works right now with software products I'm not a coder by any stretch of the imagination um physical products I'm working on a free plus shipping offer just because I think it would be fun to put it together it's a total pain in the ass to deal with all of the logistics around this but I got a hunch that if this thing clicks off it's going to absolutely explode and this is in addition to the hundreds of digital things that I'm selling in in several different markets um so so with that idea Kevin what are like the core if you were to sum up like so as as digital wildcatters and for those who don't know what a Wildcatter is it's someone who goes around the oil fields and works on the oil fields so as as someone working in the digital oil wells World um what do you think the core kind of like like what are the core mindset shifts what are the core things they're going to need to keep in mind to sustain um momentum through through kind of the process so I would say the first thing to think about is or that I always think about is that I I think about like I want to if I'm going to build this thing can I build it in a way to where my life so I think of things in life units okay so this is maybe useful to to think about so you know the thing that you've only got a finite amount of of is life units right and and you have to divvy those up however you will like some people um want to watch college football for 12 hours on Saturdays and I don't judge them for that but I don't want to use my life units that way right I would you know I've got too much other stuff that I'm trying to do than than to do that some people use their live units to sit in a cubicle and nobody really wants to do that but they need money to pay a rent or or the bills or whatever so they have to trade their life units for this amount of money that someone's willing to pay them to do it so so so what I found like I said a few minutes ago is that I had taken one job that you know traded my life units for a certain amount of money and through the course of eight years had found myself back into a very similar situation and it and it made me think okay I want to build something that can go from one to one life units to one to infinite life units like and and and the truth is is that's the way like this thing right here I think I I think it was 2005 when I wrote the sales letter for this and made the first sales and it sells every month to this day almost every day it sells and I've never changed the sales letter I haven't you know I I like it's it's the same and so those those life units were spent 16 years ago and now it will make me 50 bucks when somebody buys it and that is the first thing I would say for my like if you're going to do Commandments of of a digital oil well it's like one to infinite is the first thing or at least at least approaching infinite right the name of my company that all my businesses are in is infinite Roi infinite return on investment investment of time investment of energy of a focus of money any of those things and and that's the idea here the first idea I think is that if you're thinking of your life units even if you have to invest 50 of them or 100 or 200 to get it started if if it runs for 10 years it it that that starts to look like nothing right and that's the big that's the first big idea I agree uh getting leverage on yourself right like out of that trading dollar for hours and getting into something that's that's scalable is a kind of a buzzword if you will in the industry of it's front loaded it's it's there's a lot of testing there's the skills there's learning the copywriting and ultimately it's testing does the marketplace value this thing do they want it like it's not about asking me or Kevin like hey what do you think about this idea like I don't know what does the market think about that idea so what one thing I would like to add and to kind of like layer on here in addition is the idea of becoming a merchant right like people buy things all day every day the economy that is Flowing around each and every one of us is I mean it's it's trillions of dollars or just just flowing back and forth and exchanging hands at all times and becoming the kind of person that not just is at that service level right like oh I'll give you hours to do this thing that you don't want to do right not just trading that income type but the leveraged model of I'm going to offer this thing and it can be B2B and even in a B2B scenario still another human on the other side if you're selling to a corporation there's actually one person there who's going to type in the credit card or who's actually going to pay for the item so we're always selling to another person and it's thinking in this world and thinking through the terms of like man what can I create what can I offer to other people that they're going to Value enough to want to purchase and or what are they already buying that I can just sell them uh and we're gonna talk more about this at many levels right the idea of selling status the idea of selling um you know usefulness you utility value and some blend in between the two there but really just looking at the world in terms of being a merchant and for some people it often starts as can I just go buy seven or eight or nine of these things can I sell these things can I sell them on Etsy can I sell maybe can I can I just sell something can I act as a middle person and I think one of the the oldest ways to build wealth wealth in our world and I'm talking about tens of thousands of years is buying things and selling things right and people are so much more willing to to pay money for physical things like we we just understand the exchange like oh hairbrush nine dollars that's a good value I need a hairbrush I actually don't need a hairbrush but like that's what I'm saying like it becomes an easy value and sometimes getting into the realm of the expert kind of courses that a lot of us are very familiar with seeing it can become more difficult to sell these abstractions of ideas it requires a lot more skills uh maybe a lot more trust but it's it's a gigantic scale and all of these are potentially leverageable in a major way with some of the Fulfillment companies out there and the technologies that we have available to us today but it's looking around the world as a merchant which means and I guarantee you do this too I'm always paying attention to what people are selling so I'll go to a farmer's market I love getting groceries and vegetables and fruits from the farmers market and I am paying attention and there's this dude who makes these super high-end mushrooms and I buy shiitake mushrooms from him for like 17 a pound and they grow out of these really awkward bags he converted his basement into a mushroom thing and I love it I love finding these kinds of people um there's a kid at one he made these magnet things you slid on your mattress and it helped you sleep better because you got the magnetic force of the earth I bought two of them 190 each I'm in because he was hustling right and I'm observing what are the offers what are people making and I just want to make this point really clear to people again like I'm not saying that the goal the end goal is to set up a booth at your local farmers market for some of you it may be but golly goodness is that a great place to go test your ideas sometimes we have to get that deep into the mud of hand-to-hand interacting with people are you interested in buying this thing yes or no why why not those are the things that we can learn sometimes that will turn into the sales letter that will turn into the funnel that becomes hyper scalable not saying it's required but just looking through the world in terms of of offers and products and thinking like a merchant and observing what's going on with selling and why certain things are selling when they're selling it shifts your brain into really like CEO like being a CEO of your own business of your own brand and and something happens we just the world opens up and you see opportunity everywhere and I know you feel this way and I feel this way as I look around like I have to constantly restrain myself from taking on new projects because there are a million ideas floating around absolutely everywhere and it's the execution that makes it work because I know on those million dollar ideas I'm like oh I could go there but it's front loaded it's going to take a lot of testing I don't know the market I don't have to write new sales letter I'll have to figure out there's all these things am I willing to do this back to the lifestyle which is something you talked about right for me right now with my lifestyle the amount of income I'm earning how much time is costing I love the lifestyle I've created and that's where we're here to help you guys get there sometimes it's front loaded sometimes it takes more work up front it's more effort it's kind of feels like a pain in the ass it's a challenge because we're doing a lot of testing to see if they want but when it unlocks that's the infinite side of infinite Roi and we want to get you there and everybody wants to be there everybody's like I want that it's like cool we're going to lay the path out for you and the path is going to be manual the path is going to be can you go get a few of them and sell them do you really quickly want to share a bit about Trey Llewellyn and how because he was he just blew up some products in the gun space some funnels in the uh I call them the gun nut World um do you want to share a little bit about like the early early start and how he kind of like tested those ideas in the early days yeah so well before I get to that one one of the things I'll mention about what you were saying is um I think you've become a good noticer that's that's the way I describe it like I um you know it's easy to go through your life and not ever really pay attention to what's happening around you especially if you're not sort of in the market for a thing and um you know I talk to my kids uh we do a thing called unschooling with our kids and um I talk to them about not just being a consumer of things but being thinking like a producer like like not just a consumer of content but think like okay that guy who did that video he planned it he he thought it through like there you know there's there's a lot that goes into all the things that we it's so easy to just become like a vegetable and just like have things coming in and and you and and I think when you get when when you're like that you you're not it sort of dulls your noticing abilities whereas I think when you are sort of on the other side of it you're always sort of looking from behind the curtain you know like you said there's opportunity like for someone to be in the United States I mean I know there's places in the world where there's less opportunity but but to be in a first world country like this with the freedoms that we have I mean it's it's incredible I you know I I can't imagine there that there was ever a better time to be alive than right now you know like so so so like you're saying about the farmer's market and some of those things I mean it's incredible that people are making fortunes selling soap no I mean like like just or or mushrooms or you know weird you know Chinese baby names I mean like that there's a million of these ways that people are making like more money than than a brain surgeon makes I mean it's just it's mind-body way a better lifestyle and a higher quality of life and probably way higher up on the happiness index compared to a brain surgeon right if you look at the difference on doctors and lawyers it ain't it ain't party um to say the least well and and you don't have to give up you know seven to ten years of your life to be you know worthy to practice your career either you know it's like you can have a good idea there so there's there's um I'll mention names but there's um somebody that I know of who you know started a a it's a course that they're selling and they've gone from zero to millions of dollars in sales per month in less than a year think about that like you can go from being just a regular dude to a millionaire a multi-millionaire in one year's time these days now I'm not I'm not saying that to to blow smoke and be like Grant Cardone and all these bsers that you know are I'm naming names I know that probably makes miles cringe but um there's a bunch of guys that I feel like are con artists out in the world and that's the farthest thing from what I believe in but there is the reason that con artists um have the ability to take people's money is because there's usually a lot of truths and what they're saying but they just don't have the goods to deliver the final thing of it but but like there's incredible opportunity today and being being a good noticer is is one of the things that happens when your mindset shifts to to that being a merchant type idea that you're talking about because like the two to make 20 grand a month to to make you know I don't know exactly what a brain surgeon makes 250k a year that's like a that's a high level career that's a career that you paid six figures in college loans to to get right so 20K a month at a piece of paper and within an hour to have 50 different ways that you could be making 20 grand a month within three months I mean not not seven years not ten years not 200 000 of you know Harvard Education or whatever but but just with some elbow grease and the ability and willingness to learn and test and try things and take measured risk um and go for it you know it's it's there's never been a time like this and so that's the cool part totally and I want to just throw in there so you have the copywriting skills and you know how to craft an offer and I think that's why you look at that list and you're like I could do any one of those in a few months for for the folks listening who are who are just here with us joining kind of embarking on this journey their journey is probably a little longer because you've got to build those copy skills you got to build the skill of being able to craft an offer that an audience is willing to pull out their credit card and buy and and that might be front loaded but once you unlock that it's a skill and that skill is with you for the rest of your life and that's where you come from this place of confidence and I feel it too I'm not like I literally have to limit the number of things I go into because it just it is I just overwhelm my I'm working 78 hours a week and I'm I'm semi-retired like what am I doing here um it's back to the lifestyle idea but once those skills are unlocked and I kind of put it all under that direct response marketing World crafting an offer getting that offer in front of people in a way that that draws them in and tapping into a couple of these psychological things like like the the status goal type thing the the world opens up from there um if we could so uh let me say one thing about operating skills and things so I was I was alluding the con guys and stuff like that a minute ago I think that's one of the places where the con happens just to be real with you is they make it sound like you don't have to do the work to attain skills so so to admit to to make the sale to get you to take your thousand dollars and make it their thousand dollars they make more sales if they take away the actual hard part which is the skill development like like if if there's any piece of this that is the thing that will give you security it's not having a digital oil well it's having the skill that it takes to make a digital oh well and that is the and then being able to stack two or three or four skills on top of each other like if you can write copy and you can run traffic and you can probably um you know understand a conversion path or funnel or whatever they call like you don't have to be great at this or or you don't have to be like world class at any one of these streets to have a business but you've got to be probably if you have to do any like writing great copy and understanding the psychology behind a sale is is probably the most important and then being able to run some simple campaigns is is probably next and then third is is just have a simple way to move them through the process so if if you can do the work to to learn a few skills like that then you have security right I mean like that say Facebook ads go away forever then okay you can just move to YouTube so you just go away forever okay you can start mailing people I mean like you have the thing the intangible thing that nobody can take away from you and that is I would say the if there's anything that is probably the most valuable nugget it is having the skills to create these things and and then that is where you're able to build ultimate freedom 100 degree and that that's really what they're getting what what you're getting as you go through this is is the understanding the skills and I think the mental models right um through these conversations with Kevin and I you're going to really understand how we see the world because we you know successful uh internet marketers and internet entrepreneurs who do seven figures per year each um and have for for a time you've been doing that for significant longer than I have like we have a mental model we have a way that we look at the world we have a way that we look at platforms we have a way that we look at things that allows us to see this opportunity that's right there it's in front of everybody it's in front of seven and a half billion people and there's a real real small handful of people and there's a way of looking at it and thinking about it and then ultimately testing Upon Our assumptions when we kind of get to the point like man that would be fun that would work like I'm going to try this like this just it seems like a really cool offer boom when that locks it and that's what's going to happen through following through on this course um and I did I dropped I kind of threw the tray idea out there I'm going to give like a 60 second on top of that just and I'd like you to fill in if you wouldn't mind anything I miss but he scaled some funnels that were essentially um products that gun users love and he ran a lot of traffic on Facebook but if I'm correct he went to Walmart if I'm learning if I know the story correctly he went to Walmart at first and literally bought all the tar I think it was like targets and Gun oil were the first things he tested and the big point when I it's irrelevant the the the niche or anything the dude went to Walmart and he bought things off of the shelves and then he went to his house and he sat down in front of his laptop and he wrote freaking sales letters form and he crafted offers around them he crafted free plus shipping offers and then he crafted upsell offers and he started playing with these pieces they're sitting on the shelves at Walmart is there a better place to buy them for higher Roi of course there is that's not the point the point is he just literally went in and he's like okay groups of people online are like nuts about this and and there's golf nuts and there's fishy like there's knitting nuts so like I don't I use the term nut lovingly um we're marketing nuts and so so he's like okay there's an obsessive purchasing audience who loves this kind of stuff let me just go to Walmart where they sell cheap stuff what kind of stuff might those people buy I don't even know if he had experience and he's like okay well I'll try these I'll try some of these and let me go see what I can create and I don't know exactly how far he scaled it I believe he I mean I know for a fact of seven I I think maybe he made it the eight figures um that that's the whole that's the main point and I think you might know more or you might be able to fill in a few details but like the dude rearranged the resources that were around in his world he went and got things from a place that sells stuff and he typed words on a page and then he took people through ads from Facebook to that page that he created to sell stuff that he went and got somewhere else it clicked he scaled Boom Like Magic happened and ultimately it's that kind of resourcefulness that that linked together with those skills crafting an offer and writing the sales page and a whole bunch of testing I'm obviously 60 seconds of maybe a year or more of work it opened up an absolute world for the dude well what yeah what he what he did is he committed to to testing a new um uh funnel is what they would call then um uh this was like at the beginning of the click funnels um thing but he committed to testing a new one each week and so every week he would put up a new offer and so he started you know you can't Source all these products from China that fast so essentially he just said okay but can I sell one you know I can go to Walmart and buy it and lose money on it and ship it out you know but if somebody wants it I know okay this is worth me spending more time on and so it's sort of this micro you know it's like What About Bob you know baby steps to the kitchen baby steps to the curb you know it you just gotta take those look so sometimes it it feels like such a big project that it just stops you before you even start versus being able to just get validation of the first piece and then if you can validate that then you can move just the baby steps to the next piece and so on and so forth and he did from those baby steps he was able to um you know go up to eight figures in sales and his stuff and that's you know that's another skill set that you know I can tell you this for my personal perspective I've never wanted to have an eight-figure business um because you end up with a bunch of people in a building that want to talk to you and and have done and HRS and all that kind of stuff and I don't you know so I I I've got businesses that I purposely make less sales on because I have made them run on autopilot without people right I could I could sell more if I wanted to put people in the process but I don't want that but then you're a manager that's right and then you have to deal with that and that that's it's okay so it's like a hire a manager and then that manager costs money so it reduces your profit margins and then you're responsible for so many more people and it's like heavy it starts to me personally starts to get heavy it's like okay this is not like I can't just say I want to go to Hawaii for a month um because people expect me to you know I don't know be in the office or something and I don't want that now there's there's definitely a cur there's an arc to it and at some point it it becomes uh it becomes a weight uh and what we want to help people get to is that sweet spot that works for their lifestyle to maximize the time Freedom they have in the future from putting in the minimal number of time units in the present right it's front loaded but once you get there it opens up from there and I think to be honest uh from my perspective it's just more fun to to play Observer to go find new ways to synthesize what's working in different areas and to craft new offers for my same audience it's so much easier that I would rather we and that's what my wife and I do that's what we we're offer creators we we create lots of content lots of value to build a list of people who enjoy us but from there it's what gets them on the list well that's the offer the lead magnet offer well what happens after that well that's the one-time offer what happens that's the upsell we wrote I wrote a one-click upsell video sales letter um six years ago still running it today still converts 35 33 38 of traffic by this thing and it just it's something we spent a few weeks to dial that in and it just pays over and over and over and over and over and that's what we're helping people get with today um at this point let me can I say one thing about that so one of the ethos things about oil wells versus the other analogy that is that you know comes to mind as a gold mine right is that oil wants out of the ground and gold wants to go to the bottom to the Bedrock I like to watch this show called Gold Rush and like scaling your business to eight figures where you've got to put 30 people in a room somewhere talking to each other and passing their TPS reports and doing all their stuff that feels like a gold mine you know it like at a gold mine you've got guys on the front end loaders and guys in the wash plants and guys in the excavators and and it's like this everybody's running around all the time yeah breaks and so everybody says yeah and and so it's like it takes a lot of people and a lot of fuel and all this stuff to run the gold mine because that gold is trying to get away from whereas an oil well when when you get a gusher you cap it off and you put the pump on it you hook it to the pipeline and then you just you just leave it you know and I found that uh that business that I alluded to earlier where I started in the uh discovered it in the bookstore I I I I'm not so I want to be clear I I haven't discovered all this stuff because I'm perfect and it just came to me I discovered it all because I screwed it all up right uh I kept making the mistakes and so like this business was doing about 150 Grand a month in sales and I was putting at that time probably 50 000 a month in my bank account after expenses and refunds and taxes and everything every ads and all that and uh and there was just more and more um clicks to be bought and so I kept scaling it up and what I figured out eventually after doing all the mistakes is that at a point of about 140 Grand a month it will run on autopilot without me ever touching it I got one employee a girl in Atlanta who answers emails and gives refunds and that's it and and I I log in every morning to my AdWords account to my stripe account into my bank account and I make sure all three did what they were supposed to do yesterday that takes about 10 minutes 15 minutes max once every three or four years something gets out of whack and I gotta like spend a week fixing it but that's it whereas when I when I scaled the business from 150 up to 250 Grand then I had problems with my merchant account right and then I had to pause my ads and then when I pause my ads because I couldn't take payments and I started my ads back up my ads didn't work as good anymore because they were they were rolling and were just going perfectly and had built all this momentum over six months or so and I just stopped the locomotive and it had to start back up and so I end up you know my costs for sale goes way up and I'm not profitable and you know and so it was all this stuff just because I wanted to push the machine Beyond where it wanted to run broke the wash Plant that's right I and and and so so what I found is that I would much rather run it at 120 to 140 Grand a month and just put that 40 Grand a month in the bank and do two hours of work a week just monitoring it and and then build something else versus it's not my only good idea right if it was my only good idea I ever had then yeah I'd probably keep working on it and trying to make it do more but because it's not my only good idea I can just set that thing on autopilot and then build out my next good idea and leave that alone right so thankfully now I haven't had to touch my ads for that since 2011.
so that feels pretty good you know it's like you just let it run right and and so it took me um about a year and a half of breaking it to figure out like going through three Merchant accounts and two like shutting down two AdWords accounts you know like like from doing stupid stuff and like because because your AdWords account like if they um you know but well it's beyond the scope of all this but but suffice it to say starting and stopping starting and stopping starting and stopping is not a problem no way no yeah yeah and so what where you get where you get these things really going is where you get this thing sort of just cruising on its own yeah and coming and you don't have to mess with it and so that is one of the things I would say is is is move it up to where it runs well and then move on and build another one well so it's and the oil I love the analogy of the oil right so it's there is pressure built up uh under the ground inside of this pocket of oil there's pressure there and Jet Clampett goes and shoots after the rabbit and the bullet releases the pressure so what I said earlier is that there is you know this trillions of dollars or exchanging hands each and every day in this massive economy that is the thing that there's pressure in okay there's built up pressure within the economy and what we do as wildcatters as digital oil well Builders is we find ways to tap right to prick into that with an offer and obviously there's pieces the offers the ad the thing the sales all those little bits and pieces that we'll get into in Greater depth but the big picture is the important part the pressure is there the desire to buy a thing or a result or an outcome or status is already there within the audience within the marketplace and we go tap into that and once we tap into that it flows now to get an oil well so we got one oil while we build the pump we're running it right if you attempt to accelerate the rate at which you're getting the oil out beyond the natural pressure you cause all kinds of problems for yourself versus going and tapping another well and this is the idea I like to think of it it is so so yeah we're teaching digital oil wells once you're done you'll be able to build a whole oil field and then you'll be able to build a whole oil field on multiple continents so my wife and I right now we have several offers in totally different niches right and that is because I want to diversify I want to make sure I've got levels of security we started with one we focused on one and another and another and all of a sudden we got 20 oil wells pumping in this one brand it's like might make sense to crack off in another brand just in case things and that is the the game and once you get into it it's that realization that there's pent-up desire in every Market people want to buy things they're they're hoping they're hoping something really cool and exciting that makes them feel good or something useful that solves a problem for them comes across their plate they're ready to buy it right here and now yeah that's the shift that's what we're helping people that's what we're helping you turn into is someone who is the creator of those versus the consumer of those things yeah and and I love the idea of you know it's an oil well and it's a an oil field and then it's oil fields in completely different geographies because I have that as well like I've got stuff in the internet marketing space just a few little things I've got my test prep stuff I've got my you know my little golf product and a bunch of other little one-off things that I've thrown around but you know there there is something like people always ask me and this is kind of a weird thing to say but people ask me they're like how do you sort of live your life without you know giving an F right like like there's a buddy why don't you care right there's a buddy of mine he's like man he goes I've never met anybody like you and he's a guy that has an ace figure internet marketing business and he's a very well-known guy and he's like you're the only guy I know that that like you have all this opportunity that you could cash in that you don't cash in he's like you don't try he goes you could build a personal brand and have an eight figure business he goes everybody comes to you you're you're the like he was talking he's like you're the secret weapon of all these people who you're the guy behind the guy yeah you're making all these guys rich and if anybody knew that you could start uh you know a big coaching business or or whatever you know that kind of thing and I was like well I don't need it like that's I don't and I've gotten to the point whether it's through age or laziness or whatever that just because it's there doesn't mean I want it you know and and uh and I think but but the power the reason that that I have that that I couldn't really explain to him is when you have your needs met in three different niches yep like that gives you security yeah Ultimate Security it's securing that lifestyle Freedom that has a cost and and you know like there's there's certain levels of costs that you and I live that we've just consciously decided we want to live a lifestyle that's that many dollars per month and now we have that coming in from totally uncorrelated assets that run on different traffic sort like like if Google like it's different traffic sources it's different niches it's different audiences it's totally non-correlated stability and again the reason why we have both been able to build that which is totally the reason why we're collabing on this in the first place is because very few people get this like you do and I do um we've won like we've literally won the game like like okay what do I want to do like roam around in my little RV like build you know that's that's what we get to spend our time doing because we have that sense of security that even if Calamity hits on one platform even if collab even if the world stops giving an f about this entire Niche I still have multiple other backups right two is one one is none type thing well well three is two and two is yeah exactly um well and the the cool part about that is that um you know if if you ever do get interested in one of those type things then you are able to if you decide you want to to cash in any of that Equity that you have you can do it on your own terms and you like you know it like I I have people that are in um the labs you know what the labs is like messaging me that are they're like yeah you know we we would like to do this or this or this and I get usually like three or four messages a day from this small little membership that I have of people that want to spend more money somehow and I just don't offer those things you know like they want us to run their ads or things like that and we we just shoot so so I'm able to if I decide hey I want to do something at some point then I get to write the terms of it and it's such a different positioning than the person who is cold messaging people on Facebook trying to get them to let them run their ads you know it's like that like that's driving the price down whereas when you're un unreachable or whatever then that drives the price up so well at this point I think we've I think we've got this covered for the the ethos and this kind of um beginning really helping people build that that unshakable mindset to uh move forward confidently and competently any last words at this point on this one Kevin no I I guess the only thing I would say in closing is I guess I do have less words I shouldn't say no but um is that um the ultimate dream that I have is to have like a machine building machine so to have my process be the process that you know it's like where you're like that's where you start building the fields and the you know the whole thing it's like you you have the machine that builds the machines and that's what we're trying to codify here in my mind is we're trying to give you the the loose framework for having a machine to build these machines that work for you right so that is if I could have had the clarity 20 years ago about this that I have today then you know I I don't know what would have been different but I would have had a lot a lot less headaches along the way uh and those kind of things and so that is sort of my uh dream for this is for this to be like a a blueprint for a machine for you the the person who's watching this video to be able to build these little these little oil wells these little machines that you know like like I have I have different ones that only make like 250 a month so it's not like you have to have this six figure thing you know like what is 250 a month mean to you like well okay um that's a lot of Fiji Water I don't know I mean you know it's like there's something that that 250 bucks a month means and I didn't work for it this month it just got deposited into my bank account that's a cell phone bill home internet I got one that we've we've been working on it's been doing about 1200 1300 bucks a month right nothing to shake a stick out I got another one I just turned on that's doing about three grand 2 800 per month and it's not that any one of those are life-changing but when you add them all together that becomes powerful because a it's Diversified in a way that if anything happens to any one of them I'm okay everything's good I got enough of them and I now have the skill to build more but when they all add up together that's when the absolute magic happens that's right so cheers all right well we're gonna call for this video I look forward to connecting with you on the next video and uh thanks for joining us on this first vid here
