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'd 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 was $0 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 had 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 Kraft Foods. Yeah, that Kraft Foods. Is this it? I felt like I'd been scammed. I said I would join Kraft after graduating university, pending one small ask from them. I could travel for four 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 on my travels that I realized new depths of freedom. I realized that I needed to live a life where I could control the four Ws. 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 two weeks, I realized that no one at head office had even a clue what I was doing day to day. So I secretly switched from working 40 hours a week to working just two 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 listened 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 gonna do with all this knowledge. I just knew that if I clocked in and out of that dead-end 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 need to do something to change my life situation. I had to take control of the matrix or the matrix was probably just gonna 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 on the planet. They all got rich from owning things. Elon built Tesla, PayPal, and SpaceX. Bezos started Amazon. Buffett grew Berkshire Hathaway 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'd 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 one month of graduation, 90% of the students from the program were 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 Kraft to work on Bitmaker full time. Everything in my life was finally, finally looking sunny. And that's when it happened. Seven 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 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 dollars. I stayed up all night emailing over 3,000 people including superstars like Chamath, Paul Graham, and Vinod Khosla, 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 two 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 crap 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 oftentimes 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 zero to 15 people, annual revenue of over $2 million, and facilitating the education of over 1,000 developers. I hustled our way to partnerships 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 ReadWrite. I love growth, hustling, and making a dent in 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 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 wanna do? I mean that very specifically. Don't give me your pitch you give to everyone. Tell me what would get you out of bed with excitement. I couldn't believe it, it actually worked. Thanks to 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 Stoner's 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 Stoner's Cookbook 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 Stoner's 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 dollar 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 cashflow. 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 opened 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 Ikigai and was fascinated by it. Ikigai is a Japanese concept that stands for your reason for being, your calling in life. Your Ikigai 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 Ikigai. 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 used ConvertKit to create a newsletter. I used Kajabi to create a website. I used Skool to create an online community, Seamless AI to connect with fellow founders, and a tool called HypeFury 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, Founder OS crossed 250K in revenue per month after being in business for just 12 months, and Herb does 480K 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. Naval Ravikant. 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, mean, 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, and cashflow 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 thousand 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 while 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.