How I Went From -$15k to $8.7 Million (My Story)

hey my name is Matt the two companies I own make me $8.7 million a year and I get to take home almost $4 million of that all while traveling the world and building a meaningful life which is insane to think about this is the story of how I turned a miserable life into a life better than I could have ever imagined I can still remember like it was yesterday a time when I had nothing I've been kicked out of my family home at 18 my friend and I were living in a crummy apartment we were

broke and completely hopeless my friend had recently attempted suicide there was0 in my bank account I was ashamed that I had no money to buy anything so I opened up a credit card and just started buying on credit and kept doing that until I was $15,000 in the hole and I can remember that specific day I hit rock bottom I just come home my friend was cleaning the house and the vacuum he was using just suddenly exploded dust went everywhere the walls the kitchen the furniture my clothing and we both just hit our breaking point

I left the house and had a panic attack and my friend stayed back and tried to take his own life I thought about taking my own life as well and I'd love to say that everything just changed overnight the truth is it took years of grinding for me to get out of that hole looking back though I can see four clear mindset shifts that happened at different points along the way there were the key moments in that transformation some of these things I've never shared publicly before but I think there are four changes that everyone

needs to go through if they want to build a successful business and feel like they're in charge of their own life so let's get into it I made it my mission all through High School to get into the best business school in Canada so I could run my own business and be a Founder by some miracle I made it into the ivy business school in London Ontario but I quickly learned that business school is broken I wanted to be a founder and I was being taught to be a slave a follower a suit I always

thought that after graduating I'd have all these amazing opportunities open up to me but the only job offer I got after business school was for craft Foods yeah that craft Foods is this it I felt like I'd been scammed I said I would join craft after graduating University pending one small ass from them I could travel for 4 months first they said yes I had $0 to my name I opened a $30,000 line of credit I figured screw it you're only young once it was all my travels that I realized new depths of freedom I

realized that I needed to live a life where I could control the four W's work where I want on what I want with who I want whenever I want but then I came back to Toronto after the trip of a lifetime and life hit me like a ton of bricks same old job same old people it was painful but I had a ton of autonomy a free car and I was able to make my own hours after doing this for 2 weeks I realized that no one at head office had even a clue what I

was doing day today so I secretly switched from working 40 hours a week to working just 2 hours on a Tuesday and nobody noticed so I used the other 50 hours to go all in on learning how to code I also read books on how to run a startup and listen to Tony Robbins I don't negotiate with myself I'm so great I'm not here to discuss this with my mind okay yeah maybe a little bit too much of Tony Robbins but at this point I didn't know what I was going to do with all this

knowledge I just knew that if I clocked in and out of that deadend job without investing in myself nothing would change and it doesn't matter that I chose coding I could have chose real estate or Finance or anything else I just needed to do something to change my life situation I had to take control of the Matrix or the Matrix was probably just going to take control of me I'd also learned along the way that you don't get seriously Rich by just acquiring skills and then working for other people look at the Forbes top 100

list of wealthiest people in the planet they all got rich from owning things Elon built Tesla PayPal and SpaceX bzo started Amazon Buffett grew birkshire hathway by owning multiple companies this is how you build serious wealth by having Equity Building and owning things that increase in value like stocks shares companies and property not from selling your time or being employee of the month so I decided early on that I wanted to own something that could grow I had two friends Tori and Duncan that would come by my apartment in Toronto and we jam on new

business ideas one of our experiments was this concept of a coding school called bitmaker we trained people to become software engineers and then get them jobs at tech companies around Toronto a few people we talked to were interested in it and I was so desperate to make a change in my life situation I just said the hell with it and stayed up for two nights straight emailing potential students and instructors to join the program and companies to be our hiring Partners so that the students when they graduated had jobs we sold 30 spots for 5K

each before we even had computers a location instructors or even a finished curriculum and within 1 month of graduation 90% of the students from the program we're getting jobs at top tech companies like Shopify IBM and Facebook pretty soon we were making $200,000 a month and I quit that job at craft to work on bitmaker full-time everything in my life was finally finally looking sunny and that's when it happened 7 months after starting bitmaker we were raided by the government yeah the government two enforcement agents came into bitmaker one day after seeing a positive article

of me the paper was saying how much of a promising Canadian entrepreneur I was they said we were operating as an unregistered private career at college that we were giving people degrees even though we weren't and that I could go to jail for a year and be fined up to a million I sted up all night emailing over 3,000 people including Superstars like chath Paul Graham and venod kosla and the story went viral within one week the government backed off and we were granted the only exemption for a business of Our Kind in Canada over

the next 2 years we trained over 2,000 software engineers and bitmaker was acquired by general assembly for eight figures which from a business standpoint it was incredible but it was also a huge personal relief I'm not sure if I could have carried on building bitmaker much longer inside I was dying I was depressed I was anxious I felt like craft that entire final year of the business after the acquisition I had a decent chunk of cash but not enough to retire on and I still wanted to work and do something meaningful with my life so

I realized I needed to make my own luck I believe that getting lucky in life is often times just a numbers game because when you talk to people it increases your surface area for luck Community connections and just makes it way likelier that something will happen out of the blue and so that's exactly what I did and that's what happened I emailed over 5,000 people asking for interesting business leads advice and whether they could connect me with interesting people and companies hi blank name I have enormous respect for you and insert company I was the

founder and CEO of bitmaker labs until recently when the founding team decided it was best to go separate directions I'm now on the grind in search of the next exciting opportunity I was responsible for growing the team from 0 to 15 people annual revenue of over $2 million and facilitating the education of over a th000 developers I hustled our way to partnership sh with over 80 companies including Shopify Microsoft and HootSuite in June we were nearly shut down by the government and I spearheaded the team through the controversy we fought the law and emerged stronger

than ever and earned valuable press coverage including wired and read write I love growth hustling and making a dent the universe I'm 24 willing to prove myself and ready to do whatever it takes to succeed are there any companies or people you suggest I reach out to thanks Matt I spent January 3rd 4th and 5th 2014 emailing over 2,000 people I was determined to overcome my feelings of depression and despair with action and momentum I convinced myself that one email one person one connection could change everything I spoke to over 240 people I took as

much action as I could muster up and it finally paid off in 2014 when I emailed the author Tucker Max I sent Tucker in my hungry to hustle email to my surprise I got this response oh my God I know so many places that could use a real doer what do you want to do I mean that very specifically don't give me your pitch you give to everyone tell me what would get you at a with excitement I couldn't believe it it actually worked thanks for the prompt response my real strength lies in business development

marketing and team building what gets me out of bed is working with amazing people solving problems that I'm passionate about Tucker replied well I'm part of the team at the Stoners cookbook but we're already in the process of completely redoing everything and reconceptualizing that site as something like an all recipes or Epicurious for a different Niche is this something that you'd be interested in talking about the Stoners catbook was a user generated website that showed people how to make novel recipes they had a super engaged Community which got me interested and thinking this could maybe

be a multi-million dollar business so I bought the Stoners cookbook with all the money I'd saved from selling bitmaker and I rebranded it to Herb we slowly grew the site from 100,000 visitors a month to over 14 million people and herb is now the number one digital marketing company in the category huge billion dooll Brands pay us to Market their products and we've had offers for over $50 million for the company and I've always said no to those acquisition offers because I just see the company growing and growing in value and continuing to compound our

revenue and cash flow I believe we are just getting started so I made it I was rich and most people don't think beyond that point but trust me it's perfectly possible to be wealthy and still feel deeply miserable and I wasn't happy at the time when herb was growing the most my girlfriend dumped me I was sad and used substances like alcohol to cope with the feelings of Despair and sadness the years of grinding had worn me out and I needed to make a change so I reached out to an online friend Dr Andrew huberman

who encouraged me to get some blood work done well it turns out that alcohol negatively impacts your sleep which hurts your testosterone which then affects your mood your drive your bone mass your fat distribution your muscle mass a lot of important stuff I began cleaning up my lifestyle this was the final piece of the puzzle investing in and taking care of my own body I quit drinking and started eating healthily I also started doing yoga four times a week and lifting daily the more I found I took care of myself the more a world of

opportunities open up to me I felt more focused and alert I had more brain power for solving business problems but the even bigger and realer change was the fact that I started journaling every morning on pen and paper I journaled around my passions my calling in life and where I wanted to be in 10 years I came across this book called iy guy and was fascinated by it iy guy is a Japanese concept that stands for your reason for being your calling in life your iy guy exists at the intersection of what you love what

you're good at what you can be paid for and what the world needs I completed my iy guy here it is I realized I love to help Founders get to $5 million revenue and Beyond automate businesses build vibrant communities like I had with herb and travel the world I was passionate about helping fellow Founders avoid the pain the agony the struggle that I had been through while I was building my businesses it was only because I did all this internal work of thinking about what I really wanted to do that I created my third company

founder OS teaching other Founders on how to create effective systems to build successful companies while working less my journaling had led me to share my writing and systems online I use convertkit to create a newsletter I use kajabi to create a website I use tool to create an online community seamless AI to connect with fellow Founders and a tool called hyp Fury to schedule all of my content for 60 days out so I wasn't chained to my laptop and phone at all times of the day I was off the content hamster wheel and I was

able to use content to set my audience on fire I grew my Twitter to over 214,000 people LinkedIn to 264,000 people my newsletter to 68,000 people in just one year I got clear on who I was and what I really wanted this year found crossed 250k in Revenue per month after being in business for just 12 months and herbed uses 48 80k Revenue per month it still blows my mind I now run a portfolio of internet companies doing $8.7 million a year I have to pinch myself daily I'm finally living my dream I believe in

the power of what I call symbiotic success creating a business that fuels your dreams versus draining them most people think that being a Founder is this Relentless grind that you have to sacrifice your health relationships and your life for the success of your business there's this like massive epidemic of entrepreneurs that are suffering the emotional toll of building their companies 72% of entrepreneurs in a recent UC Berkeley study self-reported mental health concerns I can say without a doubt that I was part of that 72% Founders are 10x more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder 2x

more likely to suffer from depression and 2x more likely to have Suicidal Thoughts but building a business isn't about surviving it's about thriving it's about designing a life that you're proud to live at the end of the day the healthier you are the better off your business your relationships your spirit and your bank account over my founder Journey I've learned to be the architect of my life and now I'm living everyday retirement retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow when today is complete in and of itself you're retired nval rakon I

found Freedom by creating systems eliminating the unessential taking care of my health and then delegating to weapons and you can too you can create a business that gets you to jump out of bed in the morning that you're excited by you don't need to work yourself to burnout like I did you don't need to scale at all costs this channel is for a new breed of Founders we Embrace time Freedom location freedom and Financial Freedom we aren't Revenue focused we focus on profit we build lean distributed teams you don't need a co-founder automation is your

ally we don't advertise we increase our surface area for Community clients in cash flow with Organic content we don't run off pure grit we are systems driven we put our business on autopilot so we can travel the world and make memories with family and friends we believe in designing businesses that actually serve us we don't need investors to be rich we don't even need a th000 customers to make $5 million we need a hundred raving fans we need a lean team of weapons and we form a collective of creatives hackers closers operators across the world

that are committed to just one thing getting to $5 million profit a year will crafting a delightful customer experience we slow down and relax and we know that slow is smooth and smooth is fast let's build your automated Empire find a job you enjoy doing and you will never have to work a day in your life