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Me 3 years ago :
- 50k debts
- Criminal record
- Can’t get a normal job
- Breakup after 7 years relationship
- Kicked out of house
- Moved back to parents house
- No friends left
- Failed son
I would never become successful if all those things didn’t happen to me.
Let me explain it :
The -50k debts made me realize that I had to make a lot of money and fast. I started to think big and I started taking action immediately.
I started to do my research and I heard that @EcomMatrix & @ecomlegend which are both from my city became rich in a very short amount of time.
I know them both from childhood so I opened my old IG account and messaged them both.
They ignored me and were gatekeeping everything so after asking around I found out that they do dropshipping.
I was mad at them back then but understood them later.
I had to move fast, no time to lose.
I didn't believe in myself so I contacted my childhood best friend, a super smart guy that just finished university and showed him that there is money in this. We decided to start a business together immediately.
Unfortunately everything we tried together failed.. he came to my house at some point and said in a nice way that he wants to stop and is going to work 9-5 again with his degree.
I understood him, thinking back I would have done exactly the same if I was him.
But I was in a situation where I had to make it. There was no other option left.
Meanwhiles I tried to get a job as well but I kept getting refused by every company because of my criminal record.
So I asked my father full of shame if he can help me to get a job in the factory he is working in. He has a managing role so he gave me a job in his team. I started working full-time in shifts like 22:00 until 06:00.
When I came home I made coffee and started working on my business until dinnertime, I slept a couple hours and went back to the factory.
I was still running a unprofitable business. My situation even got worse.
I had literally lost all my motivation, I lost my mind and started punching my wall.
I was about to give up..
I remember me saying:
"Ya Allah, I can't take it anymore”
“Ya Rabbi, show me a way out”
After a while my mother knocked on my door, she brought me a cup of coffee, a sandwich and a small heart shaped paper saying “I love you”.
She looked at me and said, son I know you are in a hard situation now but I believe in you. In a couple years from now we will be speaking about nice things together.
I couldn’t look back at her. I wanted to tell her that my situation is worse than she thinks but no word came out just tears.
Tears are not paying the bills unfortunately.
I didn't believe in myself anymore but my mother did.
I manned up and started grinding again.
Everything changed, I made money through dropservicing and started dropshipping again.
Nothing failed anymore.
I was deep in the grind every single day and ended up in Dubai running 5 different businesses.
I literally reached higher levels than the people I used to look up to without realizing it.
TRUST THE PROCESS.
Allah already had a plan for me. I just had to be patient.
“And whoever fears Allah - He will make for him a way out. And will provide for him from where he does not expect.” - Quran 65:2-3
🧠✍🏽
He's right. I just met a Chinese seller at Roman Khan's event doing $400M a year.
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His team doesn't even speak English.
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They don't need to. AI writes the ads and they just push volume.
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Last year I visited a billion dollar company in China.
3 floors of nothing but desks and chairs. Everyone works 9am to 11pm, and the boss sits at the same table so nobody slacks.
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They always outworked us. Marketing was the one edge we had left.
AI just took that too.
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And you can't beat their COGS. They're straight from the source.
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It's already happening. A guy in Evolve got outscaled by his own factory. They launched a US brand and copied his ads word for word with a different creator. His CPA almost doubled.
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Selling better was an edge. It was never a moat.
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AI copies your ads in hours. A factory copies your product in days.
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But here's the thing about that $400M seller.
He can sell anything and outcompete almost anyone. He's still been struggling to build a real brand for a long time.
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Because the one thing AI can't copy is the position you own in your customer's head.
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Think greens, you think AG1.
Think water in a can, you think Liquid Death.
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If your category doesn't bring up your brand, you're just another option. And the cheapest option wins.
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Most brands are just another option right now. They've been copy pasting their way to revenue.
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3 ways to own a position they can't copy:
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1) Be different, not better
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Better is easy to copy. A factory can make your product better and cheaper by next month.
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Different isn't.
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Represent makes great gear. But so does Nike, and quality alone was never going to beat them.
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So they built something different: premium athletic for people who run and train, right as running became a craze again. They host their own races and the whole brand lives in that world.
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247, their performance line, grew 55% last year.
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A Chinese brand can copy the look for half the price. To a runner, it's just "the cheap Represent."
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Every copy reminds people who the original is.
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2) Stand for something
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Look at politics. Left wing, right wing, there's fanatics on both sides because it's us vs them. People don't switch sides to save $10.
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Comfrt sells hoodies, such a basic product, and they're on pace to do $1B this year.
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The whole brand is built around anxiety and stress. Hudson, the founder, has been through it himself. He was homeless at 16.
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He meets his best TikTok Shop creators 1 on 1 and tells them the mission. They carry that story into every video, and it's the same story in the ads, the site and the emails.
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That's how they became one of the biggest merchants on TikTok Shop.
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A factory can copy the hoodie. It can't copy why people wear it.
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3) Say no
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Chick-fil-A doesn't sell burgers and closes every Sunday. That's a full day of sales gone, every week.
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It's still the #3 restaurant chain in America.
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Who it's not for is what makes it for someone.
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And a volume seller can't copy that. Their whole model is saying yes to every product and every customer.
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Get these 3 right and when the $400M sellers come for your category, your customers still buy from you.
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Angles are rented. A position is owned.
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The prepared will always win.
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See you on the winning side 🤠
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One of the real ones in the game.
He has been through every dirty chapter of ecom.
Pay attention.
I remember 7-8 years ago we used to buy accounts from the Chinese and pay them 50% in Fees
You heard this right, we did not get 50% credit we paid 50% as a fee.
Meaning we spent $100k on facebook, we sent them $150k.
The ROI on accounts back then was massive, so it was well worth paying those fees.
I have an insane amount of stories from this time but let me fast forward to the end.
The Chinese figured out that they didn't need us to buy their accounts when the could run them all on their own.
They got massive buildings like this with 300+ people in them that would launch these accounts 24/7/365
They absolutely decimated the "BH Rebill" industry with scale that was never seen before.
Lots of advertisers in the space got wealthy and most of them ended up with zero when the Card Brands and FTC cracked down hard.
The way to get credit card processing has been forever changed because of how quickly the Chinese scaled offers.
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I used to run the #1 community in ecom.
Created real millionaires. Hosted some of the biggest events in the industry.
My name still carries weight in this space.
Now I am in China sharing everything I learn on my socials.
Some of you probably think I am warming you up for another community launch. 🎉😂
Relax.. I am not selling you shit.
I am locked in on my own businesses.
If you are looking for a community to join, check out @shauneng.
He is running the #1 realest ecom community right now.
No gurus. No fake flexing.
Real Chinese operator who actually knows the game.
Respect to the rest, but facts are facts.
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ChinaEcom is no joke..
Just walked into an office with 5 floors and hundreds of employees.
People still think the Chinese will always need us to sell their products.
Good luck with that. 😂
Anyway, I just made a deal.
Getting my own office inside this building and building my own team here in China.
打不过他们，就加入他们。🇨🇳
First day in China 🇨🇳
Clapped when we landed. Nobody joined..
Ran to take a shit. Almost fell into the toilet. No paper. Asking with hand gestures felt weird… Mission cancelled.
Supplier picked me up in a BMW.
Asked why he is not driving Chinese cars.
He asked why I am not ordering from European factories.
End of conversation..
Realizing the language is a must here.
I speak 4 languages. Mandarin is next.
How hard can it be?
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We are going bankrupt..
ChinaEcom is going to eat us alive.
I have been in ecom for 7 years.
Our advantage was simple.
We knew how to sell better than them.
They controlled everything else.
Factories. Workers. Supply chains.
Now AI is teaching them our marketing skills.
But no AI can give us their side of the business.
They are learning to operate without us.
We still cannot operate without them.
Why would they keep sharing their profits with us?
Because we have a nice Shopify theme? 😂
Not gonna sit in Dubai pretending my business is safe.
Flying to Hangzhou right now 🇨🇳
Going to learn from serious Chinese ecom operators before we become irrelevant.
Not leaving until I understand where this industry is heading.
Will share what I learn on X.
Ecombaba retweeted
At 23, we sold our software company to an international buyer for €83 million.
A few people have asked me how I got started without money. This is how it happened for me.
I grew up poor and started working for myself at 16. I had no money to invest and no network to ask for favours. But I'd learned to code, so I started earning money with that.
Websites, iPhone apps, computer repairs. Whatever people needed that I knew how to do.
At the same time, I kept building my own software projects. Hundreds of systems that went nowhere before I finally made something that worked.
I was 19 when I met a woman working in healthcare. She was much older than me, around 50 if I remember correctly. She told me her staff were still working with Excel, Word and USB sticks.
I thought it was so primitive. Surely I could build something that would let them write reports about their patients online, straight from their phones.
She offered to finance the whole thing as long as I did the programming.
I wasn't thinking about ownership, negotiating shares or eventually selling a company. I thought it was a really interesting problem, and now someone was offering to fund me solving it.
I've always loved figuring out difficult things. Give me something complicated to build and I'll happily disappear into it.
That's why I didn't negotiate. I was happy with what I was offered because I got to spend my time doing something I loved.
What started as a way to write patient reports became a complete ERP system. It covered everything from assessing how much care a patient needed to scheduling staff and billing for the care delivered.
We built a company around it, with employees and multiple locations. The software became a market leader in its field.
None of that was in my head when I first said yes.
At 21, I received my first dividend.
I was on holiday with my parents in Fuerteventura, standing in line at Lidl to pay for some croissants, when a notification came through on my banking app.
The money had arrived.
I opened the app and immediately took a screenshot. That's the picture attached.
When you've grown up without money, seeing a balance like that is a feeling I can't really describe. Almost better than sex, honestly.
Two years later, we sold the company.
That €83 million was the sale price of the business, not what I personally received. I owned 30%.
Looking back, I wish I'd had the confidence to ask for 50/50. She financed the project, which made it possible. I built the entire system. But at the beginning, I hadn't really thought about the value of what I was bringing.
I was just excited that I could build it.
So when someone tells me they don't have the money to bring their ideas to life, I understand. I didn't either.
I earned money from my skills, kept trying my own ideas and eventually met someone with a problem I could solve who was willing to finance the development.
That doesn't mean every project will work. Most of mine didn't.
And I certainly didn't know at 19 that this would become the business we sold at 23.
I'd gladly do the work again. I just wish I'd trusted my own ability earlier and taken the ownership conversation as seriously as I took the programming.
My mentor @UntoldCorporate runs multiple successful businesses, he could retire now if he wants..
Barely anyone knows his name online and offline.
We recently had a conversation about personal branding. I showed him how social media has helped me with hiring, networking, deal flow and opening doors that money alone can’t.
One problem..
He never wanted to be in the spotlight.
So I suggested him something I did myself : build an anonymous personal brand on X. One day you can reveal your face if you want. If not you can keep it anon.
No face. No flexing. Just real business experience, untold stories, lessons and insights from someone who’s actually in the game.
Follow @UntoldCorporate.
Some of the smartest people in business are the ones you’ve never heard of.
He is one of them.
HIRING
Creative Strategist — Supplements
$5k/month base + 3% of ad spend (uncapped).
Own our creative strategy: angles, scripts, editor briefs, testing, and iterations. Work directly with me and our team.
Looking for someone hungry, ambitious, and ready to grow with the brand.
Requirements: experience with supplements + track record with winning ads backed by $100k + in proven spend.
Got the results?
DM me.
I heard Samuel Onuha got snitched by “businesswomen” that didn’t get paid.
Now that he’s locked up, everyone suddenly has the guts to talk.
The ecom space is full of nerds who only act tough when there’s no risk.
In my eyes, the ones talking now are no different than the “businesswomen” that didn’t get paid.
The Tate brothers are locked up because they refused to bow down to the corrupt system that demands you to sell your soul.
Their imprisonment is proof that standing up for truth and refusing to be controlled comes with a price.
@TateTheTalisman @Cobratate
#FREETATE ✊🏽