Make Money Online

I like making money online. How we got started, our first businesses?

Well, depends how we want to think about it. I think the first dollar I made online was selling Magic for the Gathering cards on eBay in high school. I started. Selling parts of my collection online, realized there was an arbitrage opportunity and started buying cards locally from card shops, from other players, and eBaying them, and cut my teeth on eBay for Four or five years. Wow. How about you?

Let me fill in the backstory on my side. So I started with. eBay business. Let me think about the time frame here. So Magic the Gathering and that being some sort of revenue or revenue source of my life started when I was 14, 15, so middle of high school, and continued through college until after college. And during college, I did a tiny bit of WordPress freelancing on the side, building basic websites for folks for less than $20 an hour. and ended up at one point starting a newspaper on campus. We rebranded as the Comic Press after five issues, but the launching name was The Weekly Enema. We were a bi-weekly satirical, every other week satirical newspaper. Sort of like the onion. We ran that for, my partner and I ran that for two and a quarter years. And at one point, we had 18 people on staff: writers, editors, designers. And that was a fun, wild, wild ride. Graduated college in 2008. And went to work at a startup doing their social media. My background education-wise is in econ, but I always was interested in marketing and really wanted to Dive into that world. Started at the startup, poached away to an educational media company in town where I started as the sales engineer, which basically was the guy who was able to talk to marketing, talk to sales, and talk to tech. To make sure marketing and sales knew what was going on, graduated to be the sales manager there, left to be marketing manager at a SaaS company in Eugene, a software as a service company. I was posted away from there to be the director of marketing for a construction firm. I did not enjoy being the director of marketing for this construction firm. And after a year, I left and went full-time independent. That was 2012. And That was me throwing myself out of the jet plane. I really had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t have any best practices established for Being a consultant. I lucked into a large long-term gig with the former CMO of a company I had worked for, the SAS. And when they asked me, well, what’s your rate? I knew that I was making $25 an hour at the construction company, so I was like $30 an hour. And they were like, great, sounds good. And I had no clue how to price myself, no clue how to value what I was doing, no clue how to be an effective consultant. I was very much a pair of hands there. I worked with them for about a year and a half while slowly figuring out consulting stuff and also on the side starting a second eBay business, buying and reselling Apple products like iPhones. Started that one in Honolulu. That grew at an amazing pace while I was doing consulting on the side. At peak, it was doing around 40,000 a month in revenue. And I decided to get out of that market as quickly as I could once I realized that it was incredibly volatile. Overnight, At one point when iOS 6 came out, the value of an iPhone 5 on the secondary market dropped by 50%. And thankfully, I was not carrying any inventory, but it went from Oh, cool. I could sell this phone for $400 too. Oh, I could sell this phone for $200. I just paid $300 for it. What do I do now? And when that happened, I decided to go all in on consulting and Continue growing that way, and since then, I’ve been full-time all in on consulting, growing first W e-commerce and now W your audience. And now I’m starting to branch out towards information products and see how I could add that as an additional stream of revenue.

Oh, gosh. I go back and forth on that all the time. Like, I think diving into the yeah, like, I don’t know if it’s sell more iPhones, but figure out a way to do it sustainably. Like, I think there’s like at the end of the iPhone business, I had stopped selling on eBay, partly because I discovered there were brokers willing to pay money in bulk for iPhones, and we’ll circle back to that in a second, partly because I got banned from eBay twice. Do not try to run an eBay business while you’re moving from Hawaii to Eugene. You will disappoint your customers because you will ship orders late. But I had started selling to a broker who was shipping them over to China. He had a hundred guys like me. He was making two or three bucks per iPhone. He was sending a literal, uh, what’s it called? A shipping container full of iPhones every week over there. And I’m like, my god, the volume. Like, how much are you doing? And he’s like, We are doing a lot of volume. We’re sending a lot of iPhones. And I keep looking at that business and thinking, well, there is definitely money to be made there. But I think on a macro level, What I would have done differently in that business in particular is figure out how to elevate myself out of the day-to-day operations because at the end, I was doing everything. I never figured out how to delegate. And I think that’s A recurring thing throughout my history as a business owner and even an employee. I never have been that good at delegating to other people. It’s something I’m aggressively trying to get better at. And even when I look back to Kai as a beginning level consultant, there were so many opportunities for me to either delegate to other people Who I knew as consultants and hire them as subcontractors or delegate to people who were hiring me and saying, Hey, somebody else at the company should handle this and this is why. I just never did it. And it It’s a muscle that has definitely atrophied that I’m getting better at. How about you? What would you change over your history as a business owner?

That’s interesting since the more you understand about the business needs at play, I think the higher well I know the higher rates you’re able to charge because you’re able to say, well, this is the value of what I’m providing. This is the painful problem you’re experiencing. It’s costing you a million dollars a year. I mean, this is value-based pricing one-on-one, but if it’s costing them a million dollars a year and you could say, well, I’m 10% certain this could or 20% certain this could fix it, I’ll charge you $10,000 to do it. it’s a winning bet for the company to say, okay, yeah, even if we aren’t certain this is going to work, it’s affordable enough and there’s a good enough chance that it’ll work for us to invest. And you only get to that point by understanding what the problem at play is.

When I think back on my experience as an employee and what I changed there. I guess going back one step, it always surprises people that I don’t have a business degree and that instead I have an econ degree. And connecting with your statement about MBA 101 feeling like douchery That’s exactly what I felt when I was in the business program at the UFO. I just did not, as much as I am a business person and love being a business person and love the art and craft of business, I could not stand What felt like training to be a middle-level employee in a cubicle doing Excel all day? And I felt like there has to be a different way. And my different way was just opting out of The business program and saying, okay, if I want to learn more business, I’m going to start a newspaper. I’m going to sell shit on eBay. I’m going to create interesting things and have a number of failures. I think I started to Consulting agencies in quotes, in big, big air quotes with friends in that period. And we never got any clients, but at least along the way, I was able to learn more about the art of doing business. I didn’t invest in any books. I didn’t know who Alan Weiss was until a year and a half ago. I didn’t know who Brennan Dunn or any consultant consulting luminaries were until a year and a half, two years ago. But knowing about them Just elevated my knowledge in such a way, and I wish I had taken more time to study and learn about business. Just reading a book like Book Yourself Solid when I was 20 years old would have changed the trajectory of my life dramatically, let alone something like Chet Holmes’s Ultimate Sales Machine or Spin. Selling or any number of titles I could rattle off.

I sort of draw a weird line in the sand and say there’s business advice and entrepreneurial advice. And what I really thrive off of is entrepreneurial advice. And a lot of The books we just mentioned, Let’s Pick on Bretton Dunn’s double your freelancing rate. It’s a book for consultants, but it also feels more like a book for entrepreneurs. Like the person who reads that is most likely an independent consultant or owner of a small agency. So you were more in the entrepreneur camp than the business camp. And business school felt like it was teaching me the craft of business, but what I really wanted was to learn how to start a business, learn how to be an entrepreneur, learn how to provide value and then charge for it. And at least at the University of Oregon, when I was there, none of the classes or courses really directed you in that way.

Right. It seems like the distinction between this is something I’m doing because I lost my job and I’m freelancing right now until I get another job. Or I have started a business. I’m a business person. I own a company. I think back to when I was working with my first client as a freelancer, as a consultant. There was a point when I was like, Oh, yeah, I just incorporated and set up a business. And there was a subtle change where they’re like, Oh, you own a business now. You’re now a Capital C consultant. When before it really felt like I was a pair of hands, just the way people would refer to me in meetings or we’d have conversations. That subtle distinction between I’m a freelancer and I’m now running a business or running a freelance business. Definitely shifted my perception within that company. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

And that’s something I’ve actually always struggled with as a business owner, where rebel isn’t the right word, but I’ve struggled against adopting a persona or putting on a persona for business Kai. And I mean, on my Twitter, the way I communicate with folks, it very much is the honest, authentic, like Kai brand. Like my my Twitter bio, for lack of a better example right now, is retweets and faves are sex. I love you. Oh, your internet boyfriend. Your real internet boyfriend. Your real internet boyfriend. That’s it. And uh, like, that’s very much The type of humor and the type of jokes I would make in real life and how I would present myself. Like, what do you do online? I’m your real internet boyfriend. Like, that’s the authentic slovenly, for lack of a better word, Kai. And I’ve had that carry through my marketing, my messaging, how I present myself, how I communicate with clients. Like they’re hiring Kai and they’re getting Kai. Full stop. There’s no, I’m sectioning off business Chi, and they’re interacting with Business Chi, and at the end of the day, the mask Comes off and I’m Kai Davis again.

Talking it out, maybe that’s where my Sense of being uncomfortable comes from with hiring people or hiring an assistant or delegating, where I feel like so much of it is integrated into who I am as a person or the brand is Kai and Kai is the brand that to hire somebody delegitimizes it or dilutes it or makes it less authentic.

And I think one thing the listener can take away from this is. We both, being our authentic weird selves, have been able to build successful online businesses, successful consulting practices. You’ve written a very, very, very successful book. And at no point along the line have you really compromised who you are, or have I or have I had to compromise who I really am. Instead, it seems we both are willing to say, well, I want to make the world around me bend to My real personality. And if it’s a slightly harder climb, okay, I’m happier to be me and happier to be weird and real and who I am than compromise and project a different image for the benefit of maybe landing a project, maybe making a little more money, we’ve been able to build a nice business for each of us by being weird and being ourselves. Yeah.

I don’t think I realized how hard it was until I found that Fit that overlap between what I could provide, what I like providing, and what people want to buy. And then it suddenly was like, oh, this is what easy mode is, this is what it feels like to have it be graceful. And running headfirst into a wall for a few years, I thought that was normal. I thought that was what owning a business was like.

I’m having fun. I think to uh this is fine I think to uh the book I just wrote uh the traffic manual and I’ve wanted to write and publish an e-book in like a technical e-book for consultants about marketing for years. Like you go back to 2010, Kai, and you ask Kai, what do you want to do? Like, what’s your plan? And he would say, I want to publish a book. I want to make money online. I want to get into information products. And it took me five years of struggle and feeling like this is a horribly, terribly scary mountain to climb. Until it finally happened. And at the end of that project, while it took a lot of work to put it out, I suddenly realized how easy it was and how so much of the struggle I was feeling was Me manifesting that struggle, me generating that struggle as an excuse. And now, when I look at it, I’m like, okay, great. If I want to write a book again, which I do and which I’m planning on doing. It’s not that hard. Like, I have a plan, I have a system, I have a framework, I have a path to follow. And maybe part of the reason I was running to the walls for so long headfirst was because I was willfully closing my eyes.

Yeah, I have a connecting to the idea of want, I have a print. Hanging in my office. I’m sure you’re familiar with this and some of our listeners are as well. It’s a haiku. All I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them. And that really is when I think about like, what do I want my business to be over the next 40 years? I want it to be that. I want to make new things. I want to think about them. I want to see what I discover about them. And ideally, I want people to be delighted by the things. I don’t want to just go off into the forest, go feral, and make some things, make my manuscript, and have people be like, what is this? We don’t care. I want to generate things that provide value, that answer questions, and that people say, like, this helped me achieve a thing. A friend who’s in a mastermind I’m in was just messaging me today. Hey, Kai, I read your book and I emailed two podcasts and I’m booked on both of them next week. And I’m like, holy shit, I helped do a thing that helped him learn how to achieve this objective. He’s never been on a podcast before. He pitched them, and now he’s booked on two, and that’s going to lead to more down the line. That’s so satisfying for me. That is delightful for me.

I wonder if our next episode will end on a happy note.

Stay tuned. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Make Money Online. Kai buys a pen. Kai buys a pen. Thank you so much, Nick.