How I went from selling t-shirts to getting sued by a $15 Million company to building a 150k/month email marketing agency

A thread on how I made $47 million:

2005: My story with online business started in (questionable) internet message boards.

I sold t-shirts that coincided with Nike shoe launches

This was before Shopify existed and Facebook was brand new

My strategy was really bare bones:

Post about t-shirts in message boards and build a list.

I'd then email the list whenever new shoes dropped and make sales directly.

Little did I know this would become a valuable skillset:

1. Build an audience with a list
2. Nurture that audience
3. Sell

You could say I "grew up in ecom"

Using the skills I learned from my t-shirt gig, I started playing with a bunch of different E-com projects.

My 1st cash cow came from a store I built with my homie.

We ripped Cartier bracelets and replicated them with 100% rubber.

Again...

The process was the same: Build a list, nurture, drive sales.

Our Cartier store was making BANK.

Cash was flowing but most importantly I was sharpening email marketing knowledge

My Cartier cash cow was pumping until...

Cartier and its army of lawyers starting hitting us with cease and desist letters.

We weren't technically doing anything wrong so we tried our best to fight for awhile but eventually it became too much.

The final straw came when they sent a cease and desist letter to...

Shopify and they cut us off on Black Friday.

That's when we decided to hand in the keys.

At the time I was working at a software company doing sales & marketing.

Even though I didn't love the job it taught me a lot about marketing and starting sales conversations with clients

I also took all the lessons I learned from my E-com ventures and started doing email marketing and running ads for different people.

And that's how the agency was born.

The problem I faced was I was conflicted.

I had the job at the software company, the agency AND I was

dabbling in E-com.

My newest e-com venture was a Nootropic supplement.

The product and branding was top quality.

I started going heavy with buying traffic and improving conversions

Looking back that was a big mistake.

I became so obsessed with traffic and conversions I..

failed to focus on growing the LTV of my customers.

The problem was my agency was making the lion's share of my income but my heart was in the E-com business.

I knew I had to make a hard choice to ditch one project and focus on the other so I went to my dad for advice. He said

"you have one foot on the dock and one in the boat"

He reminded me I wouldn't get far trying to do both and I had to go all in on one without getting distracted with shiny object syndrome.

It was OBVIOUS my agency was the cash cow unlike the uphill battle I was facing with

E-com.

The convo with my dad led me to making 2 hard choices; Go 100% into the agency and focus strictly on email marketing.

Late 2018: I went 100% into the agency and did 100% of the selling and service fulfillment on my own.

Even though I was making great money...

I knew there was something I couldn't see that was preventing me from unlocking the next level.

Early 2019: I made some big changes to the agency.

I hired people to do fulfillment while I focused strictly on doing sales and marketing to bring in new clients.

I was doing 15k/mo

and by the end of 2019 we did about a quarter million in sales.

And that was when everything began to snowball and I struck the power of momentum.

At this point I was doing zero fulfillment and focusing purely on sales.

That brings me to today:

Our agency now does 150k a month and we've made $47 million for clients doing exclusively email + SMS

If you need any help with email and SMS marketing?

Give me a Follow and shoot me a DM

Cheers for listening to my story

Talk soon,

- Phil