My first business automated an adding machine.
Not a metaphor. My clients were calculating payroll by hand, on an actual adding machine, the kind with the crank handle, next to bound books of printed tax tables. That was the industry. If you wanted to know what to withhold for federal tax on a given paycheck, you looked it up in the book and punched it into the machine by hand. Every payroll, every employee, every pay period.
I was a broke college student building the thing that replaced all of that, out of my dorm room, with no money, no experience, and no idea what I was doing. I'd seen the first IBM PCs show up on campus and had one thought: this has to be automatable. I had no programming background. I had no capital. What I had was a hunch and a willingness to be bad at something in public while I figured it out.
24 months later, the largest national payroll processor in the country bought me out. Seven figures. From a dorm room, automating what my clients had been doing by hand on an adding machine, to an acquisition, in two years, with zero prior experience in payroll, technology, or running a company.
I'm telling you that story on day one because I want you to know exactly who's writing to you every day from now on, and because it sets up the only promise I'm going to make you.
Here's why it matters to you specifically. You didn't need my resume. You needed to know that the person filling your inbox every day actually built something from nothing, more than once, and is willing to show you the parts that worked and the parts that didn't. Most of what lands in your inbox from people selling "make money online" anything was written by someone optimizing for your click, not your outcome. This isn't that.
The move today is small. Just keep opening these. I'm going to send you one real thing every day, something I actually did, tried, tested, or got wrong, with no 40 minute video before you get to the point. If a day comes where I don't have anything real to say, I'll tell you that instead of manufacturing filler.
Since that first business, I've started 14 companies. 13 are still running in some form today. The national failure rate for new businesses sits north of 70 percent. I'm not saying that to brag, though I'll admit I'm proud of it. I'm saying it because that number is going to keep showing up in what I send you, because the reason behind it is the actual subject of this newsletter, not a footnote to it.
Here's the honest part, on day one, because I said I'd lead with it instead of burying it. Not everything I've built has worked. One idea in particular, something I was certain about, something I'd built my entire skill set around, crashed and burned badly enough that I still think about it. I'll tell you that story this Sunday. Not because it makes a good arc, but because you deserve to know both sides of this before you decide whether to trust anything I say for the next 60 days.
