“A short little post about making so much money my bank refused to take my money”
When I started my first online business something awful happened to me right away.
It was success from the get go.
….and I don’t mean just a little bit successful.
It was pretty much of a home run from the beginning.
I’d started my business out of 100% pure desperation.
I needed $10,000, and I needed it within the next few weeks.
That might not seem like a ton of money now, but I was only 19 years old at the time.
Growing up the “rich kids” in my town were the ones who’s parents were police officers or teachers, and so $10,000 was practically unimaginable.
Back in the late 1990’s day trading the stock market was the hot thing.
Think of how crypto is today, then 10x it.
The market was insane and growing.
I’d saved up some money from a summer job and jumped into the game.
It took me a few months of losing money to finally figure it out, but I was persistent and would do a post-mortum on every single trade I took. That little habit led to me becoming a decent trader pretty quickly.
Over a period of some months I grew my account to a little bit over $10,000.
I was mostly making anywhere between $50 and $150 a day.
So I wasn’t making a ton of money, but it was enough to cover my major expenses of rent, food, weed and beer.
I was majoring in Anthropology. What that really means is that pretty much everyone around me were Marxists or at the very least socialists.
So I had nobody to really talk shop with.
That’s when I discovered a few “message boards” and “groups”.
All across the web a bunch of groups and topic specific threads would bring in a ton of people and we’d all be talking about stocks.
Basically it was a more primitive version of what we have today here on Facebook.
Yahoo Groups.
Excite Boards.
RagingBull.com
message board (Remember, this was like 23 years ago, so at that time Raging Bull was just a message board for trading geeks like me, not a group of criminal gurus fleecing desperate people.
I started to get pretty involved with them. Arguing with people over the merits of this company or that one. (none of us really had a damn clue as to what we were doing, but hot damn that didn’t stop us from having strong opinions anymore).
Eventually I started my own group on the Yahoo boards.
I’d basically give people a hot list of stocks every day along with my reasoning behind looking at it.
Eventually that group crew to over 10,000 people.
I think that there was only 5 or 6 people who might have had bigger groups than me.
Well anyway, one fine day in November I totaled my girlfriends car.
Now, if you really know me then one thing you know is that I’m an awful driver. Like, literally probably in the bottom 0.1% of drivers, not the bottom 1%, the bottom 0.1%.
Because of that she had to exclude me on her insurance policy.
So after I totaled her car the only way the insurance company would pay is if she filed a report with police that I’d stollen the car.
Shit got real pretty quickly.
I did have about $10,000 in my trading account, but that was literally all of the money I had in the entire world.
If I was to dip into it something truly awful would have happened.
I’d have been forced to get “a real job”.
Scary stuff!
So for about a week I was just a complete and total mess freaking out about this.
I’m a skinny smart ass white boy, it didn’t seem to me that I’d handle jail all that well.
..but then one day it just came to me.
“Hey you dipshit, you’ve got over 10,000 people hanging on your every word about trading. Maybe you can convince 50 of them to part with $200.”
And so that was the beginning.
Next thing I did was to write what may still be the worst sales letter in all of history.
Fast forward a few days and I didn’t reach my goal.
I freaking smashed it!
I had 919 people me a check for $200.
Everyone in my family was pretty much ashamed because at that time just about the only thing most people associated the internet with was porn.
So my family is ashamed of me.
And my bank….well, no way they were going to believe that some pothead anthropology major just made $184,000 so they held back my money. I wasn’t able to finally access it for almost 6 months.
When they did release the money to me they did it by giving me a cashiers check for the entire amount and then closed my account and told me not to bother coming back.
Now let me tell you something.
I had this idea in my head that every bank in Iowa City would be tripping over themselves to get my business.
ahhhhhh, yeah, not so much.
Nobody wanted my business.
…….imagine that, if you go to the bank drunk and stoned with a $184,000 cashiers check the back will find you questionable and refuse your business.
The nerve on those bastards!
Eventually I found a bank to take my money and not only that they opened a merchant account for me so I could run CC through Authorize.
But now I had another huge problem.
You see, I had no damn idea how it was that I was able to get so many buyers or followers.
The only thing I really knew how to do was give away a shit ton of stuff for free and build my tribe that way.
Well, now I had people paying for that, so I couldn’t just be giving it out to everyone.
Over the course of the next year I had very few sales.
Several months I didn’t get a single sale, and most months when I did get sales it would be maybe 5-10 people.
I knew that there was a great future with “this internet shit” as my dad used to call it….but I had no idea what so ever how to capitalize on it.
Then on one fine Saturday night, when I would much rather have been out with my friends getting drunk and stoned and chasing girls, I went to the business school library.
I really had to figure this out.
I’d had a small taste of success, and I was desperate to taste it again.
Had to figure this shit out.
So I was trying to find stuff on marketing and sales because I was at least smart enough to know that was the root of my problems.
It was getting on 2am or so and the library would be closing up at either 2:30 or 3 (I can’t remember) when out of the corner of my eyes I spotted a book.
A book that would play no small part in changing my life forever.
“How to write sales letters that sell” by Drayton Bird
I spent about 10 or 15 minutes thumbing through it and I just knew in my bones this is what I needed.
This book was going to change my life!
So I go to check it out.
Life just has a way of throwing shit on us. It sucks, but thats life.
So I’m trying to check out the book when a big pile of shit gets dumped on me in the form of the library checkout girl told me that only people enrolled in the business school could check out books from the Business School library without a note from a professor.
A bunch of horse shit, but them’s the rules and she wasn’t going to budge.
So I did what any juvenile delinquent would do when presented with this kind of road block.
I stole the fucking thing!
Over the course of the next week I was totally obsessed with that book and I must have read through it and taken notes 4 or 5 times.
So then it’s time to put this stuff into action.
And I wrote such a beautiful letter.
I showed it to my mom and my girlfriend – they both loved the shit out of that letter. “I’m so proud of you honey!”
I could wait to get this masterpiece of a sales letter into everyones inbox. I just knew that by the end of the week I was gong to have made so much money it would make that $184,000 look like chump change.
So I hit send.
Crickets.
hmmmm.
Finally I decided that maybe the email system had some kind of glitch, so people didn’t get it.
So I sent it again.
Oh boy oh boy, people had definitely seen them both and several dozen of them took the time out of their busy day to respond to me and tell me what a pathetic little piece of shit I was and to stop sending them bullshit hyped up sales letters.
Well, that wasn’t very nice of them.
Come end of the week a grand total of 4 people had bought it.
That was certainly not going to cut it.
Back to the drawing board to write another masterpiece.
This one had to have been a lot better than the last one cos not only did my mom and girlfriend love it, my gramma did too!
So with dollar signs again lighting up my eyes I hit send.
This sucker was gonna make rich.
I even went to the gas station down the hill to buy a Dupont Registry and then some luxury home magazine.
Now some people might think I was getting a little bit out of ahead of myself, but I mean, come on. Whats the point of making a trillion dollars if you’re not gonna blow it on frivolous things.
Within about 20 minutes or so of hitting send I was getting a massive response from my list.
Unfortunately that response was something akin to a lynch mob that wanted to kill me forming.
Don’t worry, it gets even worse.
So almost 1/3 of the people I had on my list unsubscribed and as if that wasn’t bad enough I literally got zero sales.
FUCK!! This was turning out to be a hell of a lot harder than I thought.
From that point I sent out six or seven more total flops in a row, from those six or seven letters I think I got a grand total of 25 or 30 sales, and that was only after I discounted the letter to $50. That pretty much totally backfired
on me cos now not only was I pissing off everyone on my list, but the people who’d bought from me in the first place were all really pissed off at me because they felt like I’d fucked them over.
I can remember laying in bed crying myself to sleep a few times.
My dream was dead.
It was looking like I’d just need to accept a future as a high school or middle school social studies teacher.
I started to think the entire thing was just bullshit.
Some of the early guru’s like Cory Rudl were teaching this “internet marketing” crap.
Be damned if I’m gonna give them any of my money though.
I would walk around during the day with a knot in my stomach.
I’d be so tired during the day it was a struggle to stay awake (looking back now I was obviously suffering with severe anxiety and depression) and then at night I’d just lay in bed tossing and turning or pacing around the house. Sometimes the anxiety was so bad I’d be throwing up from it.
It was getting to be near the end of the school term. I’d spent pretty much all of the money I made because since it came so easily that first time I made the mistake of thinking I made all those sales because I had some sort of special talent, but the real truth was something closer to “You got lucky”.
So it’s looking like I’m going to have to move back home for the summer.
The depression just kept getting worse.
I remember a few times wishing I could just get run over by a car or something so I could be put out of my damn misery.
So the school term ends and I had most of my stuff packed up and ready to go.
I decided to read Drayton’s book one more time, take really careful notes as I read it and then write one more letter.
I was convinced it wouldn’t get any sales and I’d just end up pissing more people off, but desperate time call for desperate measures I guess.
And something happened.
Twenty eight people bought.
I swear to God I was more excited and made happier by those 28 sales than I had been by the initial release I made $184,000 with it.
OMG it was such a relief.
I spent two or three days again going through “How to write sales letters that sell”.
My purpose this time was to figure out if there is some kind of template I could use on my social media posts that would help me replenish the list I’d basically destroyed.
It it worked like crazy!
I went from adding maybe 20 or 30 people to my list per month to doing close to 100 per day.
And sales kept going up every month.
It was either late may or early june when I sent out that first letter that worked for me.
By Thanksgiving I was pretty consistently making between $3000 – $5000 every week.
In March I had my very first $100,000 month.
Then I got a little bit cocky and slacked off too much.
In April I made $45,000.
In May I only made $10,000 again.
I was drinking and smoking weed all the time, the stress of this shit was killing me.
Luckily around the middle of June I got really honest with myself, which was to really accept and realize I’d gotten cocky and forgot about the basics that allowed me to have that first $100,000 month.
In September I got over the $100,000 hump for the month again.
After that last ordeal I promised myself I would never allow myself to get cocky like that ever again.
In January I had my first ever $250,000 month.
From that point I didn’t have a single month were I made under $100,000 until the summer of 2006.
* * *
Like to get results like Brandon, but without the weed?
Why not grab a copy of How to Write Sales Letter That Sell! now?
Updated last year to include a whole new section just on emails.
Choose from the PDF, or the limited edition, signed paperback.
Best,
Drayton
