Have you ever read an amazing autobiography?

They’re rare.

Most famous people aren’t great writers.

But when a stunner comes along, it can electrify you.

My favorite is Andre Agassi’s Open, where he recounts his journey to become one of the best male tennis players of all time – and how it made him hate the game.

When I was younger, that sounded ridiculous: How could you spend your entire life on something but also hate it at the same time?

But then it happened to me.

Not so ridiculous anymore.

Part 5 of my life story explains how your passion could turn into your prison.

And how you might escape, even when the only “exit opportunity” looks like a leap off a cliff.

Plus:

• Why you should be very careful of hiring “outside consultants.”
• Why listening to your customers can be a HUGE mistake.
• The #1 reason why you should not start a business, and why no one ever tells you this dirty little secret.
• The most powerful strategy for success in sales, marketing, and dating, and why it’s the opposite of what you might expect.
• And yes: Korean girls. A lot of Korean girls. OK, at least one Korean girl.

Recap – Previously in Brian’s Life Story

In Part 4 of my story, which covered 2011 through 2012, I had conducted a series of experiments in the Laboratory of the Absurd:

• I released a web series that had great production values but which failed to reach beyond the M&I audience or get us a deal with HBO.
• I hired ~10 guest writers that, despite making some great contributions, ended up making my job more time-consuming and stressful.
• And I started dating the craziest girl I’ve ever met, who asked for a $6,000 gold bracelet within three months of meeting her.

By the end of 2012, I had come to my senses.

I didn’t continue with the web series, I scaled back the guest articles, and I defeated Crazy Girl and her boss, Sauron, by tossing the bracelet into Mt. Doom:

I planned to refocus 100% on business, partially by working with “Yoda,” the founder of a marketing agency I had hired (They’ll be known as “The Marketers” in this story).

He recommended increasing my prices, encouraging more up-sells and cross-sells, and dropping all my side projects.

My goal was to grow sales by 10x within 2 years.

Revenue in 2012 was up only ~35% over 2011, so I had a lot of work to do – quickly!

Sleepless in Seattle

I started 2013 by leaving New York and moving to Seattle.

I needed a change of pace, and Seattle is nearly the opposite of NY.

Also, several friends had moved there to launch eGraphs, a startup that let fans get autographs and personalized messages from athletes and celebrities.

I put my plan into action as well: I would raise the prices of our main modeling courses in April, and before that I would revamp the Excel course, which badly needed a facelift.

And then I would revamp all the other courses, re-launch them, and raise their prices as well.

Meanwhile, The Marketers were helping me with new sales and marketing strategies, email campaigns, and paid advertising on Google and Facebook.

This first launch in April 2013 went very well, but then I got blindsided by fate.

Startups: Survivorship Bias

Within weeks of my launch, eGraphs ran out of money and shut down, and most of my friends returned to NYC or California.

I stayed in Seattle because I didn’t want to move yet again.

So I tried to enjoy my free time there, but I found myself increasingly bored.

You can easily meet new people and mingle with random groups in cities like London and NYC, but Seattle requires a lot more time and effort.

So I decided to go away for the summer and spend a month visiting friends in Asia.

Back to Drug Dealing in Korea

On a whim, I contacted the original Korean girl who drew me to Korea (“The Drug Dealer”).

In Part 2 of my story, we met at a speed dating event in Beijing, and then I followed her to Seoul… where she ditched me upon arrival.

But I figured things might have changed in the past few years, and you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Within a day of meeting, we started dating again.

For the rest of 2013, I alternated between the U.S. and Korea before finally moving back to Seoul in 2014.

From the start, this relationship was like a Korean drama: constant ups and downs, lots of melodrama, and full of illogical plot twists.

Not only did the long distance make it awkward, but she changed her mind on major issues approximately 10-20x per day.

One day, she would propose marriage; the next day, she would try to jump off a balcony because of “depression.”

There were no gold bracelets, but her constant mood swings consumed a lot of energy.

Match of the Century: Product vs. Marketing

Meanwhile, a conflict started brewing between myself and The Marketers.

They were happy that I raised prices and re-launched the products in April 2013, but they wanted me to keep doing that and spend 100% of my time on marketing.

From their perspective, the BIWS courses were “good enough,” and it was silly to improve them when no one had explicitly asked for it.

They wanted me to write elaborate email sequences, create new package deals, spend more money on Google and Facebook, and even use postal mail to advertise.

Some of their suggestions were reasonable, but it seemed short-sighted to focus 100% on marketing.

For one thing, the hiring market was changing, and case studies and modeling tests were becoming more important.

And while our courses were “OK” for case studies, they also had some shortcomings:

1. They didn’t explain how to use financial modeling to make investment decisions and advise clients.
2. They were too focused on investment banking and didn’t have enough coverage of private equity, equity research, hedge funds, etc.
3. They were too S.-centric and too focused on technology companies.

But I didn’t want to jump into a multi-year project without testing my ideas first.

So I experimented with the Dell case study and the NAV model case study for Ultra Petroleum.

I felt they were far better than the older material, but they also took ~5x more time to create.

That meant that I would have minimal time for marketing if I wanted to go all-out with this effort.

So I had to make a decision going into 2014: Should I listen to The Marketers or my instincts?

Never, Ever, Ever Getting Back Together

After I moved back to Seoul in early 2014, The Drug Dealer “lost interest” in me within a few months.

It felt a bit like déjà vu.

I could have left the country, but I wanted to stay for at least a year and make the most of it.

Plus, without the relationship drama, I’d have more time for work.

I might even be able to spend a good chunk of time on marketing and new courses!

2014 Begins: To Infinity and Beyond

But as 2014 began, I decided to spend the bulk of my time on product development, with maybe 15-20% devoted to marketing.

The Financial Modeling Fundamentals course was our most important product, so I started there.

The new version would include 10 case studies, each based on a different company in a different industry and region.

Even with 2-3 team members helping me with the Excel and research, it would be a stretch to finish by the end of the year.

The Marketers weren’t exactly happy, but I own 100% of the business, so “activist revolts” aren’t possible.

A flurry of work followed.

Throughout most of 2014, I worked 14-hour days to finish the course.

I dated a few new girls on my occasional off days, but I was so busy that nothing went anywhere.

A Tempting Proposal Arrives

That summer, The Drug Dealer returned and asked me how to buy and use a round-the-world plane ticket (it’s quite tricky).

She wanted to quit her job and travel through English-speaking countries while working on a Master’s Thesis on second-language acquisition.

I told her to quit and do it, and then… she quit and did it.

We met up a few times before she left Korea, and then toward the end of the year she asked me to travel with her through Southeast Asia and Australia.

But I was so busy that it was out of the question.

“Sorry, have to work. Have fun!”

Launching the Fundamentals 3.0 Course

December was approaching, and so was my deadline.

The Marketers were finally happy because I was getting back to marketing: a big product launch.

And I was happy because I was almost done with the new course, though I had to postpone 2 case studies due to lack of time.

The launch went remarkably well, and sales for the year increased substantially.

We had grown about 3x in 3 years vs. the original goal of 10x in 2 years.

While that was far short of the goal, it was an insane goal to begin with: 10x growth in 2 years is impossible for almost any company.

Getting there still seemed plausible; it would just take more time.

Meanwhile, things with The Drug Dealer were as stable as the average relationship in a Korean drama: She had arrived in Australia and seemed to be making friends there.

She was going on a lot of yoga/meditation retreats, which I brushed off as a symptom of boredom and funemployment.

I planned to visit her in the next year.

Leaving Korea… for Good

As 2015 began, I decided to leave Korea.

I had a better time there in 2014 than in 2009-2010, but I also had no reason to stay.

So I headed back to the U.S. and planned my next trip: Australia.

My work plan was to continue revamping and expanding the courses, including a private company and IPO case study, three real estate private equity case studies, and a new PowerPoint course.

Nothing was as major as the new Fundamentals course, but I was too tired to work crazy hours for another year.

Another issue was that many of the changes I had implemented with The Marketers required significant maintenance time.

For example, I spent months writing extended email sequences that would encourage customers to use the courses and sign up for more in the future.

If you’re selling diet or exercise guides, and the information never changes, this is a reasonable strategy.

But it created a lot of maintenance work here: I once spent an entire month rewriting emails, updating PDFs, and changing links because the case studies had changed.

These strategies might have boosted sales, but were they worth the time and effort?

Lost in Australia: The Smoke Monster Attacks

In April 2015, I finally went to Melbourne to visit The Drug Dealer.

Within 5 minutes of meeting her, I could tell something was wrong.

Within an hour, I could tell that many things were wrong:

• She was now a hardcore vegetarian.
• She wanted to meditate all day and convert to Buddhism.
• She looked down on the concept of “money,” and didn’t seem to think it was necessary.

In short, she had become a hippie.

And then she uttered the worst phrase that any significant other could utter: “I’ve changed so much.”

That could mean only one thing: she’s found another guy.

My friends encouraged me to leave immediately and cancel everything.

But I didn’t see the point – I would only be in Melbourne for a few weeks, and I would be working most of the time anyway.

Korean Drama, Episode 20

Since everything up to this point had resembled a Korean drama, I decided that it had to end that way as well.

And there was only one proper conclusion: a dramatic confrontation when you wait until the last possible moment to say something important.

It was the middle of May, and we were both headed to the airport to part ways.

Right before she left, I told her I knew everything, and that I knew it early on. We had both changed so much that there was no point in continuing things.

She didn’t deny anything, but she was surprised that I waited so long to say anything.

And then she made one last comment before leaving:

“I am different. But you’ve changed more than me. You no longer smile, laugh, or do anything fun; it’s like you’re not a real person anymore.”

She stepped through the gate, and I never saw her again.

This relationship had lasted almost 7 years, off and on, across multiple countries.

And now it was over.

About Those TPS Reports… Growth Numbers

My favorite methods for getting over personal trauma include burying myself in work and drinking excessively, and I intended to use both here.

I decided to start with burying myself in work, but the news went from bad to worse when I reviewed business results from the first half of 2015.

For the first time, annual growth for the year would be close to 0%.

Growth had varied in past years, but it had never dropped below 30-40%.

Just like a company reporting “non-GAAP financials,” I could come up with excuses for the lack of growth:

• In past years, I had always done 1-2 product launches, but I wasn’t doing one in 2015.
• The pricing changes made it hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
• Deal activity was slowing down, and banks were reducing their hiring.
• The market was saturated; everyone who wanted to work in finance knew the sites and had my guides and courses.

You can create all the “pro-forma” trickery you want, but the GAAP numbers don’t lie.

So what explained the poor results?

Was it related to the market or deal activity?

Had The Marketers and their suggestions backfired?

Was it a waste of time for me to revamp our main modeling course?

D. All of the Above

The truth is, it was a bit of everything.

I had made a critical mistake because I listened too closely to customer feedback.

For years, a vocal minority consisting of 2 people wearing pajamas in their basement complained that our courses were “too short” or “too simple.”

And now, after I had spent thousands of hours revamping them, people said they were too long and complicated.

These weren’t just “idle complaints”; people were violently angry over free updates.

Here are a few representative comments and emails that illustrate the absurdity:

It was like my dating history and customer history were the same: the other party kept changing its mind and complaining about one thing, but wanted something else the whole time.

Revamping the courses was fine, but I should have made the new case studies shorter and simpler.

And then The Marketers, after proving useful as a voice of reason in the early years, were adding less value over time.

Say What?

You might be wondering what “marketing consultants” do.

Here are a few examples:

1. They might improve your branding and USP (unique selling proposition); if you don’t have one, they’ll come up with one.
2. They might look at a page where 2% of visitors buy something and test variations of the page that boost the purchase rate to 4% or 5%.
3. If the average customer is spending $100, they might find ways to boost the average order size to $150 or $200.
4. If you’re not using certain advertising methods, such as Google AdWords or Facebook, they might start campaigns there.

These changes sound small, but when taken together over a long period, they can make a big difference.

And in the early days, they did.

Optimizing your sales prices or pricing can make a massive difference with very little work.

But the 80/20 rule very much applies to marketing.

If you’ve already tried 10 versions of a sales page and spent 4 years optimizing it, outside consultants can’t do much more.

But few people like to admit this fact, so consultants start suggesting more complex strategies after a point.

These strategies may seem reasonable on paper, but they may not always work in real life.

For example, we implemented a complex sequence where readers would receive a free report, then get an offer for a $7 guide, then an offer for a $97 guide, and then an offer for a $347 or $497 course.

This strategy might work in some markets, but there were a few problems here:

1. If someone is going to spend $347 or $497, why bother selling them a $7 guide first?
2. Are there people who want to win $150K-$200K jobs in IB/PE and who are willing to spend only $7 on their initial recruiting efforts? If so, they should give up right now.
3. For someone to jump from a $7 guide to a $347 or $497 one, that $7 guide better be amazing. Most $7 guides are not amazing.
4. Our systems aren’t set up for a high volume of purchases at low prices, so this campaign caused a lot of technical glitches. Read that as: “I had to stay up until 3 AM putting out fires more than once.”

So outside consultants can be helpful, but they also yield diminishing returns over time.

And they will never know your market and customers as well as you do.

How to Drown Your Sorrows with the Hobbits

A business is supposed to get easier over time as you hire more people.

But mine was getting harder as I hired more people.

Ironically, I had quit investment banking to give up money for more free time, but the exact opposite had happened. Maybe I should have just continued!

I felt like Andre Agassi in Open: I hated the business that I had spent much of my life on.

I had already tried burying myself in work, but that backfired, so now it was time for my other “personal trauma coping method”: excessive drinking.

So I went to New Zealand and spent the week in a drunken stupor, hoping to find a few hobbits to share whiskey with me.

No one stepped up, but I did find some good whiskey in Auckland.

What Are You Doing with Your Life?

After my trip, I came back to the U.S. and faced some harsh realities:

• I had created a business that was impossible to sell or hand off to a partner, and which also required a massive amount of work.
• I was behind all my friends in non-work areas – most of them were already married, and some already had kids. I had a string of failed relationships and no hobbies/interests.
• And while growth had been a solid motivator in early years, we weren’t growing anymore.

So all I had going for me was money.

But did that matter?

Just like marketing consultants and Korean girls, money yields diminishing returns after a point.

You start to value free time and options more than another 10% increase in income.

And that’s the biggest problem with starting your own business: you end up trapped.

If you run it for only a year or two, sure, you could downplay the experience and get a normal job once again.

But if you’ve been running it for 10 years, it’s exceptionally difficult to go back to the corporate world.

So you pretty much have to keep running it, or, if you want to quit, start something else.

Yes, potentially you could sell the business, but 99% of businesses sell for very low multiples: think 1x – 3x annual profits or cash flows.

So unless you’ve built a massive company, this option just takes you back to the “start something else” alternative.

There was no easy way out, but I decided to start with something I’ve recommended before: changing my environment.

To Faraway Lands

Back when I lived in Korea, one incredibly cynical acquaintance who hated the country always asked me the same question:

“You could live anywhere in the world. WHY have you spent so many years here? WHY?!!!!!”

He was right.

Sure, I had reasons, but mostly it was a self-limiting belief.

I was repeating the same behavior over and over again… because I had already repeated the same behavior over and over again.

So in June 2015, I planned out the next 6-12 months with the goal of going to all new places:

• Europe (Finland, Sweden, and Estonia)
• South America (Argentina and Chile)
• Africa (South Africa)

I didn’t know anyone in these places, I did almost no research, and I didn’t have a plan or goals.

I just said, “Time to leave!”

A Breath of Fresh Air

These trips turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Meeting new people was easy because there are so many apps, sites, and events for doing just that.

“Not having a plan” didn’t matter because I was still working the entire time, so if I ever got bored, I went back to Excel.

But I became less of a workaholic because it seemed like a waste to sit on the computer for 14 hours per day after traveling halfway around the world.

I wasn’t exactly working less: instead, I just re-allocated my down time from TV shows and reading to activities and socializing.

But the most important shift was in my mindset.

In the past, I had always been chasing something.

I set goals, such as 10x growth, and did everything imaginable to pursue them – even when the goal made no sense.

And then I followed females around trying to make relationships work, tried to keep business partners satisfied no matter what, and tried to stay in touch with “legacy friends” when there was no reason to do so.

I dropped all that and stopped caring.

My dating success rate skyrocketed.

There’s no better way to achieve success than to put yourself out there as an attractive option, but then not care about convincing anyone to do anything.

Or even better: take the opposite approach and tell them not to do something.

In sales, this is called “the takeaway close,” and it works remarkably well because people always want something more when you explain why they shouldn’t want it.

This new mindset actually worked too well.

I started getting distracted by too many text messages and emails, so I had to cut back a bit.

And dating had become so “paint-by-numbers” that I disabled all the apps and websites a few months after starting this experiment.

Cutting the Non-Core Assets and the Non-Core Habits

I started implemented similar policies in this business.

If someone emailed us at 3 AM, sent a 100-spreadsheet Excel file, and asked me to balance the Balance Sheet by 8 AM, I did not spend the next 5 hours fixing it.

If someone was annoyed that we wouldn’t draft a 20-slide presentation for them, we issued a refund.

If someone left an angry comment or response, I ignored it.

In short, I became more detached.

Cutting my non-core habits was a good start, but I had to do something more painful next: cut my non-core assets.

Slash and Burn

The best companies are the most focused companies.

This principle explains why Yahoo floundered and failed, while Google and Facebook are now worth hundreds of billions of dollars: they focused on 1-2 things and did them really well.

Working with The Marketers, guest writers, freelancers, and other companies over the years had created a lot of non-core assets and obligations.

People wanted me to promote their products/services, publish their articles, and in some cases, even run their marketing for them.

So I dropped many of these efforts.

I used to promote the NY School of Finance every quarter, but I cut back on that.

I wanted to make the podcast into more of a regular series, but I put it on hold because of the low ROI.

I wanted to publish more regular infographics, but I stopped because they were incredibly time-consuming to review and edit.

And then other guides and services were all put on hold or cut.

I didn’t like saying “No,” but it was now more important than saying “Yes.”

Even after all these cuts, there were still two big tasks remaining:

1. Deciding what to do with The Marketers.
2. Deciding what my long-term plan

Marketing vs. Ego

When it became clear that growth was slowing down and that the more complex strategies didn’t work so well, I knew I’d have to change my agreement with The Marketers.

But I made my typical mistake: I waited too long to make the change.

Almost a year later (May 2016), I proposed a lower-priced plan where they would be responsible for “maintenance” tasks.

They responded with a counter-proposal for a higher-priced plan, and they pointed out how some of their strategies had, in fact, generated sales.

They were correct, but it was also tough to argue that it made a big difference relative to my spending.

All that work had generated maybe 1.2 – 1.5x what I had spent on it.

But if I factored in my own time putting out fires, editing and revising documents, and fixing technical problems, it fell into “break-even” territory.

Still, I leaned toward accepting their counter-proposal at first: I wasn’t losing money, and something new might work well in the future.

BUT one thing bothered me.

On a conference call to discuss this change, one person kept probing me on why I wanted a less-expensive plan.

My reasons were crystal-clear: diminishing returns and a desire to save time/money.

But that explanation wasn’t good enough: he started asking about my long-term plans for the business and how I had been “spending more time traveling lately.”

They didn’t directly state it, but the implication was clear: I wanted to cut back on marketing because I was lazy and didn’t want to work as much anymore.

Yes, really. Me.

This one rubbed me the wrong way.

First off, personal matters shouldn’t impact business planning.

Second, yes, I was “spending more time traveling,” but I was still doing a ton of work at the same time.

It wasn’t “Now I’m in Buenos Aires; time to spend 10 hours a day drinking wine!”; it was “Now I’m in Buenos Aires; time to work all day and go check out a new restaurant for 1 hour at night.”

And finally, this implication didn’t address the real issue: growth.

So I stuck to something closer to my proposal and went with a reduced rate that included mostly maintenance tasks.

Long-Term Survival

On the other hand, The Marketers had raised a good point: What was my long-term plan?

Could I keep things running for decades if the business was dependent on me and required non-stop work?

Or would I just have to wind things down at some point?

These were broad questions, but two main factors influenced the answers:

1. Lifetime support obligations. In other words, a big “unfunded liability.”
2. The need to update and revamp the courses over time.

The Worst Business Policy Ever

When I first launched BIWS back in 2009, I made a bold decision: I gave customers free lifetime access, updates, and support.

There’s a reason why almost no other company in the world offers this: it’s a bad idea.

Most customers don’t even value it highly: it’s a nice bonus, but it’s not the main reason anyone signs up for a product or service.

But if a lot of people start taking it seriously, the economics can quickly break down: an upfront payment of $97 might result in $1,000 of support costs over time.

This point doesn’t matter if you only have 10 customers, but with 30,000 customers the risks increase significantly.

PayPal has also had major issues with lifetime access – they almost banned us several times for offering it.

And any acquirer or investor would be very hesitant to put in money into a business that had this kind of massive, unfunded liability.

But it was difficult to change this policy because doing so would affect every single account retroactively.

I knew that people who had signed up 5 years ago and barely used the site would start demanding refunds if their accounts stopped working.

Some team members argued that we should bite the bullet, change it to a 2 or 3-year access period, and issue refunds to anyone who complained.

Others said we should leave lifetime access in place, but limit the support obligation to 2-3 years.

And then others thought we shouldn’t change anything because doing so would lead to fiery Armageddon.

But none of these changes would solve the core problem: a small number of students abusing, or potentially abusing, the support services.

Sure, we could limit the support to 2-3 years, but people would say they didn’t know about it, claim they signed up before we changed the policy, etc.

So I just started limiting our responses and saying “No” more often.

I started giving shorter, more direct responses instead of writing detailed treatises.

If someone asked for something we couldn’t help with, we politely said, “No,” and offered a refund if it didn’t match their expectations.

I don’t know if this will work forever, but it’s more sustainable than our old approach.

The Course Creation Conundrum

While the newer courses and case studies were much better, I also realized that this practice of completely re-doing courses wasn’t sustainable.

If a product takes 2 months to create, it’s reasonable to release a new version every 2-3 years.

But if it takes 2 years to create, that stops being reasonable.

So was it necessary?

Putting aside questions of depth and quality, would the content start “looking too old” at some point?

Or did it not matter that much?

I would put this one in the “Vocal minority cares, but few others do” category.

Yes, some people will complain if something seems old, but most people just want something that works.

There is probably some upper limit on age; maybe 10-15 years?

I doubt it’s as high as 50 years because things change a lot over that much time.

But in theory, I could keep things running forever by constantly re-doing courses:

• Year 1: Delete and re-do Course A to make it look newer.
• Year 2: Delete and re-do Course B to make it look newer.
• Year 3: Delete and re-do Course C to make it look newer.
• [Repeat for Courses D – J through Year 10]
• Year 11: Ten years have passed; time to delete and re-do Course A once again.
• Year 12: Delete and re-do Course B.

But that seemed like a miserable existence.

I don’t mind creating new material or new courses that cover new topics; I actually enjoy it.

But redoing everything to make it look “newer” each year would be like torture in a Soviet labor camp.

So I made my biggest mindset shift yet: I realized that I might have to shut down everything if it came to that.

And I accepted it.

I would still revamp the older courses and guides, not to boost sales, but because I want to create the best products possible.

And I would still release at least 1-2 new courses in the future.

But I wouldn’t get into the “Do 1-2 years of repetitive work just to keep things going” game.

If complaints started piling up about a specific course, I would turn off sign-ups and make it bonus content.

And if that happened everywhere, I would have to find a new profession.

It would be a big change.

But maybe it was about time.

Goals, Purpose, and 10x Growth

We’re now close to the present day (July 2016), and Part 5 of my story ends here.

I don’t have a long list of takeaways, but I will leave you with one message.

The biggest mistake I made was the original goal I set: growing by 10x within 2 years.

The problem wasn’t the size of the goal.

The problem was the purpose of the goal: nothing.

It sounded like a big goal, and it was, but there was no reason for it beyond “getting bigger” or “earning more.”

Even if I had gotten there, it wouldn’t have impacted my life in any way.

But more importantly, it wouldn’t have helped you in any way.

Yes, dream big.

Aim high.

Do the impossible.

But make sure your goals have a purpose behind them, and if not, re-think them.

And even if your goals are big and have a solid purpose, don’t get too caught up in the chase.

Make yourself appealing.

Become the best option.

Put yourself out there.

And then, let them come to you.

The Rest of the Series:

[catlist name=brian-life-story numberposts=-1 orderby=title order=asc]

The post My Life Story, Part 5: What Do You Do When You Start to Hate Your Business? (2013 – 2016) appeared first on Mergers & Inquisitions.

When the Dark Lord Sauron returns after hundreds of years of captivity, the easiest way to defeat him is to go straight to Mt. Doom and toss the Ring of Power into the lava to ensure its total destruction.

Or… you could get distracted by random side quests, fight a giant spider or three, and get tempted to keep the Ring for yourself.

In 2011-2012, I fell into the same trap that Frodo did – and the same trap that Peter Jackson did with The Hobbit trilogy – I got distracted by random side quests, unrelated adventures, and other nonsense until I finally came to my senses and destroyed the Ring.

Besides my battles with orcs, ring wraiths, and the Dark Lord himself, here’s what else you can look forward to in Part 4 of my Life Story (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first):

• What actually happened after the partnership with WallStreetOasis fell apart, and how many kidneys I had to sell to survive.
• How I hired people in the most haphazard way possible: if you ever start a company, do the exact opposite of this.
• How our Cost of Capital web series got started and the one big point I wish I could change, looking back on it.
• The single good decision I made during this time that helped reduce the fallout from these mistakes.
• And a fairly blunt discussion of whether or not starting this business was worth it (hint: you may want to keep your day job).

Yes, everything from Sauron to the Ring of Power to selling my own body parts to fighting giant spiders: this will be a fun one.

Let’s get started:

The Day After the End of the World

At the end of Part 3, I left you with a cliffhanger ending: I had just lost the partnership we had with WallStreetOasis and it was unclear whether or not the business would survive.

Since I’m an extremely rational person, I instantly assumed I was going to lose all my income, become homeless, and die out on the street.

I even thought about quitting entirely and going back to “normal job” land, all on the basis of assumed future losses.

I woke up the first day after losing the partnership, turned on my laptop, and… nothing happened.

Course sign-ups continued, and although traffic and sales for the month of June 2011 were down over previous months, it wasn’t a dramatic fall-off… yet.

July Ambiguity

Then we entered July and the data got more ambiguous. There was a definite drop compared to May and June, which was unusual since fall recruiting was approaching.

But two other changes were also taking place at the same time:

1. The marketing team I had spoken to back in June was now setting up paid advertising and revamping our promotional materials – after losing the partnership, I decided I had to hire them as a hedge.
2. Traffic also increased substantially in the July-August period, partially because of Google’s search algorithm updates and partially because of consistent content production on the site over the years.

By the end of August, traffic and sales had both increased substantially.

I’ll never know 100% what was responsible for this – was it the additional marketing and traffic?

Or had my gut feeling (huge audience overlap between the two sites) been correct all along?

There was no way to tell – looking back on it, all I know is that I would have been a complete idiot to have quit at this point:

Source: Joel on Software.

OK, maybe the “adoption curve” wasn’t that much of a hockey stick but you get the idea…

You Can’t “Fake” Caring About People

Something else also played a role: word of mouth.

In the age of social media, you can’t “fake” giving a crap about your audience and customers, because word spreads rapidly.

Likewise, if you do put in the time to respond and be as helpful as possible, word also spreads rapidly.

Let’s be honest: many other companies in this market really do NOT care about offering support, answering your questions, or simply being real with you.

And they certainly won’t stay up until 4 AM giving you feedback on your case studies and Excel models, as I often do.

One Bad Idea? Why Not Make It Three Bad Ideas!

After resolving this minor struggle-for-survival, it was time for my next brilliant plan: pursue not just one, not just two, but THREE questionable ideas.

LeBron James would have been proud of me.

Idea #1: Hiring (More of) a Team

Around this time, I was also running out of ideas – after 4 years of writing about investment banking, I had exhausted my own personal experience.

So I thought I could “outsource” the content for this site and reduce my own workload by hiring a team of guest writers …

…Not fully understanding that managing this team and training everyone would also consume a huge amount of time.

My announcement post was “OK,” but my own response was downright silly.

Rather than picking 1-2 new writers, I selected over 10 new writers, under the logic that everyone had a different background and could write about different topics.

Training the new writers, editing article submissions, and following up and asking for new articles every few weeks became a 2nd full-time job.

Despite my own incompetence, we got some great features from all the new writers.

The process was my fault for not putting strict rules and standards in place, and for taking on way more than I could handle personally.

Idea #2: Producing a Web Series!

Around the same time, I had another thought:

“Aha! I am obsessed with TV shows. Instead of locking myself in a dungeon and creating 5,000 hours of Excel videos for the next 30 years, maybe I should take a break and make my own TV show!”

So I took a “break” (“break” = working 8 hours per day rather than 12-14) in the summer of 2011 and wrote the scripts for what would become Cost of Capital.

It’s not that difficult to get your own dramatic web TV series produced if:

1. You’re paying for it yourself, and you keep expenses low;
2. You’ve already written all the scripts, and they’re coherent; and
3. You have friends in Hollywood with connections to the web series community.

I turned to my friend Goldie, who lived in LA at the time and who knew other producers there.

We got a Director and several others on board, and everything seemed to be proceeding smoothly…

Or so I thought at the time.

Idea #3: Getting Into the Dumbest Relationship of My Life and Leaving Australia

After leaving the US and moving to Asia in 2009 and then leaving Asia at the end of 2010, I had planned to live in Australia for the rest of 2011… but those plans fell apart a few months into my stay there.

In late June I went back to the US for a friend’s wedding, and driven by a toxic combination of alcohol and self-delusion, I turned what should have been a short-term fling into a serious relationship.

Within 2 weeks, I knew it would never work out: there was a big age difference (I was older), a difference in maturity levels and personalities, and friends and family members on both sides hated did not exactly like each other.

But rather than cutting my losses, I succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy and kept at it – like a trader who repeatedly ignored his stop-loss level even as a stock’s price plummeted.

And not only did I keep at it, but I also decided to move back to the US and live in New York City in the fall of 2011, partially due to this relationship and partially because I had no reason to be in Australia.

A move halfway across the world, a massive expansion effort, a new web series, and a toxic relationship, all while I was running both sites full-time.

What could possibly go wrong?

Dangling from the Edge of Sanity

So I arrived back in NYC in September 2011 and attempted to stay alive while doing everything above.

I was also adding dozens of hours of new video to the Bank Modeling course, but my pace was glacial because it was impossible to work in long, uninterrupted stretches when putting out fires from all sources.

Those “fires” also consisted of spending time responding to criticism from readers who didn’t like the new guest writers on the site.

I understood why some readers weren’t happy, but many of the reactions were way overblown.

We’re dealing with a website… you are not, in fact, going to die if someone other than me writes an article here.

One day, I spent 10 hours dealing with negative comments and emails, guest writers asking me why their work was being attacked, and then making even more edits to upcoming articles because I was becoming paranoid.

“Damn,” I said, “Did I really start this site because of a book called ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’? What was I thinking? Can I get a refund?”

Web Series Witchcraft

“To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.”

-Alfred Hitchcock

Meanwhile, work on Cost of Capital continued in LA.

Just one small problem: my scripts needed serious work, and people were “afraid” to tell me.

The basic problem was that I couldn’t decide if it was education or entertainment.

It’s very, very difficult to do both well, which is why documentaries are categorized separately from feature films.

The series ended up being more “education” than entertainment, though I inserted random fiction throughout.

As a result, it was too “boring” to gain mainstream appeal.

For this site’s audience, of course, it was great – but I had wanted to produce something that would go beyond M&I.

It needed more “pizzazz” and more human drama, but since I was funding the production no one had the balls to tell me, “Brian, rewrite your scripts or hire a real writer.”

One Bracelet to Rule Them All

The question of what would go wrong first was answered sooner than expected – in the middle of October, about a month after I arrived back in NYC.

On that day, the girl I was dating (for all of ~3 months, by this point) marched me over to 5th Avenue and revealed the gift she “wanted me to buy for her.”

My only clue was that it “had been on Entourage before.”

We walked into the store and I saw it right away: it was the gold bracelet that Amanda (the female agent Vince switched to when he got upset with Ari Gold once) give to Vince back in season 3 of Entourage.

The only problem is that it was $5,600 USD.

Visions of Sauron breaking out of captivity and possessing this bracelet, rather than his usual Ring of Power, filled my head.

Predictably Irrational Decision-Making

At this point, of course, I should have ended it, cut off all communication, run the other way, and immediately moved away from New York.

Instead, I did the dumbest thing possible: rather than saying yes or no, I attempted to “compromise”… which inevitably led to more drama, which eventually, yes… led to me giving in and buying it just to avoid more months of fighting.

I’ve made a lot of business and personal mistakes over the years, but this was easily the worst personal mistake I’ve ever made.

When you work crazy hours constantly, your judgment in non-work-related areas gets impaired – which is what happened here.

Any sane person would have instantly ended things, but my “sanity meter” was nearly empty and I was running on fumes.

Luckily, someone was about to slap some sense into me…

How I Met Yoda and How He Changed My Life

A few weeks later, something equally shocking happened: I met Yoda.

One of the head members of the marketing team I had been working with came to visit the US, and we met up for a day-long planning session.

I came into it with an ambitious goal: I wanted to grow the business by 10x within 2 years.

That type of growth is close to impossible, even for successful venture-backed start-ups – let alone a small business in a niche market.

But I was incredibly determined, mostly because I had already put an ungodly amount of time into the business and wanted to take it as far as possible.

My conversation with Yoda went something like this:

“Me: So here’s what I’m planning for next year: more interviews, more courses, and expanding what we already have. Oh, and this new web series, and more guest writers… did I tell you I’m already researching even more specialized courses?

Yoda: Your goal is to grow by 10x in 2 years. How much revenue will all of that generate?

Me: Well, if we sell XX new course that could bring in…

Yoda: But you’ve already covered the major areas. These new courses would appeal to fewer people, and they would require 2,000+ hours of intensive labor to create. On an hourly basis, you would earn more working at McDonald’s.

Me: OK, but I really want to cover everything… and besides, what else can I do?

Yoda: Your plan is completely ass-backwards.

Fix the existing problems with your business first:

1. Your most advanced courses are the cheapest ones. WTF?
2. Your websites look like an elementary school kid’s art projects, and the UI and features need a revamp.
3. You’re not following up with customers after they sign up, and you’re not encouraging them to use the site or to sign up for any other courses they might need.
4. Your existing marketing is ineffective because you’re not describing the benefits of your courses in much detail.
5. You should improve your existing courses by adding features like certifications and transcripts that customers want.
6. You’ve been relying almost 100% on free traffic, and you’ve never put serious money into paid advertising.
7. If you want to grow to that level, you need to get schools and major firms using these courses… which you means you need sales reps to sell to them.

Me: Good points.

Yoda: So how serious are you about actually growing by 10x in 2 years?

Because if you stick to your current path and spend all your time on training writers, editing articles, creating niche courses, and producing a web series, I guarantee you will never reach that goal.”

I could not implement everything above on my own, so I would definitely need outside help – if I decided to go through with his suggestions at all.

Decisions and Actions

I didn’t spend much time considering my options since his suggestions were the only viable options.

It had already been an epic struggle to create courses on banks/insurance, oil & gas, and real estate, and those were the “easy” areas – going into even more obscure verticals and then committing to updating those courses over the next 20-30 years was out of the question.

Plus, managing article submissions from the new writers was killing me and it didn’t add much traffic to the site. It was 200% extra effort for a 10% gain.

And while the web series was fun, I knew I couldn’t spend much time on it if I had a ridiculous goal like growing 10x in 2 years.

Time to Turn the Ship Around

So by the end of 2011, I took Yoda’s suggestions to heart and completely changed my plans for the next year.

Peter (he’s probably answered your questions if you’ve signed up for one of our courses) had been working on a new course on venture capital & start-up financing, but I had to put it on hold indefinitely (sorry, Peter!).

I stopped researching even more niche areas, and started planning how to improve the existing courses and switch our shopping cart and other systems to something more robust instead.

And I made plans for fixing the course pricing, and improving the overall marketing and site design.

There was still some time for battling giant spiders on side quests – I visited LA for part of the Cost of Capital filming, for example.

But my focus shifted dramatically.

Eye of the Tiger

Six months of frantic work followed this decision. Picture that training montage in one of the Rocky movies, but even more intense.

Working with a larger group now, I went to work on a major redesign of the BIWS site, all the upgrades I mentioned, and improving the free tutorials we use to promote the courses.

It was a bit easier than creating instructional videos, but content creation is still content creation… so my hours continued to skew toward “crazy.”

From the beginning, I had always thought certifications were silly… but there was definitely value in adding quizzes to the courses, and certifications would be easy if quizzes were already in place.

Plus, we had received so many requests to add both quizzes and certifications that I couldn’t ignore them any longer.

But I also had no capacity to do the certifications 100% on my own, so I hired someone else to write many of the questions. Editing still took time, but it took much less time than writing and editing.

Selling to institutions got off to a much slower start (it’s tough, and sales cycles are long), but that also started in 2012 and expanded even more in 2013.

Outside of Work…

Meanwhile, as I started focusing on business 100% after my “vacation” in 2011, other things fell by the wayside.

I didn’t have much time to oversee the web series, so it was handed off to the team in LA until I saw the first trailer in the summer of 2012.

But after months of drama and an incredibly stupid move on my part in 2011, my relationship seemed to be improving in the early part of 2012…

And as the middle of 2012 approached, there was a sudden improvement.

Most of the drama went away, the complaints that I worked too much diminished, and I found myself less stressed out each day.

“Finally! Maybe this will work out.”

Or so I thought.

Interview Guide – Back Again?

I was in for another surprise by the middle of 2012: the interview guide we offered – and that saved the site in 2008 – was in serious trouble.

More competitive interview guides were emerging, and some had features that our version, at the time, lacked.

And we were getting more comments to the effect of: “Why is this better than X interview guide or Y interview guide?”

Sales were going down, refunds were going up, and it wasn’t going to sell in its current form for much longer.

If I had 4 months of dedicated time and some help with the writing, I knew I could make the existing version 10x better.

So I completely changed directions once again, put marketing projects on hold, and locked myself in a room, cut off all friends/family/outside distractions, and got to work revamping the interview guide.

Rather than just presenting questions and answers, I wanted to explain the concepts in the first place and give you a way to test yourself via quiz questions with automatic scoring.

I ended up hiring 5 other writers to help with it, from the hundreds of quiz questions to the massively expanded “fit” section – and even after all that, by early August 2012 it still wasn’t where I wanted it to be.

But remember the main lesson from Part 1 of my story: you have to get your product out the door, even if it’s not perfect.

There was another clear deadline this time: recruiting season.

I had to finish this by the middle of August, even if it meant pulling all-nighters and going cash flow-negative for a while.

Other friends looked at me and said:

“Really, Brian? You’re in Year 5 of this business, it’s now 20x bigger than when you started in 2008, you’re not in a desperate financial situation anymore, and you’re still pulling all-nighters?”

Being my usual friendly self, I said they were stupid and ignored their questions.

Launches, Launches, and More Launches

A flurry of launches followed in August and September of 2012.

First, I gave up on my perfectionism and released the imperfect-but-still-greatly-improved interview guide on August 16th, which resulted in a “Wow, this is the best interview guide I’ve ever seen” reaction from many who signed up.

Then, in early September, we launched the Cost of Capital web series after holding a premiere party in LA.

Hundreds of people showed up, even though I had barely had any time to promote it.

But if you have a big event in LA with free alcohol, hundreds of people will tend to show up.

The series turned out better than I expected, even though the original issue of entertainment vs. education lingered.

The producers, director, actors, and everyone else involved all did a fantastic job, and the problematic area – the writing – was entirely my fault.

The new BIWS redesign and the quizzes and certifications were almost complete as well, though those launched at the end of 2012 into early 2013.

“Two launches done, a third one coming up, and hey, my personal life might just be getting back on track,” I thought.

So it was time to take a break, go back to my serialized TV addiction, and catch up on Homeland Season 1 right before Season 2 started at the end of September.

We’re Like Good Friend, Sharing a House

I got to that episode in Season 1 where Saul’s wife Mira, after being estranged for a long period when he’s busy with work, says, “We live together, but we’re not really married. We’re like good friends, sharing a house.”

And then it hit me: the exact same thing had happened to me.

Nothing had been “resolved,” and the apparent lack of “drama” just meant that we had been barely talking at all…

…Which is easy to forget when you’ve locked yourself in a room for 4 months to avoid distractions.

After I took the time to come up for oxygen and look at the outside world, I realized there were too many “unexplained events” on her side to ignore.

Too many disappearances without explanations, too many field trips off with other friends, and no real idea of what was even going on anymore.

If I asked directly, I wouldn’t have gotten a real answer – plus, I had this epiphany around 3 AM one night and normal people were asleep by then.

So I had to act like the NSA and use electronic surveillance to get what I was after.

She had been using one of my old-and-no-longer-in-use laptops for the past year, which was conveniently still in my apartment (as was most of her stuff).

I sat down, thinking I would have to go to extraordinary efforts to find incriminating evidence…

How to Beat the NSA at its Own Game

But when I opened the laptop, it was much easier than expected: she had left her email account, Facebook account, and almost every other account logged in and open.

I took a quick look through, and the evidence was pretty horrifying.

In effect, she had been running her own “Ponzi Scheme,” but with men rather than clients’ money.

Of course, she had been having multiple affairs – that was expected.

The unexpected part was how she used each person for a different purpose, from getting into clubs to psychotherapy to even more expensive gifts.

Oh, and the superhuman efforts to prevent everyone from finding out.

It was the Bernie Madoff of relationships, and I had to get out before I went down in flames.

I went to work saving every single email, Facebook message, and other file I could find, and putting them in my “evidence jar.”

Wake Me Up When September Ends

What followed could best be described as a Taylor Swift song (maybe this one) crossed with 500 Days of Summer crossed with Gossip Girl.

Rather than ending things right away, confrontation only resulted in… an even more muddled relationship.

I had a brief thought that I could “compromise” once again… before coming to my senses and realizing that I had to immediately exit and enact some “asset recovery.”

So I immediately got the Ring of Power back, along with some other foolishly-purchased items.

Sure, it had been a massive waste of time, but at least I recovered all my assets – unlike Bernie Madoff’s victims.

I was tempted to act like Frodo and Gollum and toss it into Mt. Doom to save Middle-Earth, but reselling it to save Middle-Earth was a wiser move.

I might not have been able to defeat Sauron for all eternity, but at least someone else would have to deal with the Dark Lord now.

There wasn’t even a Scouring of the Shire (I never heard from her again), so I outperformed the hobbits.

To a New Site and Beyond

It had already been an exhausting year, but I wasn’t done yet.

The new BIWS site, while “almost done,” still had a lot of bugs and unfinished pieces.

So I had to spend the entire month of November overseeing other people who were testing the site, testing a fair amount myself, and cracking the whip to get it out the door.

As with the new interview guide and dozens of other projects, it was never going to be perfect but I had to ship it ASAP anyway.

I told everyone, “OK, we’re launching this by the first week of December. I am not letting this drag on through Christmas / New Year’s. I don’t care if I’m traveling or this requires a week of all-nighters, it has to be finished. Cut features if necessary.”

And it worked.

In the process, I set a new personal record: only 12 hours of sleep in 5 days.

But the new site was a massive improvement over the old one and we instantly got positive feedback… and even more when the certifications and quizzes were launched after that.

New York, I Hate You XOXO

With the new site and the other launches done and no real reason to be in NYC anymore, I decided I was done with New York.

If you have to live there for work, that’s one thing – but my physical location is irrelevant, and I could save far more in other cities/states.

Plus, I needed a change of pace and a new location after the mildly traumatic past year.

So I planned to depart by January/February of 2013.

New Plans for the New Year

I was also going to change my business strategy for the next year.

I could no longer spend so much time managing a large group of writers, so I would go back to writing much of the content, with occasional contributions from others.

It was the right move to bring on guest writers, we did get some great features from them, and they did the best they could have – but I wasn’t good enough at running a tight process to keep it going in full force.

And if we did another web series, I would have to hire a real writer to ensure that it had more mainstream appeal.

My own time was best spent on what had already worked well: improving both sites, the existing courses, our overall marketing process, and overseeing institutional sales.

In other words, everything Yoda had told me about back in that November 2011 meeting.

If I had unlimited time and money, I would publish 10 high-quality articles per day, create 500 courses, and produce a TV series every month.

In the real world, though, you have to say “no” to most opportunities so that you can focus on the best ones instead.

It was the same lesson I had learned the hard way back in 2008, but had lost sight of in the years in between.

With that in mind, I closed out 2012, got ready to leave NYC, and looked ahead to the next year and beyond.

Sauron might have been defeated, but my work in Middle-Earth wasn’t finished yet.

A new age was just beginning.

Transaction Summary

So why did I write this series in the first place?

Two main reasons:

1. To Show You What It Takes

Contrary to what you might have heard, starting and running an online business is extremely difficult.

The biggest misconception is that once you release a product or service, you’re “done” – which is 100% false.

Do you think the world stands still just because you created something?

Nope – everyone is on the move, market conditions change, and new companies and products pop up all the time.

You need to innovate, or else your competitors will kill you, murder your family, burn down your house, and use the flames from your burning house to cook your families’ bodies before eating them.

It really is a lifelong journey, and you should NOT start a business unless you plan to stick with it 100% for a very, very long time.

Besides the time required, there are other trade-offs: I don’t have real “exit opportunities,” and I would have to streamline and simplify things if I ever wanted to raise a family.

Finally, it’s extremely isolating.

Can you imagine going a day without speaking to another human being in real life? What about an entire week, or several weeks?

If you can’t imagine that, you will NOT succeed in online business – at least if your role is content creation and marketing.

Was it all worth it?

From a purely financial perspective, I’d have to say, “No, it was not worth it – if you count the true amount of time I’ve spent and will continue to spend on everything.”

It would have been easier to join a venture-backed start-up, get even a tiny percentage of equity, and ride that out for 5-10 years… well, assuming the start-up became moderately successful.

Once you take into account non-financial factors, such as getting to work wherever I want, not having to deal with idiotic mid-level managers or office politics, and having complete control over my own schedule, it’s a closer call.

Even with those points factored in, though, I’d have a very tough time recommending this type of business to most people – it’s just too much work and too much isolation.

You need to have a unique personality to succeed in this field, and most people are better off joining existing companies or working in more of a team environment.

2. To Show You What Is Possible

On the other hand, you have to judge me by my actions – not my words.

I’ve been doing this for over 6 years now. If it were really that bad, would I keep doing it?

And would I plan to keep running it indefinitely into the future?

While it’s extremely difficult in some ways, it’s easier than normal jobs in other ways.

There are no “gatekeepers.”

You don’t need to get “permission” from anyone.

And you don’t have to deal with high-maintenance VPs, government bureaucrats, or any annoying/incompetent people.

When I started out, I had almost no credentials, qualifications, or relevant experience.

There were already entrenched competitors, existing sites, and established ways of doing things.

But none of that mattered.

If you are willing to out-work and out-invest everyone else in the market, sacrifice more, and hustle harder than your competition, anything is possible.

So if you don’t have the right experience, the right degree, the right company name, or anything else, don’t let that stop you.

Instead, take it as inspiration to prove the naysayers wrong and achieve the impossible anyway.

If you take nothing else from this series, take that.

Questions? You know what to do.

The Rest of the Series:

[catlist name=brian-life-story numberposts=-1 orderby=title order=asc]

The post My Life Story, Part 4: How I Defeated Sauron and Saved Middle-Earth (2011 – 2012) appeared first on Mergers & Inquisitions.

In June of 2011, I was very close to quitting this business, shutting down both sites, and deleting everything.

You’ve mostly read about success so far: overcoming obstacles, launching products, and yes, even surviving the occasional Korean girl who kept showing up at my apartment unannounced to steal my tomatoes.

Today, though, my story is about failure.

That is the part of entrepreneurial stories that never gets publicized, which is tragic – because it’s also the most representative of what it’s really like to run a business.

I made several huge mistakes from 2010 to 2011 that almost led to a complete shut-down, and today I’m going to cover all of them.

Here’s what’s coming up in Part 3 of my life story (see Part 1 and Part 2 first):

• Why I decided to leave Asia and never come back (or so I thought at the time) after living there for close to 2 years.
• Why creating the industry-specific modeling courses was ridiculously difficult, and how I made the biggest mistake with the easiest part of the process.
• The real reason(s) why our partnership with Wall Street Oasis fell apart, and why you should never rely heavily on external partners.
• How a visitor named “Raj Verma” misinterpreted one statement in a course outline and then blackmailed us, causing a gigantic mess known as “Raj-gate.”

Out of the entire series, this part most closely resembles The Social Network.

The Winklevoss Twins may even make an appearance if you’re paying close attention.

Did You Just Make the Dumbest Decision Ever?

Here’s where we left off if you’re joining this series midway through:

• I launched the site in late 2007, gained a lot of traction in the first year, almost quit after the Wall Street collapse in September 2008, but then saved the site by the end of the year with the interview guide I launched.
• I had met a female who claimed she was a professional drug dealer at a speed dating event in Beijing – and, obviously, I decided it was smart to follow her to Korea, where I had lived for almost a year by the middle of 2010.
• I spent the 2009-2010 period trying really hard to kill myself by working like crazy on video production and ignoring everything else in life – it was sometimes fun, but mostly just highly productive.
• And I had just re-launched all the modeling courses successfully… only to see everything fall apart in the aftermath as sales and traffic both fell off a cliff, partially because we split a single course into multiple courses.

Immediate Problems

The new course format was too confusing and there were too many sign-up options: what had been 1 big course was now split into 3 separate ones (Excel, basic modeling, advanced modeling) and 6 different sign-up options (3 * 2 * 1).

It’s not necessarily “wrong” to offer options, but you still have to guide people in a specific direction.

Too many options without a clear direction leads to indecision and lower sales – just ask Dan Ariely.

Too many readers were signing up for the Excel course because it was the cheapest, and because we didn’t make it clear that mastering Excel was NOT the same as mastering financial modeling.

So we changed that around, removed the standalone Excel course sign-up, and cut the sign-up options down from 6 to 3: the Excel and basic course together, the advanced course, or a bundle with both of those at a discounted rate.

That didn’t change things overnight, but it did make the sign-up options less confusing and it led to more sign-ups for the bundle package in the long-term.

To his credit, Patrick from WSO suggested some of these things when he saw the big drop-off after the launch finished in April 2010.

“Ah,” I thought, “this partnership is going so well! It’s great to have someone else also thinking through these issues and making good suggestions.”

So far so good, right?

Problems Solved?

Those changes, plus waiting a few months for recruiting to pick up, solved my major problem at the time: a complete drop-off in the business.

But then 2 other big problems emerged:

• Living in Asia was getting depressing because most of my friends had left or were leaving by that point, I was in a mediocre and unfulfilling relationship, and everyday annoyances were driving me nuts.
• I had also promised to create a PowerPoint course and industry-specific modeling courses on real estate, banks, and oil & gas within the next year, even though I knew exactly nothing about any of them when I made that promise.

A Food Tour Guide… or a Black Belt?

To get around the boredom, I tried a comical number of random activities:

• Jiu-jitsu
• Kick-boxing
• Yoga (I’m normally too embarrassed to admit this one)
• Ballroom dancing
• Paintball / survival games
• Homebrewing
• And my favorite: I went on a few “food tours” to learn more about the culture, and ended up explaining Korea to foreigners who just landed and didn’t know anything. The guy running it was “impressed” with my knowledge and asked if I would become a tour guide. Nice thought, but I was still just a stupid white guy in Asia.

I felt like Ali G or Borat showing up to some of these events and asking nonsensical questions while everyone else was taking notes and looking very serious.

Industry-Specific Modeling – Mission: Impossible?

Creating the PowerPoint course was more difficult than expected because there were no good references or other courses on it, but you only use a fraction of PowerPoint’s features in finance – so it was still easier than the full modeling courses.

The industry-specific courses, by contrast, turned into an epic battle of Biblical portions.

I pored through books, other training programs, and random models sent in by readers – and I even contacted dozens of bankers in these industry groups to ask questions.

If you think bankers are unresponsive when you’re networking with them, try sending them 10-15 detailed questions on FIG accounting and see how responsive they are.

One time, I played phone tag with a friend-of-a-friend across multiple continents over the span of 2-3 weeks.

Finally we got in touch and I asked all my questions… only to realize that he didn’t even have good answers.

He had worked at a top bank and then gone onto a top PE firm, but he couldn’t explain (in detail) how to make revenue growth assumptions for a company in a certain industry.

I got similar results elsewhere: people didn’t know the answer, or I got 10 different answers from 10 different people.

What Next?

I thought about stripping down the entire project and creating shorter, 3-5 hour long “summary” modules for the 3 industries instead of extended, 20-30 hour long case studies.

I could just say that my plans had changed.

But then I realized that would be a HUGE mistake.

The problem? Competitors had full-fledged courses on these industries that were more than just short summaries.

Just to see how good they were, I paid $3,000+ of my own money to sign up and go through all of them…

And I couldn’t believe how much they were charging for courses that weren’t that great.

Releasing shorter, cheaper courses would have immediately put me at a disadvantage because I would have been saying, “Our material isn’t as in-depth as competitors’ and these are just short summaries… but look, it’s so cheap!”

You never want to be seen as the “budget option” in any market.

That strategy only works for Wal-Mart, and selling niche financial modeling courses isn’t quite the same as being a soul-less retailer bent on world domination.

So the plan was set: go all-out on these courses, create better material, and sell it for the same price as other courses in the market… right?

One Red Bull IV, Please

In Part 2, I told you how I stuck to a grueling pace in 2009 – 2010 where I was often working 12-14 hours per day, every day (“real work” – not 50% downtime like in investment banking).

I upped the intensity even further in August 2010 and taught myself accounting and valuation for commercial banks, created a case study of JP Morgan, and produced 15 hours of video all in the span of 4 weeks, with no prior knowledge of the sector.

I was drinking so much coffee that I began twitching uncontrollably on most days, but it had to get done because of my favorite technique: setting an impossible deadline (I was leaving for a trip to Europe on August 31st).

I released the course a few hours before hopping on the plane, and hoped nothing would go wrong as I was taking off.

It was the same process for the other industry-specific courses, but it was a bit less stressful since FIG proved to be the hardest sector to learn.

The content for these new courses turned out much better than expected.

They were better organized, they had more quick reference guides, and the formatting and explanations were much better than the first few courses I had created.

But then I screwed it all up by making one serious mistake…

What’s Your Price?

For some unfathomable reason, I released each of these industry-specific courses for $97 USD initially.

This was a big problem because competitors’ courses sold for $400 to $1500+ and actually covered less material.

So not only was I sending a message that my own courses were worse – price send a big psychological signal, after all – but I was also earning less on each sale, even though anyone who signed up was willing to pay more (yes, really – we got emails to that effect).

I said the $97 price was the “early bird discount,” and I mentioned that the prices would all increase eventually (which they did).

But I waited 1.5 years before doing that, which was a very costly mistake.

The truth was that in the back of my mind, I didn’t think the courses were “good enough” – and I felt uncomfortable charging higher rates.

In Part 2 of this story, I said that sales and marketing are the most systematically under-taught skills in business schools.

Among business owners, though, pricing is the most systematically misunderstood aspect of business.

Pricing is about far more than how much revenue you generate – it affects everything from how you market yourself to how much you can spend on marketing and customer support to the types of employees you can attract.

There is sometimes a “sweet spot” where you can maximize revenue and/or profit…. but it is not always a good idea to pick that price if it compromises other aspects of your business, such as customer service.

This is why I would never sell a guide for $5.95: for that price, I would rather just give it away for free.

Business owners tend to underprice their own products and services, for the same reasons I did here: insecurity, the feeling that they’re not “good enough,” and a lack of market knowledge.

Doing so leads to lower sales, sub-par support (it’s much easier to support 10 customers rather than 1,000), and lower margins.

This is why we’ve shifted to selling higher-end courses and services and serving fewer customers over time.

Sure, there is also a market for $5.95 guides, but I do not want to be in that market.

Predictably Irrational Pricing

“So,” you’re thinking, “that’s interesting, but what evidence do you have that this was a mistake? Where are the numbers? Or is this just a theory you’ve dreamed up?”

When I raised the prices of the industry-specific modeling courses, unit sales increased.

Yes, you read that correctly: after raising the prices from $97 to $247, the volume of courses sold actually increased even though the price was 2.5x higher.

How could that possibly happen?

Let’s say that you’re looking to buy a new car, and you’re expecting to spend ~$10,000 USD on it. You find 1 model selling for $8,500, 1 model selling for $10,100, and one selling for $9,300.

Then you find 1 model selling for $2,500.

Would you think it’s a great bargain?

Or would you think there’s a defect with the car?

That’s what happened here: by pricing the courses so far below anything else out there, we were effectively saying, “We have an inferior product” even though that wasn’t the case.

Leaving Korea

Meanwhile, I had come to the conclusion that I had to leave Korea.

It had gotten to the point where even routine tasks like going to the convenience store filled me with rage.

After my first 9 months there, I started having less and less fun; I was in a fairly stable relationship, but I knew it wouldn’t last and I didn’t see it as a reason to stay.

My enthusiasm for learning the language had also plummeted. I made a lot of progress in the first 6 months, but after that I should have taken a class with a professor who could explain nuances and focus on “business formal” language.

Instead, I continued taking lessons from… a friend of my original bartender “teacher” I found on Craigslist.

I assumed that since I knew Japanese (similar grammar) and had studied Mandarin (shared vocabulary), I could tackle Korean on my own.

But I was wrong: Korean is significantly more difficult conversationally than either of those languages, and it is arguably THE most difficult language for native English speakers to learn.

By the middle-to-end of 2010, though, I just didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go take a real class or otherwise learn from a professional.

Farewell

I left the country in December 2010 and had a farewell party where everyone made an appearance: friends, my teacher, her friends, and yes, even various females I had dated (good thing they didn’t know each other).

I remember explaining to a friend how I would never return to the country.

He disagreed and said, “You think you’re leaving, but you’ll be back. This place finds a way to draw everyone back.”

I laughed at him, wished him the best of luck, and said I was heading off to Australia next.

I wasn’t quite ready to go back to the US, and I wanted a country that was “Western” but still “foreign” – so Australia seemed like a good fit.

Plus, I was a US citizen and I had an employment record and bank accounts to point to – how hard could it possibly be to get a visa?

Side Note: I’m laughing as I write these words in August 2013 because I’m currently sitting on a bench in the Seoul-Incheon International Airport. Yes, I’m back in Korea. My friend was right.

I’ll get to this story if I extend this series and write Part 5 in the future.

“My Enemies Are Everywhere And My Friends Are Fools.”

“It’s a common mistake among inexperienced founders to believe that a partnership with a big company will be their big break. Six months later they’re all saying the same thing: that was way more work than we expected, and we ended up getting practically nothing out of it.”

-Paul Graham, Do Things That Don’t Scale

Toward the end of 2010, I did an “end of year review” and uncovered some disturbing trends.

First, it was clear that the BIWS promotional partnership with Wall Street Oasis, which had expanded to a few other sites, was not a good deal for me.

Sales had increased, but profits were down because we were paying out a high commission on all product sales referred by others.

You might think, “Wait a minute – you’re selling digital products, who cares if you pay out a high commission? You have no expenses!”

And then you might think, “Don’t you want to be in as many places as you can be? Who cares if it cuts into your sales?”

Both of those thoughts are wrong.

Yes, I have higher margins than an offline retailer, but there are still big expenses – creating the courses, customer support, web development and design, paid advertising, promotional materials, bandwidth, etc. etc.

So if you think this is a 90% margin business, you’re off by an order of magnitude. Any business owner who claims to run a 90% margin business is lying or not doing the math correctly, e.g. not counting his/her own salary.

And yes, it’s good to “be everywhere” if you can… but not if it dramatically cuts into your margins.

A business like this could never be sold to another company or taken public, so I have to focus on the bottom-line.

Spending frivolously and waiting for an exit would be like Waiting for Godot.

It wasn’t just the numbers – by the end of the year, other problems with partners were popping up.

Some partners wanted their own custom pages, detailed reports, and special treatment; with others, the relationship was always uneasy because we were competing in some areas but were partnered in others.

It was like Apple and Samsung’s relationship, but 1 million times smaller.

I knew it wouldn’t last, and the only question was when to change the terms and what to say.

I was about to do this at the start of 2011 right after I settled down in Australia, but then…

Meet Raj Verma!

I ran into serious problems getting into Australia, partially because I was dumb and applied for a 12-month tourist visa – so in early 2011 I was stranded and wandering around Southeast Asia while trading letters with the Australian government.

But I was making better-than-expected time on the industry-specific courses, so I decided to use the 4 weeks I spent in Malaysia to revamp one part of the Advanced Modeling course and fix a few lessons that had been completed too hastily.

In the middle of that, someone named “Raj Verma” contacted us and asked a bunch of questions about the BIWS courses.

From his questions, I could tell that he would likely end up asking for a refund anyway – so I didn’t try too hard to convince him to sign up.

But he did notice one small inconsistency: in the course outline, I wrote there was a “50% discount on new courses.”

By “new” I meant “new courses that we release in the future.”

That was true at the time because each new course was priced at $97 back then, and members could sign up at a discounted rate of $47.

He interpreted “new” as meaning “any additional courses you sign up for.”

Yes, the language was confusing but it was a mistake on my part and not a “trick” or anything like that.

I clarified the language to him, acknowledged that it was confusing, and then did what I thought any logical human being would do: I corrected the course outline and sent him the new version.

The actual policy never changed – I simply corrected language that could have been misinterpreted.

Raj Verma didn’t quite see it that way – here was his response:

After a few more exchanges, he wrote back with one final demand – he left this one out of what he posted online:

He tried to blackmail us into giving him a $347 course for free because he misinterpreted one statement in the course outline, which we then clarified.

This guy was so clueless that he actually posted the entire email exchange online (yes, including the parts with him swearing at me), after which he got flamed out of existence.

Hundreds of posters jumped on him, his name and email address were black-listed at banks, and he probably changed his name shortly thereafter (if it even was his real name – doubtful).

And the best part was that he was NOT even a customer of the courses – he was just asking about potentially signing up.

The whole incident consumed 2 days of my time and caused me to reconsider if I really wanted to stay in this market for the long-term.

If potential customers were going to be this crazy, was it really worth it? Did I want staff members to spend their time responding to criminals?

It also forced me to delay changing the terms of the partnerships – after all, one of our key partners at the time (WSO) had just stepped in to defend us, or at least many users there had.

Arriving in Australia

My Australian visa finally came through, but by then I had already traveled back to the US to visit friends in New York and California. So after planning to arrive in Australia in early January, I only got there in late March of 2011.

Upon landing, the immigration officials pulled me aside for an “interrogation” because I seemed suspicious.

They were skeptical that I was really a “tourist” and started asking for all these stats about my business, the # of Australian customers, how we promote the courses in Australia, and so on.

“Well,” I thought, “I can get out of this one, but I’m sure glad I listed my occupation as ‘Consultant’ rather than ‘Drug Dealer’ on my immigration card this time around.”

A few days after that, I was diagnosed with a serious ear infection that could have resulted in permanent hearing loss.

Oh, and then the Internet took over a week to set up at my apartment.

And then I was in for one final surprise: I decided to live in the CBD of Sydney, thinking that a central location would be best.

But my building was 90% Asian, and so was the surrounding area.

It was as if I had tried to leave Korea, but Korea said to me, “Not so fast. You’re not getting away this easily.”

Life in Australia was off to an excellent start.

Location, Location, Location… and Launches

I was also way behind on the last industry-specific course: Real Estate Financial Modeling.

I said the release date would be April 30th, 2011, but there was no way to finish by then given the disasters above, continued partnership troubles, and more and more crazy people emerging from the magical leprechaun forest.

So I pushed back the launch to May 15th, which was do-able, and pulled in Peter to help with some of the content.

Social life in Sydney was very “meh” because I didn’t have enough time to go out and meet people. It was a non-stop 80-90 hour per week effort once I landed, and almost losing my hearing cost me some time as well.

And then another sub-plot was evolving: some of our own partners approached me and suggested that our commissions were too generous.

“Brian, you realize that all these companies providing CFA prep, FRM training, and others are giving far lower commissions… and their products aren’t even as comprehensive. Why are you so generous?”

My “end of year review” showed similar results months ago, but I had been delayed changing things around and I didn’t want to do anything rash without running the numbers.

So I dug into the numbers, ran a bunch of analysis in Excel, and I even calculated R^2 for several sets of data.

Profits had actually decreased even as traffic increased, mostly due to these high commissions, plus the rising costs of support.

It went back to my main fear from the beginning: I knew there was huge audience overlap between the 2 major sites in this market (M&I and WSO), and I wasn’t convinced that we were getting unique visitors by partnering with him.

But there were big risks if I changed the terms.

First off, he could promote other companies’ courses instead of BIWS.

Second, I might have been using the wrong assumptions all along. There was no way to “prove” where new customers came from and who had seen the courses first via my own promotions vs. those on his site.

It could have been the case, for example, that a high percentage of customers had seen the BIWS courses promoted elsewhere, but had simply come back and signed up through this site anyway.

But there was no way to tell what would happen without actually making the changes.

That was the biggest decision I faced in 2011.

Do I change the terms of the agreement and possibly lose a huge percentage of sales?

Or do I leave it as is, keep everyone happy, and accept declining profits even as I kept working harder and harder?

I wanted to resolve this by June 1st to avoid letting it drag on for the rest of the year.

Gut Feeling and Fear-Setting

I went back and forth about 10 times, but ultimately I went with my gut feeling that it wasn’t a great deal for me and that the terms had to change, or the deal had to be dropped altogether.

I figured that even if the deal completely ended, the courses would continue to sell because of my audience on M&I and additional traffic to the site, plus word of mouth.

And, in the worst case scenario, if the entire business collapsed I would not have shed a tear.

Why?

Besides Raj Verma and a few other disasters, I was incredibly burned out.

Just imagine working for 80-90 hours per week for 2+ years, with only short breaks in between.

When I say “work,” I mean real work – writing, editing, producing videos, and creating sellable deliverables – not “work” in IB where you sit around the office with nothing to do for half the time, and doing mindless work such as changing the font sizes in revision #153 of a presentation the rest of the time.

I had produced nearly 3 million words of content in 2 years, which is about 30 average-length novels (not a typo).

Just like Patrick Bateman, I was barely human.

But just like Bateman, I also had my limits.

Going back into finance was not an option, but since I had a CS degree from a top university I had a “Plan B” that most people in finance do not have: go into the tech industry, either at a large company or a start-up, and work in a technical or product/project management role.

Sure, it can be intense… but it still would have been 10x easier than running this business, producing that volume of content, and also being the combined CEO, CFO, COO, and CTO.

Then there were other issues: for example, I was running out of ideas for M&I articles.

The obvious solutions were to cover new industries, do more interviews myself, or hire guest writers, but I didn’t know how sustainable those were.

Even if I found topics to keep writing about, did I really want to keep writing about this one specific topic forever?

Running a business like this in your 20s or 30s is one thing.

But could I really see myself as a 65-year old man who was still writing articles about how to get investment banking internships?

Let’s be honest: it would be pretty strange.

But there’s also no easy solution to that one – when you own a business, you’re at it for years or decades regardless of whether or not you “like it.”

Until you save enough money to do something else or you decide to sell the business (easier said than done), it is your life.

And it is also your wife/husband, your best friend, and your main hobby.

I almost hoped the entire business would fail simply so that I could go back to the real world, take a normal job again, and get back into a normal career.

The Choice

With that type of silly logic in mind, I decided to move ahead and reduce the commissions on our products.

I emailed Patrick to explain that the terms were changing, and he almost immediately dropped us.

I proposed a commission that was significantly lower than the original rate, and I expected him to counter with a higher offer.

My logic was flawed, though, because I had very little leverage in this situation.

He could simply promote another company’s courses and there would be no difference to him as long as the commissions stayed the same.

I don’t blame him at all for dropping us. We don’t “hate” each other. If I were in his position, I would have done the exact same thing.

From his perspective, this had come from nowhere after we had just worked together for the past 1.5 years.

He saw it as: “I just sent this guy $X in sales, where $X is a large number – why would you suddenly decide to reduce my rates after I sent you so many new customers?”

My perspective was different because I had all the numbers.

While he saw them as “new customers,” I had good reason to believe that many of them had actually seen the courses promoted on both sites and would have signed up through us anyway.

That made it a great deal for him, but a rather poor deal for us.

I replied and expected to go back and forth a few more times… but instead, it stopped and I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks.

Last-Minute Second Thoughts

I went to a friend’s wedding in Hawaii at the end of May 2011, partially to celebrate being done with the Real Estate course and partially because, well, it was Hawaii.

The whole time, I kept thinking about this deal and whether or not I had just made a huge mistake.

A few days before June 1st, I woke up and thought, “OK, this is stupid. This is going to destroy my business if I go forward with this. I have to propose better terms!”

NOTE: This type of thinking is a HUGE mistake. Once you propose something in a negotiation and the other person says “no,” never go back on your word and give better terms.

I didn’t follow my own advice though, so I checked in again and said I would be open to a higher rate, though not as high as the original one we had.

…And a few days later I heard back.

It was a “no go,” even with the higher rate.

He had already moved on a long time before that, and would be promoting other courses on his site as of June 1st.

It was over.

Reality Checks

The whole incident served as a reality check for me.

I had focused so much on the products that I ignored all other aspects of the business – diversifying our marketing, improving the user experience, staying in touch with customers after they had signed up, and more.

In response, I contacted a marketing firm and asked about hiring them to get started with paid advertising and to revamp marketing everywhere else.

I started planning my outreach to guest writers, knowing that if the site continued, I would need contributions from others.

And I planned a trip back to the US because I wanted to start networking and interviewing for traditional corporate jobs in the SF Bay Area.

I really had no idea what would happen, but it couldn’t hurt to have other options on the table.

No, I wasn’t going to run out of money anytime soon… but there was a significant chance that both sites would simply die out.

And hiring guest writers and a marketing team would only work if I had enough money to hire them in the first place.

That was in serious doubt as June 1st approached.

The Night Before June 1st

It was the night before the partnership would officially end, and there was nothing left for me to do.

Two years before, on June 1st, 2009, I had landed in Korea with almost nothing, a huge amount of debt, and a tiny business that barely paid the bills.

Two years later, on June 1st, 2011, I was about to lose everything I had built up in that time.

“I know,” I thought to myself, “I’ll make a pro/con list! Or I’ll start making a list of companies I want to work at!”

I decided to do something much smarter instead: I went snorkeling in the ocean near my hotel in Hawaii.

Oh, and then I read more Game of Thrones (I was on the 3rd book by then, easily the best in the series).

No matter what happened to my business, I reasoned, Tyrion would always be awesome.

I went to sleep early that night, and woke up the next day to see what would happen.

I turned on my laptop, and…

Next Time, Next Time

Yes, it’s a cliffhanger ending.

But you’ll see how I clawed my way out of this one in Part 4 of this series.

Plus:

• Why hiring guest writers, or at least my implementation of it, turned out to be a questionable move.
• How we funded, created, and produced Cost of Capital and why I wanted to do it in the first place.
• Why I completely changed the direction of this business in 2012 after a harsh wake-up call from a top business coach.
• And most fun of all: how a toxic relationship with the craziest person I’ve ever met almost destroyed me.

Stay tuned.

The Rest of the Series:

[catlist name=brian-life-story numberposts=-1 orderby=title order=asc]

The post My Life Story, Part 3: How I Almost Shut Down This Business (2010 – 2011) appeared first on Mergers & Inquisitions.

When I tell people I lived in Korea for 1.5 years, the first question I usually get is “Why?”

That’s a tough one to answer, and there’s a long story behind it.

The second question I usually get from people is “Did you live in North Korea or South Korea?”

That one’s much easier to answer: I slap them repeatedly and then chop up their bodies into small pieces with an electrified cleaver.

I’m picking up my life story today with Part 2, which details, among other things:

• How and why I ended up in (South) Korea, among all possible places I could have gone after starting this online business in 2007
• How I created over 150 hours of video in less than 2 years, which most people would say is flat-out impossible, even for a sizable and well-funded team
• Why living in a (very) foreign country was a massive benefit to this business, and why you need to do it at some point if you ever hope to sell and market yourself effectively
• And finally, how a foreigner dressed in a pink rabbit suit (see image above) and a Korean girl who attempted to start a youth hostel in Xi’An led me to… launch and expand the Breaking Into Wall Street site

Let the fun and games begin continue:

When In Asia…

First off, you should start with Part 1 of this story or you’re going to be very confused.

Where I left off, things were really picking up in December 2008 and January 2009 – I had just launched the interview guide, recruiting season was in full swing, and recruiting had become so competitive that more and more students and professionals were signing up for my services.

I was planning to go to China to meet up with Jerry – my friend from university who started his own prop trading firm in Beijing (he also contributed a lot of the sales & trading material on the site).

And then I would head to Thailand to meet up with some other friends, and make a trek to Singapore, because well, I just wanted to check it out.

Two weeks before I got there, Jerry informed me that he was really busy running his company and couldn’t be a “tour guide,” so I came up with another plan: meet all my readers who lived in or were visiting those countries (original announcement here).

The trip turned into a mix of meeting up with dozens of readers, continuing to work with clients (resume editing and mock interviews), and working on this ever-expanding-and-never-quite-finished membership site called “Breaking Into Wall Street,” which was completely different and fundamentally flawed back then.

Meeting with so many readers was enormously insightful.

You can’t take everything you read online or via email seriously; people run their mouths, and I’ve seen countless ridiculous claims made on message boards and on comment threads on this site.

But when you meet someone in-person, you can learn more about him/her in 5 minutes than you can by spending hours reading what the person said online.

The time I spent doing this still benefits me to this day because I understand the real motivations, fears, and concerns of students and professionals better than anyone else who offers these services.

It also led to some very random opportunities, like the time I ended up speaking to students at Peking University (the equivalent of Harvard in the US, only even more elite).

How I Met a Drug Dealer and Survived to Tell the Tale

When I was in Beijing, I decided to take Jerry’s recommendation and check out a speed dating event.

Most of the people there had standard corporate jobs or were English teachers, but I ran into a Korean girl (woman? I don’t know) who had an interesting response when I asked what she did:

“I’m a drug dealer.”

I instantly recognized that line from the introduction to The 4-Hour Workweek, and rather than asking her for free samples or if she was lying, I asked her about the book instead.

It turned out that, inspired by the book, she had left her country, moved to China, and attempted to start a youth hostel in the western city of Xi’An (basically a giant desert… OK, and some clay statues), among other ventures.

We instantly hit it off, and I decided to “extend” my trip to Asia by going to visit a few more friends in the southern part of China and then going to visit her in Seoul.

I justified it to myself by saying, “Well, I have a few other friends living there as well…”

Oh, and if you think you know where this story is going, keep reading, my friend.

Lost in Translation

I landed in Korea and was instantly confused.

I didn’t know the language, knew a grand total of 3 people there, and even managed to get lost on the way to my hotel at 2 AM when it was freezing cold outside.

The Drug Dealer, of course, was being evasive and kept making excuses for why she had to stay at home with her parents (yes, everyone in Asia lives with their parents until they’re married)…

…which left me with a lot of free time to continue working with clients, developing this membership site, and also meeting more readers in Seoul.

One client kept asking me how he could learn accounting and finance rather than just reviewing questions and answers with me in mock interviews, so I decided to “front-load” part of this membership site and create a few simple videos for him on accounting and valuation.

At the time, these technical lessons were about 5% of the planned site and I viewed them as a nice bonus, but nothing especially interesting or useful.

My first videos were also terrible – I had no idea what I was doing, I was working off a tiny laptop from random cafes in a freezing-cold city where I didn’t know the language, and I had just been ditched by a faux Drug Dealer.

But my client loved them.

I started sharing these initial videos with a few other clients, and the reaction was unanimous: some of them had taken financial modeling courses and/or paid hundreds of dollars for other programs, but they all said that even the free videos I created were much more helpful.

I also decided that, while I was enormously productive on this trip because my plans fell through, I didn’t want to return to this country…

But then, over the weekend I met up with the 2 other friends I knew in Korea and had a blast.

One of them knew a group of foreigners that always threw parties and events, and I was pulled into everything from adventures to go ice fishing outside the city to hotel parties and much cheaper “bottles” at clubs there (no comment on the models).

I wasn’t “sold” on the country yet, but I decided that based on a sample size of 1 fun weekend, it would be way more interesting than staying in California.

Two Days Before Going Home…

Then, literally two days before I was set to fly back home, I randomly ran into The Drug Dealer right near a stadium that had been demolished the year before.

Yes, a completely random meeting in a city of 10+ million people.

She was with another guy.

Oops.

Tell the World I’m Coming Home

I finally arrived back in the US at the end of January, after the 2 most eventful months I had ever had in my life.

It was fun traveling to Asia, but as you might imagine, I was not at all convinced that it was actually a “good” idea to go back there.

My friend Kevin had just started Management Consulted around this time, and we decided to do a speaking tour and visit a bunch of schools on the east coast.

The timing was fairly awful for this trip: I became deathly ill at one point and almost ended up in the ER, and I was still working with clients and attempting to finish this huge membership site.

It became increasingly clear that something had to change: there was no way I could handle writing for the site, doing client work, speaking, and continuing to work indefinitely on this membership site that was never going to be done.

Meanwhile, my family back in New Jersey was increasingly confused and bewildered at what I was doing with my life. The most popular theory was that I was a CIA agent.

Their logic?

“He goes overseas, speaks different languages, and works on the computer.”

The Last Straw

Right after I got back from this trip at the end of February, I received an email from a reader:

“I’m thinking about taking a financial modeling program. What do you recommend? Are CD-ROM and textbook programs the best? Should I just get the cheapest one?”

This was my epiphany.

As usual, I was my own biggest obstacle to success.

The answer had been right under my nose, but I had obstinately ignored it: rather than releasing this massive membership site all at once, I would release only the technical videos I had already recorded and package that as a “financial modeling program.”

I would throw out the nearly 9 months of work I had completed and only release a tiny portion of it, completely changing the site and product focus to financial modeling.

I also set a strict, self-imposed deadline: it would have to be released by the end of April, because I would leave the country in May – still uncertain of whether I’d end up in Korea, China, or maybe a small island in the middle of the Pacific.

 “The Competition? What Competition?”

I knew I would have to add topics like 3-statement modeling and LBO models – neither was in these initial videos – but I could finish those in a month or less.

I was worried about how this very “minimum viable product” course would stack up next to what competitors were offering, but after looking at the products in more depth I wasn’t too concerned:

• Yes, my material was more “basic” and more focused on interview prep…
• But it would also be about 5-10x cheaper than anything else out there…
• And I had a substantial audience online and the ability to move quickly and launch products – even 4 years later, literally no one else in this market really understands the process of how to promote a product.
• Plus, I could always say that I would add new material afterward as a free bonus – a way to hedge myself and spend more time on the program if the launch went well.

Training Month

I dove in and spent the month of March devouring training materials on internet marketing and launching products online.

Truthfully, I had gotten obsessed with these topics long before this: even back in 2008 I was constantly studying them.

I’ve read some comments online suggesting that the reason this site has been successful is because “I went to Stanford” or because “Our team has solid pedigrees.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

You learn very little, if anything, at these institutions that helps you succeed in creating and selling products/services in real life.

This site succeeded because I dove into the content creation and marketing process obsessively and, more importantly, learned how to sell and market products over the Internet.

This is NOT a skill you learn in school. It’s definitely not a skill you learn at “top” schools.

In fact, sales & marketing is the single most under-taught skill at universities and business schools, which is tragic.

Many institutions view sales as “below” them, and many students view it as “only something salespeople have to do” (big mistake).

That’s what attracted me to it.

I loved inhabiting the “dark underbelly” of an industry and skill set that was extremely useful, but which most people overlooked or dismissed.

It was almost like finding an undervalued stock and going all-in with a huge investment right before it surged by 300%.

I went through everything from high-end training courses to books to live events in an attempt to absorb every last bit of knowledge about marketing.

The plan crystallized over these next few weeks:

• Prepare promotional materials in March into April.
• Launch at the end of April.
• Take care of post-launch business and wrap up loose ends in May…
• And then, yes, you guessed it, return to Korea on June 1.

I’d like to say the last point was a rational decision based on my desire to “explore other cultures” and “learn a new language” and “reconnect with friends” or something.

I attempted to justify it by saying, “Well, I have friends there, I made more friends the last time I visited, Jerry just sold his company and moved there, and staying in California would be boring.”

But hey, we’ve all followed Drug Dealers down rabbit holes before, and let’s just say that you don’t always end up in Wonderland when you come out on the other side.

Product Launch Madness

The month of April began, and instantly I was even more panicked than usual.

First, the simple site I had set up barely worked and there were a ton of technical issues.

Second, I was about to start using my real name on the site. Yes, up to that point it had been completely anonymous and I was known as “The Inquisitor.”

Third, I was about to start using my voice in the promotional videos for the new course… would everyone hate it? Think I was crazy? Instantly reject it?

Most of these fears turned out to be completely unfounded.

Yes, there were a few technical hitches, and yes, I would have done some things differently, but overall the launch of the BIWS site on April 20th, 2009, went exceptionally well.

April 2009 was the best month in the history of the site to that point, by far, and hundreds of new customers signed up for a new and unproven course because they… believed in me? Weren’t satisfied with existing programs? Liked the sound of my voice? All of the above?

I’m not sure.

My favorite comment from that time came on the post I published just before the course became available:

“Do we really need to wait till Monday? =| this is worse than a cock tease….”

The Post-Mortem

You couldn’t argue with the numbers, the time-limited offer, and my last-minute addition of the “Networking (Ninja) Toolkit” bonus, which got a lot of readers sitting on the fence to sign up.

But several parts didn’t go as well:

• I took negative feedback way too seriously. There was this one poster on WallStreetOasis who said the program was horrible and constantly disparaged it, so I started doubting myself. Then, even after I added more material over the next few months, he constantly said it wasn’t good enough. I look back on this now and laugh that I cared so much about what this one anonymous guy thought, when 300+ others thought it was awesome.
• I might have promised too much upfront. “Free lifetime updates and free access to all future modeling courses” was not the best idea because the site expanded from one course into almost 10, and went from 10 hours of video into 150+. By promising so much, I put way too much pressure on myself and gave up significant future income.

One Morning in the Month of May

But I survived the launch intact, and my plan to leave the country and head to Korea was on track.

Several points also became clear in this next month:

• There was a ton of demand for an Excel course, so that would have to be my next addition.
• There was also a lot of demand for real companies and case studies, along with more advanced material, so that would be addition #2.
• There was absolutely no way I could do both of the above and continue to grow the site if I was still offering resume editing and mock interviews.

I had to choose: should I shut down the services that had comprised 70%+ of my revenue to this point so I could devote more time to a new and unproven site?

Or should I do the safe thing and continue to run the services but somehow limit the number of sign-ups, or otherwise find more time for product development?

After a few weeks of freaking out, I shut down the coaching services and decided to leave my fate in the hands of the interview guide and new modeling course.

In my first draft of this article, I wrote a long explanation for this move, but here’s the short version: focus is your most important resource as an entrepreneur.

If something distracts you from the area with the highest potential, cut it out even if it means enduring short-term pain.

In the worst case scenario, I could always restore the services if I ran into trouble and needed money (I still had close to $100K of student loans by this stage).

And in the best case scenario, sales of the interview guide and modeling course would continue to increase each month and I could focus on improving and adding to those.

Landing in Korea, Part 2

I stuck to my plan and arrived in Seoul on June 1st, 2009, once again not entirely sure what I was doing there.

On one hand, I could go “learn a new language” or “learn martial arts” or do a bunch of other random things and attempt to follow The 4-Hour Workweek.

Other random opportunities kept springing up as well:

• One friend wanted me to help out with his new sex therapy course
• Another friend had an idea for a clean energy site and wanted my input
• I thought about getting more involved with event planning and meeting people like that

On the other hand, I didn’t think it would be possible to make massive additions to the newly launched BIWS site and also frolic around like a leprechaun doing everything above.

But I was very interested in becoming an actor – or at least doing voice acting – since I heard there was a lot of demand for foreigners in Asia.

Plus, according to various commenters online I have a “smooth, sexy voice” (NOTE: not my own words).

So I decided to ignore the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, and attempted to create my own “reality distortion field” by spending my first 2 months in Korea attempting to do it all… with a few modifications.

Language Learning at the Bar

For example, I knew that language classes would never work due to my irregular schedule and penchant for working until 5 AM every night.

So I did the next best thing: I decided to learn Korean by hiring a bartender I found on Craigslist to be my teacher.

At the very least, I figured the lessons would be more “practical” than classroom training.

Incidentally, she was actually a great teacher and had real experience teaching the language to foreigners before.

More importantly, unlike most other people in the country she actually understood “what I did”.

As soon as I explained it to her, she replied with a single question:

“So it’s like a paid porn site, but for education?”

One Night in a Pink Rabbit Suit…

This strategy worked decently for the first few months, but it had its limits.

While adding the Excel lessons in May and June wasn’t terribly difficult, the more advanced additions were a hairy mess.

At one point, I actually tracked down the former IB analyst at Goldman Sachs who had worked on the failed Microsoft-Yahoo! deal and got his input.

He started off by saying, “When I heard you were creating a case study based on this deal I thought, ‘Great example… but you just might go crazy doing it.’ ”

I had such limited experience with video at this point that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know, and this “simple” addition ended up taking over a month of extremely long hours, weekend work, and me pulling my hair out while consuming copious quantities of coffee.

One night, I took a break and went out drinking with some friends…

And I ran into a foreigner who… happened to be a real “actor” in the country!

I put “actor” in quotes because his actual job was to wear a pink rabbit suit and bounce around on kids’ shows on TV all day.

He told me that “acting” was a waste of time for foreigners in Korea, and that almost everyone in the industry was bitter and disappointed.

Friends who were on TV shows and other programs there all came back with the same story: it was extremely tedious and degrading work, and unless you really wanted to be the token foreigner dressed in a pink rabbit suit on kids’ shows, it probably wasn’t a great bet.

All of that, combined with part 1 of this advanced case study (what would later become the Advanced Modeling course) left me with a simple conclusion:

I had to double-down on work, eliminate all distractions, and work to the point of exhaustion to finish everything I wanted by the end of the year.

I sat down on August 9th, 2009, and planned out everything that would have to happen between then and December 31st:

• Finish and launch a brand new version of the BIWS site (the original one was very “bare bones” and needed to be revamped). I wasn’t designing it, but I had to send feedback to the designers and answer questions every day.
• Finish the last 3 modules of the Advanced Modeling course, which would require a lot of data gathering and researching of topics that I was only vaguely acquainted with, like NOLs and book vs. cash taxes.
• Finish and launch an improved version of the Networking Toolkit course.
• Completely revamp the interview guide that had come out less than a year ago, fix a bunch of problems, add more advanced material, and add templates and sample interviews.

Altogether, it was about 1,000 hours of work and that wasn’t even counting article writing, answering comments and emails, creating promotional content, and so on.

When I added in all of those, I could see that 80-90 hour workweeks until the end of the year would be the norm.

To have even a remote chance of succeeding, I would need to level-up my productivity.

That “Vision” Thing

I also started focusing even more on long-term goals.

Even the content on this site changed to reflect this: instead of wasting time writing lots of Q&A articles, I switched to focusing on specific topics, such as “private equity interviews,” that are always popular from year to year and that barely change over time.

My goal was (and still is) to make 90% of the content here relevant for decades into the future.

(Hence the lack of dates anywhere on this site. I know it annoys you, but hey, we all have our quirks.)

If others were “covering the news,” I wanted to create Think and Grow Rich, or How to Win Friends and Influence People for the finance industry – work that stays on the best-seller lists for decades, if not centuries, because the core principles ring true regardless of the time period.

The same was true of the products: I tried very, very hard to stay from anything that would become “dated” or would stop being effective in the future.

Productivity 201

To accomplish everything in my list above, I cut out everything unnecessary so that I could focus 100% on the task at hand.

The proper paperwork was not filed, I still don’t have a business card even now, I “forgot about” paying estimated taxes in these early years, and I convinced friends and family that I had to disappear underground for a few months.

If anyone asked what I was up to, I told them to fly to Korea.

One friend actually came toward the end of the year, but most people stayed away because they still thought I lived in North Korea.

My average day looked something like this for the last 4-5 months of 2009:

• 9 AM: Wake up and get ready.
• 9:30 AM: Write article for the site.
• 11:30 AM: Record 2-3 videos.
• 1:00 PM: Break and go to coffee shop… for Korean lesson with bartender teacher.
• 1:30 PM: Language lesson (interaction with carbon-based life forms kept me sane).
• 2:30 PM: Stay there and edit 2-3 videos I had recorded earlier.
• 5:00 PM: Answer support emails, comments, and questions.
• 5:30 PM: Provide feedback to designers on new site design or other projects.
• 6:30 PM: Break and go back home, maybe eating something along the way.
• 7:30 PM: Back to Excel work on whatever course I was working on at the time.
• 9:30 PM: Respond to client requests (at the time, I had offered unlimited resume edits for over a year before this – so I honored all editing requests that came in, even though technically I had shut down the service).
• 10:30 PM: Go back and outline a promotional video or new product launch campaign.
• 12:00 AM: Break and watch one of the many TV shows I was addicted to.
• 1:00 AM: Answer any remaining emails or comments, or go back to Excel.
• 2:00 AM: Sleep.

This routine was grueling but effective for 2 main reasons:

1. There were almost no time-wasting activities. Yes, I checked email occasionally, but there were never long stretches of downtime where I was waiting around for someone else to tell me what to do, like you see in banking.
2. I was creating assets, not “doing work.” Articles I wrote and products I created back in 2009 generate even more revenue today. It was the complete opposite of “day-to-day” maintenance work: almost every hour was spent on developing income-generating assets.

This is how, in the span of 2 years, I was able to create 150+ hours of video and out-produce operations with 30-40+ people.

For example, Lynda.com was a $30 million revenue company at the time and I produced more hours of video than they did in this time period – with a team of 1 rather than the dozens or hundreds they had.

At big companies, there’s almost no relationship between what employees do and revenue generated.

I have plenty of friends at companies like Facebook, Google, and eBay that do close to nothing all day and get paid for it: since the company is established and revenue comes in via pre-existing systems and contracts, they don’t have to do much to maintain it.

At a start-up, though, everything you do must generate revenue or you are wasting your time.

For my business, that means there are only 2 productive tasks:

1. Creating and improving products/services.
2. Marketing those products/services.

I prioritized anything other than those two at the bottom of my list.

How Did I Stay Sane?

SPOILER ALERT: The schedule above continued for almost 2 years after this, extending well into the middle of 2011. So you might be wondering how I stayed sane this time, given the sheer amount of work and my complete isolation.

Of course, not every day was quite like this: I took breaks, sometimes I didn’t work much on Saturdays, and I did a fair amount of traveling to other countries – though I spent most of my time in those places working once I landed.

But the real answer is that I lost some of my sanity in the process, and, ironically, only the fact that I was in such a foreign country counteracted all of this.

I came across dozens of other “interesting” characters in my occasional time off:

• One Thai-Korean girl who enjoyed making completely out-of-place comments all the time. Example: One time, she was at a dinner with 20 co-workers and suddenly stood up and shouted, “Guys, was Stephen Hawking ever normal?!!”
• One male friend there ran his own hair salon in Apgujeong (the equivalent of Beverly Hills in LA, with even more plastic surgeons) and almost convinced me to get plastic surgery once.
• There were quite a few Russians there, who looked Korean but who hung out with their Russian friends most of the time and… well, I don’t know what they did, actually.
• Oh yes, and then there was “Tomato Girl” – she constantly “dropped by” my apartment, walked in without asking, and then attempted to steal all my tomatoes from the refrigerator. I can’t make this stuff up.

I ended up joining a few groups, but groups there started up and shut down all the time; the only one that had legs was a language exchange group that managed to last for almost a year.

In hindsight, all of this was important on both a business and personal level.

Many people at the “top schools” stay very insulated and rarely venture outside their bubbles.

But that is completely the wrong approach if you want to master sales, marketing, and product creation.

You need to understand everything from your customers’ perspective, not your own, and you need to learn how to interact with people from all sorts of different, completely random backgrounds.

So yes, there is a good reason to put up with people who want to sneak into your apartment to steal all your tomatoes (watch out for anyone who wants to steal your oranges, though).

The Human Toll

In this flurry of activity in the last few months of 2009, I accomplished everything (and more) on my list from August 9th.

October and December 2009 became the best months to that point, and it was getting to the point where I could think about hiring people to take the pressure off myself.

But it took a toll on me, my health started to go downhill, and I got even more isolated over what I described in Part 1 of this series as I lost touch with many friends and acquaintances.

It is impossible to work at this intensity level if you have a family, kids, or outside commitments, and I would strongly recommend against starting any business that requires massive content creation if you’re in that position.

Did I Really Need to Work This Much, Or This Quickly?

Around the same time I moved to Korea, Jerry had also sold his company in China and moved to Seoul as well.

Unlike me, he decided to be silly and learn Korean at a real university rather than from a bartender he found on Craigslist.

He saw the amount of work I was doing and kept saying that I was crazy, asking the most obvious question in the process:

“Do you really need to finish everything this quickly? Why not just work 4-5 hours per day, spend the rest of your time having fun, spread out the work over several years, and not kill yourself?”

You might be wondering the same thing.

The short answer: yes, I needed to work that quickly, and here’s why:

1. Since each lesson was connected to the previous lessons, I would “forget” a lot of what I had taught if I spread out the work over too long a period. The recording had to be done quickly, or I would waste too much time setting up Excel files and refreshing myself on what I was teaching each time. It’s the same reason why movies and TV shows are filmed in several weeks of very long days.
2. Only the paranoid survive. I was deathly afraid that someone else would come along, copy everything, and release their own course – the site was much smaller, I didn’t have many resources, and the brand wasn’t as well-known.

So I had to release an overwhelming amount of content in a very short time period to make potential competitors say, “Damn, maybe I could do better, but this guy already has so much out there… do I really want to spend thousands of hours creating something incrementally better?”

Admittedly, I also wasted a lot of time on silly things. For example, I was still working off a tiny laptop with a small screen back then because I wanted to be “mobile.”

This was incredibly stupid because it’s 10x easier to record and edit videos on a powerful desktop computer with a huge monitor, and I probably cost myself at least a few weeks of time by doing that.

Follow Your Effort

“Don’t follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it.”

–Mark Cuban

I’m often asked if I “enjoy” creating so much content.

To me, that is a silly question for the exact reason that Mark Cuban states above: no one ever wakes up and says, “Aha! I know! I’m going to create financial modeling videos just for fun! It’s my passion!”

It’s a gradual process, and the only way to find what you’re “passionate about” is to put in a ton of effort and see what sticks.

(Incidentally, if you’re curious about the answer anyway: yes, I do enjoy writing articles and making videos, but some parts of it, such as editing and adding captions to videos, are quite tedious.)

Gangnam Style

When I finally finished everything above and launched the revamped interview guide and the last part of the Advanced Modeling course in December 2009, once again I didn’t know what to do next.

I thought about moving to the Philippines and renting a house on the beach for a few months to relax, I thought about moving back to the US (the novelty of living abroad was starting to wear thin), and I even thought about doing something completely random and starting to “angel invest” in start-ups if I moved back home (this would have been a horrible idea, phew).

In the end, though, I took the path of least resistance and ended up staying in Korea for another year.

I did change things up a bit, though, and moved from the northern part of the city to Gangnam (in the south, across the main river in the city), where, unfortunately, I did not meet Psy.

But I got to live right next to an awesome brunch / waffle place, so all was not lost.

Key Money or Drug Money?

There’s a concept called “key money” in Korea, similar to security deposits in Western countries, except you have to pay almost the entire annual cost of renting the apartment upfront in cash (yes, Wikipedia says 2/3 but it was higher than that).

Being as prepared as usual, I didn’t even have a bank account in the country at the time and always withdrew cash from my US account.

So when it came time to secure an apartment on short notice, I called my bank to get the withdrawal limit raised to $1700 per day, and then transported the entire sum to my new landlord in 10,000 won bills (about $9 USD – 50,000 won notes weren’t in wide circulation yet) in big laundry bags.

He wasn’t too pleased.

And then my bank later ended up freezing my account for a short time – I had withdrawn so much that they flagged me as a terrorist (“money launderer” would have been more accurate).

The progression was remarkable: in December 2008 I had met a Drug Dealer and followed her here, and now I had become the Drug Dealer, transporting over $10,000 in laundry bags filled with small, unmarked $9 bills.

Back At It!

It was easy to look at everything over the past year and say, “Really? Do you need to add more? Isn’t there already a ton of content on the site? What more can you do?”

But I knew that wasn’t quite right. We were getting requests for coverage of other industries, PowerPoint, a better site, and even improvements to the existing content.

One big problem, for example, was that the Financial Modeling Fundamentals course wasn’t based on real companies.

I had been concerned that it would look “dated” if I used real companies and filings, so everything was based on made-up examples and I used “Year 1,” “Year 2,” and so on rather than the actual years.

I was mostly wrong on that one, because in practice most people don’t care much about the fiscal year in a model as long as it works properly.

But the lessons were also inconsistent with the more advanced material I had just added, and I knew that they wouldn’t “hold up” very well in the future.

And then there were other problems – like the fact that few people actually needed everything covered in the course.

I spent the month of January 2010 resting and recovering, and starting to plan out what would change in the next few months.

Got Focus Groups?

Just to verify that I had not, in fact, gone crazy, I sent out a survey to everyone in early February asking what they wanted to see next… “Coverage of other industries” and “PowerPoint” were both high on the response list.

Low on the list was “re-doing / improving the existing courses,” so on the surface it seemed like a bad idea to go back and re-do the Fundamentals course.

But I knew intuitively that I needed to get this material right first before expanding into other areas.

Sometimes, customers don’t know what they really want: new topics always sound “sexier,” but the truth is that 80-90% of people on the site have focused on the fundamentals rather than those more advanced topics.

And it is always better to improve your entry-level products and services rather than worrying about more advanced ones.

I also began the hiring process for my first assistant, because support and billing questions were growing beyond my capacity to handle.

By the middle of February, I had started re-doing everything in the Fundamentals course, aiming to create more comprehensive lessons, better models, and quick reference PDFs to go along with everything.

I also set another time limit: I had to finish the revised course and re-launch everything by the end of April 2010, to celebrate the “1-year anniversary” of the site.

Jerry, meanwhile, almost fell down in disbelief when I told him that I was re-doing an entire course and was on a strict deadline.

Partners in Crime?

Also in February, Patrick from WallStreetOasis approached me about promoting the BIWS courses on his site.

I had no time to think through the implications of this, but I did a quick survey of friends who had followed along from the beginning, and everyone uniformly thought it was a bad idea to do the deal.

The reason was fairly obvious: sales cannibalization.

Promotional partners online receive commissions for sales even if someone click the partner’s link once, never comes back, and then actually signs up through my link.

So if there’s a massive overlap between audiences – which, let’s face it, there was and still is – then it hurts whoever owns the product.

I didn’t understand how much overlap there was at that time, though, and I figured it was better to be as visible as possible rather than worrying about lost sales.

So I paid very little attention to the terms of the agreement, what he was doing to promote the courses, and what percentage of sales came from him.

This was a non-factor in the first few months of 2010, but it became much more significant later in the year and into 2011 – which I’ll write about more in Part 3.

The Downward Spiral

Just like I had hit “rock bottom” back in November 2008, before releasing the interview guide and turning things around, I was approaching the same spot in March 2010:

• I realized halfway through recording the new Fundamentals course that it was actually a really stupid idea to pick Apple for the example company… but couldn’t change it now.
• I had tons of technical problems and ended up re-doing many videos due to silly mistakes like flipping signs, poor audio, etc.
• I got far behind on the project and had to cut out a bunch of planned features, like additional quick reference guides, simply to finish by the end of April.

Things were getting worse on the social front as well:

• I had now been dating another girl for a few months, when she decided to “disappear” for 3 weeks in March. The Korean language actually has a slang phrase for this, with a literal translation of “dive underwater.” Yeah…
• My friend circle was scattering more than the Fellowship of the Ring, with some people planning to leave the country, others already gone, and generally more and more crazy people emerging from the woodwork. So I did the logical thing: I replaced real people with TV shows and got addicted to a bunch of HBO and Showtime series.

On March 14 (“White Day,” when the incident above with the disappearing girl was happening), it got so bad that I went out with a few remaining friends and drank 15 shots of whiskey in an hour, after which I passed out in a back alley somewhere.

Rock Bottom

A few days after that, I started brainstorming for ways to improve things and came up with a list full of brilliant entries, such as:

• Travel more!
• Do more activities.
• Go out at least 2-3x per week.

The elephant in the room, of course, was that none of that is possible if you are working crazy hours consistently.

Most other people, meanwhile, had no idea why so much work was required or why it had to be done so quickly.

Racing Against the Clock

I had no time to consider anything because I had a deadline: this new course had to be done by April 30th, since the price of the modeling course was going up and the course itself was being split apart into basic and advanced levels.

April arrived and I had completed only around 60-70% of the new course, so I went back into “hustle” mode and locked myself in a room, attaching a (sugar-free) Red Bull IV for a few days while Excel work and video recording commenced.

I also had to create brand new content for the promotion I was doing at the end of the month, which didn’t help.

So I made the decision to cut material and hold off on certain guides, bonus case studies, etc. until after the re-launch was done.

And then there was another big deadline in the month: April 15th.

Taxes.

Whoops.

Since I was so on top of the paperwork, I had completely failed to file quarterly estimated taxes for 2009, and I suddenly owed a very large amount of money to the US government in taxes + interest and fines.

Yes, if you’re overseas you can save a bit on US income taxes, but you can’t take full advantage of the exemption if you’re overseas for only part of the year. There are also restrictions if you’re self-employed.

I knew about most of this, but assumed that I would be OK since I was overseas for a majority of the year and therefore wouldn’t owe as much – which turned out to be wrong.

I also had to figure out a way to send the money back home – unlike my landlord, the US government did NOT seem willing to accept payment in laundry bags filled with 10,000 won bills.

From Bad to Worse

I came up with the money, but now I was in a precarious financial position because I had also been paying off my student loans aggressively this entire past year.

It was “do or die time” as the April 30th deadline approached: if the re-launch went well, I would be OK; if it didn’t go well, I would be another foreign English teacher in Korea very soon.

Five days before the launch period ended on April 30th, my laptop battery died.

Technically, this wasn’t a huge deal because it still worked – but it was impossible to transport it anywhere else or work from anywhere other than my home, at least not without constantly shutting it down and restarting.

I “borrowed” someone else’s computer, managed to find the battery online, and then paid a small fortune to have it shipped internationally, rush delivery, so that I would get it 1-2 days.

The re-launch itself and all the promotional videos were going fine: there was even more interest than the year before, and the content itself was far better after a year of 24/7 video creation.

But I made some silly mistakes in other areas:

1. The sign-up deadline was April 30th at “5 PM New York time,” which equated to… 6 AM in Seoul. Yeah, not my best notion.
2. I promised free access to all future financial modeling courses, and promised that I would develop the PowerPoint course, the bank modeling course, the oil & gas course, and the real estate financial modeling course all in “the next year.” This created some interesting problems, which you’ll read more about in Part 3.
3. Worst of all, I attempted to do everything myself. Yes, I had designers and some help with support by this time, but I was attempting to change over all the pages, swap out everything, change prices, and modify the setup all in the last few hours, all by myself.

I stayed up for 36 hours straight in the last 2 days before the launch, and I had to respond to a FLOOD of last-minute questions and emails that came in at the 11th hour.

The entire past month had taken such a toll on me that I was actually confined to a bed by this point.

I spent the next 1.5 days in bed, recovering and attempting to respond to more emails and questions that streamed in.

Great Success?

April 2010 became the best month ever in site history to that point.

Up until the last 1-2 days, it was an “OK, but not spectacular” promotion, and then all of a sudden around 70-80% of the sign-ups came in the last 24 hours, with almost 40% in the last hour.

Yeah, humans like to procrastinate.

I celebrated by going to my favorite cupcake place, and then, still somewhat ill and not thinking entirely clearly, I decided to pay off all my remaining student loans.

This was mostly psychological: I had made it through tax season alive, saved up a bit over the year, and didn’t want to have loans hanging over my head anymore even though interest rates were low and it didn’t make much financial sense to repay them immediately.

I was free! Free!

Or had I just made the dumbest move ever?

The day after, I looked at site stats in more detail and saw a few troubling things:

For one, normal sales had fallen to almost $0 right after we finished the promotion and raised prices.

Oops.

Was the pricing wrong now? Did the packages not make sense? Was this strategy a terrible mistake?

Second, I had a huge “unfunded liability” in the form of these promised future courses.

I had no idea how I would even research the new areas, teach myself the material, and also find the time to create one shorter course and three 20-30 hour long courses in less than a year.

And third, I was exhausted. Working at this intensity for such a long period had seriously reduced my motivation, and I didn’t even want to look at Excel again.

So how would I get out of this one, restore normal sales, and create all these new courses on an impossible deadline?

Stay tuned for all of that and more in Part 3.

No lessons or advice this time around – you’re smart enough to extract that on your own.

Just a cliffhanger ending.

Until next time!

The Rest of the Series:

[catlist name=brian-life-story numberposts=-1 orderby=title order=asc]

The post My Life Story, Part 2: How a Guy in a Pink Rabbit Suit and a Korean Girl Changed My Life (2008 – 2010) appeared first on Mergers & Inquisitions.

When I sent out an email last year asking if you wanted to hear the story of how I started this site, I got a lot of “interesting” responses:

“I like some blogs about blogging. Back in the day, I liked a particular one by a guy named Steve Pavlina who wrote a rather excellent series on how he ended up coming to his senses while spending 24 hours in jail, finishing 3 years of college in 3 semesters, running a minor software company, and eventually earning a good living from his blog. So, don’t spare us any juicy stuff.

For instance, if one day you woke up with 2 hookers sleeping on the floor of your hotel room and leftovers of cocaine on the coffee table, 30 text messages and 9 voice mails on your phone, all the while realizing that the model you were working on before the party started has to be done in 2 hours, and saw that as a day of reckoning for your IB lifestyle, we’d love to know.”

So I’m not going to spare any of the juicy stuff.

And you can take a shot every time I mention 2 hookers and leftovers of cocaine – the 30 text messages and 9 voicemails are optional.

Today, I’m going to tell you the story of my own life – from elementary school to university and beyond – and how I started this site on a whim and turned it into a business that now employs dozens of people.

Pay close attention, because you’re about to learn more about starting a real business – one that serves customers and creates valuable products and services – than you ever would from business school, “start-up weekends” or anything else that doesn’t relate to solving a real problem.

WARNING: Read This First

This is an “off topic” post, and if you’re looking to read more about interviews, what it’s like on the job, hedge fund case studies, or financial modeling, well, you’ll have to wait until next week for more of that.

Also, if you’re easily offended or you want sugar-coated nonsense rather than my “no B.S.” extremely blunt approach, don’t read this.

Still on board?

Good.

In the Beginning…

The most common comment I got when growing up in New Jersey was, “you seem a lot different from the rest of your family.”

That was mostly true: many of my immediate family members worked for the government, were not particularly ambitious, and, despite solid educational backgrounds, had very little commercial sense.

Don’t get me wrong: they raised me well, always emphasized education, and allowed me to perform well in school, and you can’t dismiss any of that.

When it came to business skills and “real world success,” though, they came up short.

So I came from a very middle-class background – I don’t think my family ever earned more than $60-70K per year, combined – and I had a fairly unremarkable youth, where I never traveled far outside of my home state for 15-16 years.

In contrast to my immediate family members was my Grandfather, who had run his own small business – a chain of auto repair stores – for over 30 years.

While he wasn’t “wealthy,” he did quite well for himself, raised a large family on his income, and always found a way to improve his own situation.

This created a sharp distinction for me at a young age: I could become well-educated, but never understand much about business and blame others for my problems – or I could work non-stop, take responsibility for my own actions, and succeed in spite of external circumstances.

I resolved to be part of the second group, which explains why many classmates and friends thought I was actually adopted.

Your Hobbies and Interests?

When I was younger, computers and the Internet were just getting started (the 80s / 90s), and I dove in headfirst.

I was creating websites back when most people were using 28.8K modems on AOL, and I even started a web design and development business back then. It turns out that getting your local mayor and other small businesses and organizations as clients is easy when you radically undercharge for your services (not recommended).

That venture never went anywhere, though, and I took the “safer choice” by continuing with school and assumed I would go to a top university, go to law school, and then go into a mind-numbingly boring profession like corporate law where I’d be tempted to poke my eyes out every day.

My other “passion” growing up was writing, and my proudest accomplishment was pulling one of my first all-nighters to write a version of The Pearl (John Steinbeck) set in the Middle Ages.

Looking back on it now, it seems blindingly obvious that someone passionate about writing, creating content, and maintaining a presence on the Internet would end up creating this type of business.

But you can only connect the dots looking backward.

From middle school through university and beyond, I was set on following the usual “path” toward some elusive but vaguely defined “greatness.”

Following that logic, I ended up at Stanford and bounced around between different possibilities both while I was there and after graduating: engineering, consulting, project management, and yes, ultimately finance.

The only correct decision I made at this point was crossing “law school” off the list fairly early on (phew).

Why Banking?

It was an accident.

I had nothing even remotely finance-related in my background: I had completed a technical degree (Computer Science), I saw myself as an artist / creative type rather than a businessperson, and I wasn’t even a drug addict or serial killer.

Plus, I knew almost nothing about accounting or finance back then.

I was vaguely interested because I wanted to work in technology banking, which I planned to leverage to get into venture capital – this was back when it was more expensive to start a company, and VCs therefore had more cachet.

But I thought about lots of other possibilities, like prop trading (they love CS majors): the finance industry was recovering from the dot-com crash and hiring was on the upswing, so “career transitions” were much easier.

You can throw a rock and hit several tech investment banking groups and/or tech boutiques in California, so it wasn’t too hard to move into the finance industry.

I joked around about “selling out,” but I didn’t actually see it like that because I never planned to stay in banking for the long-term.

Many people go into banking and immediately hate it.

But since I am obsessive-compulsive, a perfectionist, an extreme workaholic, and a generally unbalanced person, I actually enjoyed it for the first 5-10 deals I worked on (it helped that my team was dysfunctional and they gave me far more work than anyone else).

Over time, though, the work started to pile on and on and on, and deals started to look the same after a while (Jonathan Knee shares a similar story in The Accidental Investment Banker, though he was at a senior level when this happened to him).

And it got harder to justify working that much as the learning curve flattened out and I grew bored of doing the same thing over and over.

Exit Opps!

Most people reach this point and come up with a standard solution: go into private equity, join a hedge fund, join a venture capital firm (my original plan), or go into corporate development.

I thought about all of those, and I interviewed extensively with tech PE and VC firms.

By the middle of 2007, I had progressed far into interviews with several of these firms.

One Night at 4 AM…

Meanwhile, work continued to be crazy. This was before the credit crunch, so at one point I was actually working on multiple leveraged buyout deals at once.

On May 17th, 2007, I was certain I was going to pull an all-nighter and I gave a status update to that effect to an MD as he was leaving the office that day.

He said, “Don’t get hit by a bus,” jokingly, as he left.

I finished work around 4 AM and started driving home (yes, driving – one of the many drawbacks to working in California rather than New York or London).

Thirty minutes later, I woke up stuck in a tree on the side of the road, inside my wrecked car.

It wasn’t a life-threatening accident, but the car was totaled and I was quite panicked.

Three thoughts immediately came to mind:

1. Well, this gives me a good excuse to miss work tomorrow…
2. I need to watch tonight’s episode of Lost to take my mind off this.
3. Damn, MDs are good at predicting the future.

To be clear: I got in this accident mostly because I was inefficient and didn’t prioritize well; I was also doing way too much unnecessary work to “stand out.”

So I blame no one but myself for this one.

I crawled home, woke up the next day, and sent out an email to everyone with a subject line “At the ER” (I did go there, just to get myself checked out).

In response, they gave me the day off!

I used the time to start thinking more seriously about “strategic alternatives” and what I actually wanted to do in life.

The 400-Hour Workweek

A few days after this, I was meeting up with a few friends as part of my “break,” and one of them mentioned she had started checking email only twice per day as a result of reading a book called The 4-Hour Workweek.

Side Note: Yes, we’ll get to how I eventually appeared in the 2^nd edition of this book and what I really think of it later in this series. To summarize: it’s a lot easier to buy into this philosophy after you’ve been working 90-100 hours per week, but I don’t necessarily agree with it 5-6 years afterward. And let’s just say that you don’t create hundreds of hours of video and millions of words of content by working 4 hours per week…

Side Note 2: This friend who introduced me to the book was actually Goldie, who later became our producer on Cost of Capital. Yes, sometimes life works like that.

I immediately thought, “Wow, that sounds like a scam. Who could be so stupid as to believe that?!!”

But my life couldn’t get much worse at this point, so I got curious and started reading reviews from respectable sources, and they all seemed positive.

Most people read this book and immediately assume that it’s impossible.

I read it and was blown away because it didn’t seem far-fetched at all:

1. I had already made money from my own business in the past – I knew it was more than do-able.
2. I had years of experience writing and creating websites, so “creating a product” and marketing it online did not intimidate me. I knew that getting traffic would be the toughest part, so that’s what I focused on learning.
3. I knew that an online business matched my personality because I’m good at hustling and getting things done but horrible at playing politics and climbing the corporate ladder.

Since it made perfect sense, I decided to do the logical thing and procrastinate for over 6 months and make up all sorts of excuses for why it wouldn’t work.

Decision Time

Interviews continued throughout 2007, but I had to make a decision soon: the longer I stayed in banking, the harder it would be to move into PE or VC.

At the same time, I had started helping university friends, co-workers, and contacts at other firms land buy-side roles and move to other banks. I had even been training interns and new hires when they started.

My strength was explaining technical concepts simply and getting directly to the point without adding fluff.

I didn’t think much of this at the time, but it turned out to be mildly “important” later on.

As interviews progressed, I realized that I wasn’t meant to be in a traditional career:

• I missed one flight to a later round interview by a few minutes…
• …I woke up late and missed a final round presentation at another firm…
• …And my gut feeling said, “This is not the right move for you at this time.”

My favorite moment came when I was interviewing at a mid-size private equity firm and one of the Principals told me:

“Brian, I’m sure you could work here and do a great job. But if you’re at all thinking about doing something different, do it now. It gets harder and harder to go out and do something on your own and accept no pay or low pay once you reach a certain compensation level.”

He later told me that he actually wanted to leave his own firm – yes, in the middle of an interview – and work at a normal company instead.

By this stage, I had received 2 “soft offers” from PE firms where they said, “If you tell us in advance that you’ll accept the offer, we’ll give it to you.”

But my gut feeling told me it wasn’t the right move, so I effectively turned them down by not responding.

Interviews stopped toward the end of the 2007, and I took a break to figure out my “Plan B.”

A “Too Weak” Vacation

Right around this time, many of the deals I was working on had just closed and I hadn’t used any official vacation days yet.

So I negotiated a 2-week vacation (I called it “10 days” to make it sound more palatable) to Japan and went on a cross-country trip there with a friend, visiting other friends throughout the country.

But I wanted to get started with my “Plan B” before I left, so I began brainstorming domain names with a friend… here’s what we came up with (yes, I actually went back to my obsessive compulsively-saved chat logs to find this list):

• cubicleconundrum.com
• reffedout.com
• battleforbonus.com
• bonusseason.com
• bankingforbananas.com
• overpaidunderlaid.com
• openthekimono.com
• lowhangingfruit.com
• mergersandexecutions.com

After a few more minutes of brainstorming, we finally settled on mergersandinquisitions.com, figuring that we could easily change the domain if we thought of something better (it didn’t happen).

I hired a designer on elance.com to create the logo, set up WordPress on the domain, and started “warming up” by writing short blog posts about banking.

I never published these posts because they were all terrible, but occasionally I look at them for a laugh.

Back Home…

I didn’t exactly attain enlightenment on this trip, but it was a lot of fun. Well, minus the part where we got stuck in a capsule hotel and realized that everyone else was watching porn in their capsules, but that’s a different story for a different day.

When I got back, my mindset had shifted dramatically. I was now 100% focused on the site and minimized the amount of time I spent on “real” work using some of the tricks described here.

Officially, it launched in November 2007 with some of the earliest posts written on this site (which have since been revamped several times):

• How to Get an Investment Banking Job
• The Investment Banking Analyst

I was far from convinced that it would ever turn into anything substantial back then.

In fact, I hedged myself by starting other sites on other topics that I knew nothing about, but which might have been profitable… none of those ended up gaining traction, so I shut them down the next year.

I knew almost nothing about the other players in the market or even if there would be enough interest to support a business.

I remember telling one co-worker that I would be happy to make $1,000 per month from it. He laughed at me and told me to stop wasting my life.

Oh yeah, and I had no idea how I would make money because I had no product, no time to create a product, and I did not want to offer consulting services.

I had faith only because it was an under-served market with tons of people looking for advice and almost no legitimate sources of information.

That made sense intuitively: students everywhere wanted to break in, but many finance professionals were too busy working or too angry to actually help them.

Vault was irrelevant, WallStreetOasis was just getting started and was much smaller back then, and no financial modeling training companies had an audience online.

I knew that if I acted quickly and decisively, I could create the first site with a distinct voice to offer high-quality tips and content to this market.

The Marketing Strategy…

I was so slow and so bad at writing in these days that it was almost laughable.

Still, I persisted and kept posting twice per week, constantly answered questions on message boards, and repeatedly emailed sites like Dealbreaker and the NY Times Deal Book with news of my new articles.

And when Bear Stearns was acquired in March 2008, I got a front page mention and link on Dealbreaker and received thousands of visitors to the site for the first time ever.

Andrew Ross Sorkin from the NY Times later contacted me and wanted to feature my writing (I didn’t have time to contribute, though that would have been interesting).

I spent 90% of my time on marketing, promotion, and contacting other sites back then and only around 10% of my time on creating content here – which was a very wise decision in retrospect.

This rapid growth happened because there was such a big gap in the market. In 2008, there were literally no good sources online for learning about careers in finance… and even 5 years later, there still aren’t as many sources as you might expect.

Yes, new sites start up all the time, but then they shut down just as rapidly: I’ve seen very few even make it to the 2 or 3-year mark.

I knew it had taken off when I started getting comments and emails from readers saying that they were “offended” over something I wrote (one of the first cases happened when I advised readers to start at a bulge bracket bank, if possible – yes, somehow this was “offensive”).

When people react emotionally – whether positively or negatively – you know you’re doing something right.

In January 2008, I made the mistake of offering to review readers’ resumes for free and got inundated with resume submissions.

So in February, a few weeks later, I changed this policy and launched a paid service, mostly to reduce the flood of submissions… and to see if I could actually make money with this.

It was $100 for a line-by-line resume edit and $50 for a simple resume review – looking at those numbers now, I can’t believe that I was willing to work for those rates (pretty much all resume editing services are significantly more expensive than this).

On February 10, 2008, I got my first sale as someone signed up for the $100 service.

It was almost nothing, but it validated my idea and showed that people were willing to pay for advice and tips on getting into the industry.

In the 6 months between January and June 2008, I made very little money from the site, but traffic and sales numbers kept improving each month – so I kept plugging away.

I still did not want to rely on services in the long-term, but at least this way I could earn something and, more importantly, learn the market very well.

I gained insight from these resume reviews that paid for itself hundreds of times over.

And I used all of it as I started to launch products toward the end of the year and into 2009.

The Most Critical 6 Months

While I made almost no money during this time, I achieved something that was even more important: a dramatic shift in mindset.

1. I realized that you had to stick with a business venture for a very long time before seeing any results; I stopped hoping for short-term results and no longer paid attention to the day-to-day minutiae. If it took 6 months to build traction, it might take years to turn into a viable business.
2. I dropped the “I went to a top school, so I deserve high pay!” attitude that so many of my peers had. The truth is that no one gives a crap about you and you don’t “deserve” anything. This goes back to my “origin story” with my Grandfather vs. other family members: I was simply going back to the side I originally wanted to be on.
3. I learned to focus relentlessly on what was most important – creating and marketing products and services – and blocked out everything else. No business cards, no office space, no social media, poor to non-existent bookkeeping…
4. At the same time, I also started working out and getting into much better shape physically (yes, 100-hour weeks do a number on your body), which helped with everything else above. My story getting in shape later inspired this article on fitness.

But it wasn’t all positive.

A good portion of my “friends” thought I was crazy and actively wanted me to fail and lose everything – maybe not what you’d expect from ambitious and driven people, but trust me, real life is not too far apart from Game of Thrones-style backstabbing sometimes.

To be fair, though, I also had the wrong attitude: I hyped up what I was doing far too much, and tended to “look down” on anyone who was skeptical.

I should have stayed low key and kept details to a minimum until I had something more tangible to show them.

Note: These days, I’ve gone to the opposite extreme and I rarely even tell people what “I do.” I’m as vague as possible if they ask, and people tend to think I’m either a billionaire or incredibly poor, but nothing in between (logical, right?).

Burn All Bridges?

I knew that I had to get out of banking before the end of 2008, partly because I sensed the end was near.

The mood in the industry had changed so dramatically between 2005 and the end of 2007 that I didn’t foresee anything good happening in the next year.

I could have gone back to PE recruiters and some of the firms I had spoken with, or even contacted friends in the tech start-up community and started asking for jobs.

But a month before I left in the summer of 2008, I made a critical decision: I burned all bridges.

If you’ve read Think and Grow Rich, you know that burning all bridges is one of Napoleon Hill’s key principles: if you do not have a Plan B, you must force yourself to succeed with your Plan A.

So I didn’t want to stop at merely quitting my old job – here’s what else I did:

• I turned down all inquiries from PE firms, recruiters, former co-workers, and anyone else who was trying to set me up with another job.
• One of my good friends had just quit his job and was moving to Argentina. I had given him the idea to move there, but then I backed out because I needed to double-down, improve and grow the site, and launch products.
• I also resisted the temptation to freelance on the side, take a part-time job, or do anything to otherwise distract me.
• Several senior bankers I had worked with offered to “invest” in any idea I had – I turned down all these offers, even though my net worth was negative (see below).

My odds at this point were… poor, to say the least:

• I had a tiny, though growing, website that made barely enough money to cover my very cheap rent each month.
• I didn’t have a product and all revenue at the time came from resume editing – if I stopped working, it disappeared.
• The site design was horrible and it didn’t look even halfway professional.
• I also knew comparatively little about finance, modeling, and the industry in general back then.
• Oh yeah, and I had over $100K USD in student loans. While I had saved up some cash from banking, my net worth was still negative.

I stuck with it because I was willing to kill myself if it meant that I never had to work for anyone else again.

Words cannot describe how determined I was back then (and still am today, in some ways).

But let me put it this way: The Dark Knight had just been released in the summer of 2008, and a few friends and acquaintances started comparing me to The Joker after they heard about my grandiose plans and then my actual situation above.

On the Product Front…

I had also decided that I needed to move beyond resume editing – I needed a product.

My “brilliant” idea at the time was to create something that taught you how to break into banking from A to Z: a combined interview, networking, and recruiting guide, with lots of multimedia and interactivity.

My positioning would be: “Don’t learn financial modeling – it’s a waste of time and all such courses are overpriced and useless! Here’s how you really break in. You don’t even know how to use Excel!”

I didn’t know what it would be called yet, but I started working on it furiously in the summer of 2008.

Take note, imitators (since I know you’re reading this): this was a horrible idea, and if you’re doing something like this right now, you’re wasting your time.

Side Note: Why was this product a bad idea? The top 3 reasons:

1. In this market, everyone values technical and financial modeling skills over everything else.

2. By making your product narrowly focused on those breaking into the industry, you limit your potential to sell outside of that audience, e.g. to firms and universities and to professionals already in the industry.

3. Over time, interviews have become significantly more technical and you need to know something about modeling to succeed these days. So this positioning is not even accurate.

I ended up wasting 9 months on this idea before scrapping everything (you’ll see what I did instead in Part 2 of this series).

Work Forever?

After a quick trip to Hawaii, I went back into this site and this unnamed side project.

I was about to launch a redesigned site that highlighted resume editing and mock interviews, did a better job selling the services, and explained why they were useful.

And resume editing business had really picked up; by August 2008 I was downright busy every day simply from the $50 and $100 resume reviews.

Then, I came up with the name for my new, snazzy (horribly flawed) product: “Breaking Into Wall Street.”

I registered the domain and then launched the new version of M&I in early September, attracting dozens of sign-ups for the new resume editing and mock interview services in a few days.

A few readers emailed me and asked if they could just buy interview questions and answers in a PDF, but I brushed it off and thought it wouldn’t be worthwhile – it would have been a distraction from everything else I had going on.

In August into September 2008, I was working almost non-stop; I took breaks maybe once or twice per week, but otherwise I spent about 12-14 hours per day working with clients, creating content, and continuing to market the site.

Unlike investment banking hours, which offer plenty of downtime despite their length, these 12-14 hours per day consisted entirely of real work.

It was exhausting, but effective: September was on track to be the best month yet, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel with all the progress I was making on BIWS.

Things were going well, and in less than a year I had gone from no presence online to making a full-time income from the site.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

And then on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

Merrill Lynch was acquired the day before.

I mentioned that 3 weeks before all this, I had just registered the domain name “breakingintowallstreet.com,” right?

My remaining contacts in finance started calling me and wondering what the hell was going to happen, speculating on end-of-world scenarios, and generally expressing bewilderment.

All sales also stopped for a few days right around this time, and I made exactly $0.

I was very close to quitting altogether.

I figured that no one would ever want to get into finance in the future anyway – but hey, at least I hadn’t spent years and years on this idea yet.

On a more practical level, I couldn’t survive if no one was buying anything, and I was 98% convinced that this entire market would dry up and die.

The Audacity of Nope?

I met up with a former co-worker who had left the industry earlier than me – he got out right after the peak in mid-2007.

I told him that I was seriously thinking of quitting, and he looked at me and said:

“I think you’re making a big mistake. People will always want to get in, even if it’s not as popular as it once was. There will always be business and finance majors that can’t imagine doing anything else. And you haven’t been working on this long enough to draw any conclusions yet.”

I thought about that advice and then considered my other options: getting a real job once again, doing something part-time on the side, or doing freelance work… and nothing else appealed to me.

This was my greatest motivation: all my “Plan B” alternatives were horrible, and I really didn’t want to go through with any of them… so I kept working on my “Plan A.”

Sales eventually recovered and interest in the industry continued, but I got countless comments and emails from readers wondering what would happen next – as if I had any idea (I made a few guesses, though).

Problems, Problems, Problems…

As we moved into the fall of 2008, the site survived, but more problems emerged:

1. This “Breaking Into Wall Street” program was taking me forever to create because it was so comprehensive – finishing it in 12 months would have been optimistic.
2. Sales continued their downward trend since recruiting season reached a lull in October and November, in between the busy periods of August – September and December – January.
3. Social isolation was starting to get to me, and I began having visions of The Shining and going around with an axe killing people.

I can’t overstate how much the last point affected me. No, not the axe or killing people – being isolated.

I had gone from working with co-workers, clients, and classmates all the time to… working by myself on my laptop, at home or in coffee shops.

This is one of the biggest downsides to starting an online business, and one of the reasons why all the books / training programs / seminars on those topics are over-hyped.

Yes, it’s great to start a successful business, but you also need relationships to be fulfilled in life. And starting anything – especially an online venture – is inherently isolating.

It got so bad around this time that I thought about selling everything and getting a real job.

To give you a flavor for this, here’s a journal entry from this time period (in another one of my OCD habits, I keep a detailed journal going back almost 10 years detailing all conversations with everyone and tiny day-to-day details):

November 8, 2008:          Shot in Mexico

“Quiet day. Mostly resting, but still get some work done later in day with recording and think I continued work on BIWS sections. [Friend]’s father wants him to get him US citizenship… fearing for life in Mexico now and worried about getting shot. Tell [Friend] that I’d easily sell site at this point, and later realize at gym how screwed I am. You know things are bad if not even intense exercise can take your mind off failure.”

Don’t ask about the stuff in Mexico – that would require a much longer explanation. Let’s just say that everyone made it out of there alive…

No Options Left?

My back was to the wall, I had burned all my bridges, the site was going downhill, and I could barely motivate myself to work.

I started thinking about what to do, frantically searching online and going through emails… and then I came across that comment from the reader from a few months ago…

“Can I just buy your interview questions and answers? I don’t want to do a mock interview with you or get resume editing, I just want the full question and answer list.”

I had said “no” because I thought releasing an e-book of questions and answers would de-value the other product I was creating – plus, I knew no one would pay much for it.

But I took a long, hard look at my progress so far and realized that I needed some kind of product out there.

It didn’t have to be expensive or revolutionary – just something to sell while this mammoth other product continued sucking up resources.

I also realized that I could travel a lot more now and planned a 3-week trip to Asia (China, Thailand, and Singapore), which later turned into a 6-week trip and expanded to include Korea, and eventually resulted in me living in Korea, but we’ll get to all of that in Part 2.

I didn’t think this would solve anything in the long-term, but I knew that travel would mix it up and make me less bored and isolated overall.

Dig Deep Down…

I spent 3 weeks of hardcore effort writing this interview guide, mostly re-purposing material from the massive product that I had been working on.

Version 1.0 came out to around 23,000 words.

Today, I could write that amount in 2 days.

Back then, it took 3 weeks (although I wasn’t focused on it 100% of the time).

This guide was not spectacular by any means.

The initial version was almost a joke: the “fit” questions had no suggested structure or answers, the technical questions were too basic, and there were no Excel models, no charts / diagrams, and there was no coverage of important topics such as how to tell your story in interviews.

BUT…

This guide had one big advantage: it was a finished product that you could actually buy.

Many people spend months and years on products that never go anywhere and never get released… and I had been making that same mistake for the past 6 months with my own mammoth unfinished product.

Products that are not for sale do not generate revenue. Get your stupid product out and stop being a perfectionist.

You can and should refine it later (version 3.0 of the guide today is longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy), but initially you must release a minimum viable product – anything more than that and you will waste a ton of time and effort.

I also forced myself to release the guide because I set a self-imposed deadline: I was about to leave on my 3-week trip to Asia, and I had to finish the guide before I set foot on the plane.

The Following Takes Place on December 9, 2008, at 2:48 AM

I put the finishing touches on the interview guide on December 9, 2008, at 2:48 AM and posted the announcement on the site, and then started watching the made-for-TV 24 movie to celebrate.

Almost immediately, sales started coming in. My audience was tiny, but it didn’t matter – in the first 24 hours alone, this simple guide completely turned around the fortunes of the site and turned a failing business into a viable one.

Since that day, the interview guide (in various updated and revamped versions) has gone on to sell 6,000+ copies. And I’ve done promotions far bigger than this small launch.

But in the first year of starting the site, that day was the time I felt most successful.

And I realized that products were going to be the future of the site, even though I didn’t know what form they would take yet.

Less than 24 hours after launching my interview guide on December 9, 2008, I got on the plane that took me to Asia.

Life was about to get even more interesting… in ways I couldn’t have even imagined at the time.

Lessons Learned

Now we get to the part where I attempt to make this entire story more broadly applicable to careers and business…

So, what should you take from this?

The Market Matters Most

“Market matters most; neither a stellar team nor fantastic product will redeem a bad market. Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.”

-Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and founder of Netscape and Ning.com

Many people attribute their success to what they did personally, and their failures to external circumstances.

Usually, though, the opposite is true.

Yes, I worked crazy hours and practically killed myself in these early days… but you know what? A lot of people do that in other ventures, too, and never get anywhere.

The difference here was the market: it was an under-served market in need of solutions, and I took a different angle on it than everyone else.

It wasn’t just me and it wasn’t just this market… consider the start dates of popular blogs in other niches:

• Personal Development: StevePavlina.com (2004); Zen Habits (2007)
• Internet Marketing: Copyblogger (2006); ProBlogger (2004); Entrepreneur’s Journey (2005)
• Personal Finance: Get Rich Slowly (2006); I Will Teach You To Be Rich (2004)

They all started in 2004 – 2007, when blogging was not yet developed and when there was still unmet demand for these topics.

Today, it would be much harder to get noticed, even in this market, because there are already several major sites that have been established and growing for years.

By contrast, there were several distinct gaps when I started in 2007:

• No existing financial modeling training companies had online presences or audiences, or understood how to create compelling content – a big missed opportunity for them.
• Students and professionals alike were looking for career advice and recruiting tips, but no one actually produced interesting and relevant content for them.
• And as we’ll see in Part 2, financial modeling programs on the market at the time were not effective, affordable, or easy to use… because most companies focused on in-person, classroom training instead (yeah, like that’s going to exist in 100 years).

So don’t try to “copy” this site: unless you’re doing something different or you’re in a different market that still has those gaps, it won’t work.

Malcolm Gladwell is Right About Outliers

A few months ago, I was in LA visiting friends before the premiere of Cost of Capital.

The conversation started with the usual chit-chat, but by the end they were asking me for a “blueprint” for how to start this type of business, and they were convinced that they could just “hire someone” to write all their content.

You miss the point, guys (and hey, if one of you happens to be reading this, now you know the truth).

You can’t just “write content” or “pay someone to write content” – you must create content that grabs readers’ attention and remains relevant for years or decades.

The web is getting more and more crowded, so you must produce exceptional content to stand out.

And you must be a real person and display authenticity in everything you do.

This is not something that you can just “pick up” – it takes years / decades of practice.

I didn’t know this when I started out. But I had been writing for years, creating websites for years, and I even had experience with “email marketing” and writing catchy subject lines going back to university.

So if you haven’t spent a good chunk of your life on these tasks, you need to start quickly – or you’ll never get anywhere.

The bottom-line: you are not going to jump into any field and instantly find success.

Just because I was successful with a business that required intensive content creation doesn’t mean that you will be… everyone has different skills, and you might be better off doing something entirely different.

Delete All Your “Plan B” Options In Order to Succeed

I’ve seen this one come up time and time again…

“Hey Brian, I’m going to start a business just like you did. But I’m working full-time, how can I get the time to do it? By the way, I kind of like my job and want to impress my boss, too…”

If this is you, give up right now.

The only way you’ll be successful starting a business is if you have a burning desire so great that it overwhelms everything else in your life.

You have to be somewhat insane / mentally unstable to start and run a business, which is why few people do it: normal people just fall back into the 9-5 routine.

While I now disagree with much of what’s in The 4-Hour Workweek, there is one point I do agree with 100%: “Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with clever rationalization.”

When I forced myself to succeed, I had no options left: going back into finance was not possible, I had cut off all my connections, and after months of working from home, I could not force myself to go back into an office again.

Burn all bridges, jump into pure hell, or do whatever else it takes to force yourself into action.

And if you have any doubts, just remember what Sylvester Stallone did…

There is Always a Way Out

This may seem like a contradiction of the point above, but it’s not.

No matter how dire the odds, there is always a way out. It may not be the ideal solution, and it may not be a long-term solution, but it’s out there.

For me, the “way out” was releasing a very small part of my mammoth product simply to get something out there, boost sales, and start generating more interest in the site.

Ironically, *I* was the biggest obstacle to my own success.

If I hadn’t been so stubbornly set on perfecting and releasing a massive product, I would have launched my interview guide much sooner.

Sure, sometimes external factors prevent you from succeeding… but before you blame the outside world, ask if you are the biggest obstacle first.

Sometimes you need to remove yourself rather than anything external.

The Rest of the Series:

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The post My Life Story, Part 1: How I Started This Site (2007 – 2008) appeared first on Mergers & Inquisitions.