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The LFG Show
From Troubled Youth to Affiliate Powerhouse: Tyler Day's Incredible Transformation! 🔥
What happens when a troubled youth decides to turn his life around and become a digital marketing powerhouse? Join host Dave Stodolak as he dives deep into the inspiring journey of Tyler Day, President of Optimized Convert! In this episode, Tyler shares his story of transformation from a challenging past to becoming a major player in the affiliate marketing world. 💪
Tyler's path wasn’t easy, but with just $120 and a relentless drive, he entered the affiliate marketing scene at 17, guided by his brother Peter, who helped him swap unhealthy habits for a life of fitness and personal development. 🚀 Hear Tyler recount how they invested in coaching, crushed campaigns, and hit financial milestones that turned heads—even flaunting earnings during a spring break trip!
But this episode isn't just about the wins—it's about the grind, the sacrifices, and the strategic moves that took Tyler from running an affiliate network to building a powerhouse internal team. With incredible insights on everything from managing cash flow challenges to achieving a nine-figure revenue milestone, Tyler spills the secrets of his success. 💼💥
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Speaker 3:LFG man. What a day we're at Contact IO in Denver Phenomenal day. We got a really special guest, this guy. I've been wanting to get him on the show for a while. We had his brother, peter Day, on Short interview with him at ASC a couple weeks ago and these guys are doing great things. They they're really like, oh geez. You guys are young, but you're like really like oh geez in this space. This is gonna be a great episode. We got tyler day, the president of optimized convert. It's fucking pumped to have you on the show david, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we were just, and we were just on stage. We were just on stage. We gave a goat award. We had an actual goat on stage. He shot a fucking T-shirt gun, almost had to milk a goat. That didn't happen, though, fortunately, but that was fun. You did great out there. By the way, that was great for people to hear your experience as someone that's been doing this for so long.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we're going to get into more detail about that here now. Yeah, thank you for having me on. Oh, you're welcome. It's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 3:So we're going to go back to the beginning. Man, when we were on stage, I talked about how you made $120 as an affiliate marketer and you were excited about that, and that's where it started. You were only like what? 12 or 13 years old when that happened.
Speaker 2:So let's go back to the beginning how it all started, man, yeah, yeah, I wasn't quite that young, but I got into affiliate marketing when I was a senior in high school, I was 17. And at that time I was coming out of a period of my life that was very dark. So in high school I was kind of a bad kid, you know. I ran with a rough crowd, I had gone to rehab, I'd been in trouble with the police a few kid, you know, I ran with a rough crowd, I had gone to rehab, I'd been in trouble with the police a few times. And my brother was a pivotal mentor in my life at that time where he had given me a personal development book. I forget the name of the book. It was by someone named Danny Johnson and she had this story where she had gone through similar struggles to me, like she was a drug addict and she, you know, was at a lowest of the low point and then had a big turnaround in her life and I basically pivoted from what I was doing and you know the bad shit that I was doing to actually wanting to change my life and I wanted to be better and went from sort of misbehaving all the time and getting into nonsense to, you know, getting out of school every day and going to the gym, and that became my new outlet and that was really like the start of my personal development journey, of just changing my mindset to have healthier habits, of, you know, every day going into the gym, which is something that I still do to this date, and in reading personal development content, which is something I still do every day to date. And I spent about sort of six months just getting my mind and my body right and eliminating some of the vices and the habits that were taking me off track and derailing my life and sort of distance myself from people that weren't a good influence on me. I had one of my close friends go to jail. That was a big wake-up call. I had another close friend pass away, and it was a big wake-up call and I knew that I needed to make a change in my life and move in another direction.
Speaker 2:And at that point Peter was in college and Peter was always a hustler, you know, and Peter's three years older than me, so he was, at that point, a sophomore in college and Peter had been up, you know, late at night with bloodshot eyes, google searching how to make money online and was just desperate to figure it out. And Peter had bought this course from a Google search that was teaching affiliate marketing and at the end of the course it gave the opportunity to promote the course as an affiliate and one of the methods that it taught was running ads on search to basically promote this make money online program. So Peter, being the smart, savvy guy that he is, immediately figured it out and right away had a search campaign that was spitting out profit for him and was making money for him, not to some big, big degree, but, you know, a couple grand a month in profit, that kind of thing. So Peter calls me up, he tells me Ty, I figured out you know this way to make money online. He's in college, right.
Speaker 2:And that weekend I was working a job. I was working a retail job. They had me scheduled to work that weekend, you know, and I told the boss like I want to go visit my brother. They didn't give me the weekend off, they just said, screw you, and kind of booked me anyway, you know, even though I asked for the time off and I just didn't show up. So I go up to my brother's. How old were you at this time 17.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just blew off the job that I had and went to my brother's apartment at UConn, where he was at college, and spent two days just learning everything that he knew up to that point, which was basically running search campaigns, collecting an email address, building a auto responder like a 10 day auto responder and selling this course, you know, and I, I get my campaign set up with him that weekend on Bing search. I get my email list set up, I get my auto responder series set up, autoresponder series set up. I had $200 in my bank account. I, you know, put a $20 per day budget on the Bing campaign. I, you know, went back and, you know, went to class for the week and then the next weekend I was, you know, at a, at a campfire or something like. I was hanging out with a buddy and I see a commission come in on my phone and it was a small commission, you know, 120 bucks or something like that. Right, but at the, at that point, for me everything clicked. At that point I was euphoric, you know. Of course I'd spent some money and whatnot to generate that. But it wasn't shortly after that that a bigger commission came in because there was an upsell, so they bought the first product for 120,. Then they went and bought a thousand dollar product and I earned, you know, an eight or $900 commission on that.
Speaker 2:It was at that point that I was immediately hooked and I knew that this was something that I wanted to do and my path forward for my life. So at that point forward I was rocking and rolling. I had about a $200 per month budget that I could spend on Bing ads and in return that would make me maybe about like $1,000 a month or something in revenue. And that's not a lot about like $1,000 a month or something in revenue. And you know that's not a lot. And and uh, for you know, I ended up getting into a good college.
Speaker 2:I, I got into college at Charleston and was in my dorm room and basically spend, you know, half the day going to class and I spend six to 10 hours a day just doing anything I could affiliate marketing related. So I had my little search campaign that was running and then I was. I didn't have much other money to spend on marketing. Uh, any other profit that came from the search campaign was just spent on like food and just regular shit that I, you know, uh, it's not much money, right? So I needed to generate more things and I started doing SEO. I started busting my ass doing five entire blog articles a day that would be keyword based articles like make money online type stuff to try to sell this, this coaching.
Speaker 2:You know, course, that I was promoting on Bing through organic traffic and it ended up going nowhere and I spent basically two years, about three years, completely spinning my wheels. I would make a little bit of commission when a sale would come in, and at that point there were all these different traffic sources. At that point, the narrative was oh, you need to test all of these traffic sources. It wasn't just Facebook, it wasn't just one thing that you tested, it was you need to find these traffic sources. That was kind of the narrative that I was following at the time. So it was okay, I made $1,000. Let's deposit the $ dollars into traffic vans or whatever, which was like a pops ad network that required like a thousand dollar minimum.
Speaker 2:Burned through that money trying to figure out pops. Okay, now I'm back to square one. Like you know, let's go work at the restaurant, let's go fill up some water glasses and make another thousand dollars and then I would try something else. I tried a direct mail campaign. I had saved up five grand or something like that and I um figured out how to buy a list of addresses and get a postcard design and sent out some postage piece to however many people and lost all that money, right. So? So it was about three years of basically complete trial and error, where I had some little wins here and there but overall didn't make any money and just straight up failed.
Speaker 2:And at one point through the grapevine, I heard about this guy that was offering one-on-one coaching and got connected with him and me and Peter pooled our money together. We both didn't have much at the time. I think we somehow managed to pool together maybe $3,000 between the two of us and we actually paid our first official, real, one-on-one mentor for legit coaching on what he was doing at the time, which was rent to own lead gen. And uh, this was all about doing something similar to what we were doing. He was running ads on bing and generating his own leads on his own landing page for an email submit to where. Then, if somebody would type in their email and then it would redirect into another offer link, that paid four bucks or something for an email submits. It was the the most janky setup. We didn't even know that you could pass an email through and have it pre-pop into another page. It was like they would type an email and redirect into the offer link and they would type the same email in again.
Speaker 2:But it somehow worked, you know, and um, it was the first campaign that actually just cracked off for us and immediately we were spending money and making back, you know, 50%, a hundred percent ROI on the spend.
Speaker 2:And it was scalable because this was a nationwide lead gen campaign for an area that was in extremely high demand, which was basically affordable rent to own housing and there was not that much competition on the search. You know we could get a lot of spend out of it. So me and Peter immediately started applying for credit cards and we got we each got a credit card that maybe had a ten thousand dollar limit. Within one week had spent twenty thousand, made back thirty thousand. We were on weekly pay with the network. So essentially we were able to scale this campaign extremely fast because we were making a high margin, we were getting paid weekly, we were paying off our credit card weekly and within 30 days went from having three grand in our bank account to doing, you know, three grand a day revenue, making like maybe a thousand bucks a day in profit or something like that. And, um, and how old were you guys at this?
Speaker 2:time, At that point yeah, I mean, at that point I was about 20 years old, so all the way from 17 to 20, I was doing that and I think I was a junior. It was like beginning of my junior year of college.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 2:So we were able to scale the heck out of this. We ended up learning about Facebook ads and at the time, facebook ads were so cheap. Our ad was quite literally a stock photo of a house that talked about affordable housing and the clicks were 5 cents. Wow, so we were printing money. All of a sudden, we were collecting our own leads on an email list and very quickly started to add 5,000 leads 10,000 leads a day onto our own email list that we owned, and it was just huge.
Speaker 2:I mean, at one point I remember going on spring break and sending out an email blast to my email list and I was with just some friends of mine, like we're, we're in Puerto Rico on a surf trip and, um, I'm like hanging out with a buddy. I opened up my computer. I'm like do you want me to show you how I make money? And he's like, sure, and I just I, I type up an email like a 10 line email which was, like you know, an EDU email that I was cross promoting to the list, right, and I pressed the send button in. Within 30 minutes, about $7,000 in commissions just rolled in and I was like, okay, cool, that's my work for the day I'm let's go surf now. And you know, it's like like what? Like you know, um, so, so that was, uh, that was our first real banger campaign. We ended up generating literally tens of millions of leads onto our own first party email list and we ended up running that campaign for probably three to five years.
Speaker 2:Before that that offer, that whole rent to own vertical sort of died out. Um, at one point it just sort of dried up like the buyers pulled out of it. Um, so at that point now that's you know we're talking maybe, you know, around 2014, from that initial success, and it was maybe around 2019 that that offer kind of burnt out. For us, towards the tail end of that campaign, we had launched a course where we had showed people this method of promoting lead gen offers and collecting your own leads on your email list and, um, we partnered with Charles Noe on that course, who was an OG in the space, and he helped us promote it to his audience, and we ended up getting about three or 400 students um enrolled in the course, which was a high ticket program.
Speaker 2:And you know, at that point the campaign was kind of dying out. We had, you know, three or 400 people that had gone through this program and we were. We were kind of wondering, like what our next step was. And all of the people that were going through this program they were all like, okay, well, where, who are the buyers? Can you introduce us to these networks? Where do we get these offers to promote, right? So at that point it became the next chapter of our career where we went from being affiliates to owning an affiliate network and becoming brokers in a sense, which I know you know from what I heard about your story. You have some, you know, similar experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very similar. You know similar experience? Yeah, Very similar.
Speaker 2:So I basically private message one-on-one all three or 400 students and, within a 30 day period of time, enrolled three or 400 affiliates to to become affiliates with our network. But this was around, you know, 2019 ish, like end of 2019, going into 2020. And, um, that was like that was one of the most challenging periods of my life, even to this date, because at that point, we hadn't learned how to build a team yet. Up to that point, it had just been me and Peter sort of making this this easy money, you know, blasting out our email list once a day and running this one campaign, and to go from that to then having 300 affiliates where it was just me and Peter. In the beginning, it was just me and him. I was the affiliate manager for the 300 affiliates and Peter was quite literally not sleeping because he was the one issuing the payments to all of them and making sure that we were getting paid Right.
Speaker 3:How many people were in your company at the time? Was this you?
Speaker 2:two. It was literally just the two of us, yeah. So Peter then hired our first real employee, which was an accounting person who still works with us today, who he basically trained on doing the payments for the network because I was taking him.
Speaker 3:So much time yeah, TV stuff yeah.
Speaker 2:But I was still managing all these affiliates and that was the hardest point in my life, you know. I had just every single area of my life started to sort of crumble because all I could do all day was just do calls and message people, right? So I, you know, made this impulsive decision to break off my relationship with my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, right? But I was like, listen, I'm, you know, I just don't, I can't put the time into the relationship that you deserve. I just need to focus on the business, which at the time was a huge mistake, right? And spent six months grinding, the hardest I've grinded in my entire life. I mean, I would literally wake up in the morning at the crack of dawn and have 40, 50 people that wanted to get on calls with me, that needed direction, that needed technical things done for them, offer links, open strategy sessions, whatever right. And I would wake up every morning, I would open my computer, I would see 50 unread threads from 50 different people with hundreds of messages in each thread that I was the one responsible for responding to, and I would go to the bathroom and I would puke my fucking guts out and then I would go into the office and I would handle it and I would come home at 11 at night and do it all again the next day and I did that for maybe like six months and then COVID hit and you know, at the time we were running Legion and when COVID hit, all of the call centers for Legion shut down and the offers literally shut off.
Speaker 2:So we had a huge business at that time. I mean it was, you know, we were booking at that point $10 million a year in business with a two person company, right, but I had destroyed my entire life and I let the work basically destroy me. I mean, I I wasn't taking care of myself. I, you know, had destroyed my perfectly good relationship, you know. And it was at that point that it was a big wake-up call for me, you know I I fortunately was able to win back my girlfriend, you know, send my now wife, when I had this epiphany that that was a huge mistake and that I should have never done that. That was a huge mistake in that I should have never done that. And then I began putting um more of an effort into building a team to then, you know, because obviously it wasn't going to be sustainable at that rate. I mean, you know we were doing a lot of business, but I don't know I, you know I wasn't capable of of of doing it. It was more work than than two people could possibly ever handle, right, um, and a lot of balls were getting dropped. I mean there'd be, you know, 30 people that messaged me in a single day that were affiliates of ours, that I wouldn't even get to reply to until like three days later, and at that point they're just like all right, like screw you, like you know. So at that point it became a next chapter of our life, which is building a team.
Speaker 2:At that point, it became a next chapter of our life, which is building a team, and we ended up only really operating that network for about one or two years because there was just some. You know, the network model was not great for us. I mean, there were just some issues with it, a variety of different issues around just working with that many affiliates and the advertisers that you're working with. They don't really want the traffic from affiliates. They wanted it from internal teams and the affiliates were just running dirty stuff and I would show affiliates my winning campaigns and the next day, they would just like stab me in the back and circumvent us and go direct and like.
Speaker 2:I was just like you know what, like at the time we were running, we had maybe like two or three media buyers that were internal on the team and I said, you know, me and Peter decided that we were going to basically shelf the affiliate network model and just focus only on building our internal team and basically build it into a bigger company, but with the right model of um.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously, people run successful networks and if you were an affiliate that we had to cut off. You know my, my apologies, my condolences. You know it's nothing personal, but the right direction for us we decided was to just run it with the smaller team of internal media buyers, where we had better oversight over them, there was loyalty, they weren't you know't circumventing us the next day, they weren't running things and we had no idea that they were running. We could have full control over the creatives and really build a long-term business like that. And that became another chapter for us, starting in 2021, where we basically stopped being brokers and went back to being affiliates and put a big effort into building a team and building it into a much, much bigger company.
Speaker 4:Age data there's only a few months left of this, A lot of different ways to monetize data. Data is a very broad term. There's a lot more money in it. You already spent the money. Let's just say it cost you $10 for a Medicare. You make a million dollars in sales. You already spent the money. Let's just say it cost you $10 for a Medicare. Leave you make a million dollars in sales. You really only made a hundred thousand bucks and you might not get paid by your advertiser.
Speaker 4:What if I can get an extra 50 cents dollar, $2, $3 per lead in perpetuity? What does that do to my marketing campaign? What does that do for the stress of the profits of my company? A percentage or two at those kinds of numbers are huge as moving the needle. So for us, what I love about age data, the hard part's already been done. Now it's just the revenue left for your company. What would the extra $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a week do for your business? Absolutely All of our big partners are making hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a year with us. They're never going to have this gold rush again.
Speaker 3:It's an incredible story. I mean, god, you know, this is not on the outside. It looks easy, right, but people don't. You went deep there. You got vulnerable talking about hey, 10 million in revenue, two people, that's great, right, it looks great, but you destroy your life, your health, your relationship and your wife's a saint. I mean obviously for her it's kind of good.
Speaker 3:She saw what you went through and she stuck through it. Right is what it comes down to. So I appreciate you being vulnerable, because a lot of people don't talk about that stuff and that's what we want to talk about on the show is that it's not all roses, man. It's to get to that shit, man, and totally. And were there any points where you're like, fuck, I'm just gonna give up on?
Speaker 2:this. I'm like I, did you ever that ever crossed your mind at all, or I, I think? I think when the covid crash happened, it was like probably the darkest month of my life because, you know, not only had I basically blown up my personal life, like trying to just basically spin up all this revenue, yeah but then it all went to zero and I didn't know when it was going to come back. I mean, they had said it was a seven-day lockdown, then it turned into a two-week lockdown, then it turned to a 30-day lockdown. I'm like fuck, like is this going to be a whole fucking year?
Speaker 2:like I just ruined my fucking life to get my business at this point and it's all shut off. You know so it was at that point. It was one of the first like points in my life where I was just like I don't know if I could like do this. You know what I mean and, and you know, fortunately I I got my priorities realigned. I had some, you know, was able to think through it all. You know, once all of kind of the, the fear of COVID dissipated and and you know, the business started to pick back up again.
Speaker 2:But I decided from that point that I wasn't, I wasn't ever going to let the ball slip through my hands in that sense where I was going to destroy my life to make money. You know, I think that you know it's all there. Everything has to be in equilibrium. You know what I mean. A lot of people will only focus on the money and they will spend all of their time and effort to just be on top of the money pile or to be doing better than somebody else and make their entire life around that. But there's more to life than just money. You know there's. You need meaningful relationships, you need your own health. You know I mean right.
Speaker 2:So it was at that point that at first, I had this sort of like negative view of just like, ah, like, fuck this, like you know, I don't, I can't do this, or whatever. To then being like, okay, no, I am going to do it and I'm going to do it right, and I'm going to do this in a way that you know has equilibrium with all these different areas of my life, and I'm and I'm going to try to crush it in all of these areas. So when I got back with my girlfriend, I immediately just fully committed to that, like we had been, you know, in a really you know unserious kind of dicey spot in our relationship. I said, screw that.
Speaker 2:Like you're moving in with me, like we're going to get married, that's what I told her like immediately when we got back together, you know, and she was just like wow, like okay, like you know, are you serious about this? And, like you know, I even, like, went and and you know, told that to her parents and they're like, are you sure? Like, are you know? Like I was like, yes, like this is it? Like, um, you know, we're fully committed now, like this is what we're doing.
Speaker 2:And, you know, at the same time, I fully committed to to building my business again in a way that was like sustainable for long-term growth. You know, the affiliate model was good for spinning up short-term revenue, but the revenue was only as good. As you know, the affiliates were loyal or the offer was live, right. I mean, once your one offer died, the affiliates just jumped over to the other network. There was no, you know, trying to make it work or, you know, testing these other offers, right, it was just, it all just dissipated, right.
Speaker 2:So that that entered into another chapter of my life. I mean, we had at that point, we had hit this like $10 million a year mark, but I had made a goal and I made a video publicly that I wanted to to get the revenue to a hundred million a year and that was going to take a different model. It was going to take a different model. It was going to take a different approach than than the 10 million you know and um. We set our sights on that goal like around 2020, you know later in 2020 ish, and got to work, you know, um. So at that point we started to get into paper call um. We started to build up our media buying team more.
Speaker 3:We went from having. What made you want to get into pay-per-call though at the time, like what was the light bulb?
Speaker 2:I think just other affiliates were crushing it. So, like around 2021 was the beginning of like the. It was almost like the height of like the Medicare boom, I would say. I mean, people were really crushing it on Medicare pay-per-call and we got in the game with that. And also in 2022, aca started to become more of a thing and immediately we just started to some good results in that space. So, um, I mean, yeah, we went from doing $10 million in 2020 to doing $30 million in 2022, to $50 million in 2023, to a hundred million.
Speaker 3:Um, but rats, I mean that's man, that's crazy, yeah we we hit the goal that we wanted to hit.
Speaker 2:You know we made this goal back in 2020 that we wanted to hit that specific revenue figure, but you know, I can't take all the credit for that because you know it wasn't me.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, in order to get to a number like that was all of our team working together and it was Peter hustling on the on the client side of the business, with three other people that were bringing in tons and tons of buyers. Um, it was, you know, me hiring and training media buyers, but that was, you know, a multi-year process and by that point, you know, the media buyers that that were crushing it were people that I'd hired years prior, you know, and, um, very little of it had to do with me personally or Peter personally. It was just sort of the collective team just all putting it in, putting in their best.
Speaker 3:And, um, you, you know I can't take all the credit for it, or, or nor can peter, but um, yeah, we talked about it on stage and I talked that with, about this with peter, a couple weeks ago at affiliate summit. I think you guys, you guys are great at hiring. You have a great hiring process. I know a lot of people on your team. They're right, they're all consistent and you seem to have. I'd like to talk about the methodology, because I think it's not. I know the media buying side. I know you guys have very stringent criteria. You interview 100 people and you hire one out of those people, right, but I think that that's really an art to be able to do that. I've struggled with that very much so. So that's been one of my struggles, you know. But yeah, you can't. Two of you can get to 10 million, but you're not going to. Those two won't get to fucking a hundred million. It's not going to happen. You'd be dead if you got that number.
Speaker 3:But, it takes a team man, so but the hiring process is so important I fucking struggle with it. So that would ask you. I'm always asking for like that fine line man.
Speaker 2:You know so. So I think that we've taken a different approach to hiring. I think when other people look to hire a media buyer, they might go on like Indeedcom and make like a job listing for like a media buyer and they'll have people that have worked at ad agencies or whatever right and they got to convince them to work with them or they got to you know whatever right, you know whatever right, and that can still work. I know people that have built great teams just off of like job sites and stuff like that. But our team building process was more of an organic process where we started putting this work into this sort of training and coaching, like back in like 2019, to where we built up a small following. I mean our YouTube channel is not big. I mean our our YouTube channel is not big. I mean we have about 4,000 people that watch it, but these are all diehard affiliates and a lot of them have gone through our old coaching programs or have been learning just from the organic content on the YouTube channel.
Speaker 2:Nowadays, we just do everything for free. We don't we don't sell courses. We haven't done that in five years. I mean we just put out free content and our approach has been always to lead with value and to give first. And through that approach, I believe in this world that what you give, you get right. The law of reciprocity call it karma, you know whatever you want to call it right. But what you put into this world is what you'll get out.
Speaker 2:And a lot of times I didn't know why I was doing certain things, you know, but I just had sort of this gut feeling, this voice that was just telling me to just to just do it right. Like at one point we ended up leaking a winning campaign of ours that we were still running at that point, you know where I basically there's this hernia mesh mass tort at the time and it was like making good money for us. I mean, like we were spending a thousand a day, making like three thousand a day back. I mean it was a great campaign and I basically recorded the whole ad campaign, my real ads, like the real lander, and I put it on a case study and I think we were selling it for like $7 or something like that, right, I just put like some minimal, you know extremely low price point for for something of that value, right, and I just I just emailed it out for free to my list, right, and there were so many people that went through that that were just like holy shit, I can't believe you.
Speaker 2:Just on my own I don't. I can't manage the whole client side of the business, I don't have the cashflow to do all this. Like, you're the one who put me onto this. Like, can I just come work with you? It's like we just had armies of people that were interested in working with us and still do to this day, right, I mean more people than we could ever work with. Apply, and you know, if you've applied to one of our hiring rounds and you haven't been accepted, don't take it personally. There's only, you know, so much capacity that we have. I mean, right now, our entire company is about 25 people and about 13 media buyers, right. So it's not like there's just infinite spots on the media buying team, but maybe once every six months we'll do a hiring announcement and from all the good faith and value that we've built in the industry over the years, it comes back to us, you know, by people basically willing to join our team and to work with us, and I appreciate that and I'm very grateful to be in that position.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's an incredible story because we talk about about with value. Given the value like that seven dollar course, like it brought you, you probably made people millionaires from doing that right and easily and you didn't. So you didn't see initial um financial gain from that, but long term you did because you you had these elites. You bring them a value, so they want to give you value back and they're loyal to you, right.
Speaker 2:So exactly that might be one of the she's right there, exactly, yeah, I think you know. Of course you, you gotta be careful in what you share, in a sense. I mean, of course you don't want to just leak all of your winning stuff or what's working for you, right? But in that sense, like I knew that that campaign wasn't going to be running forever, I knew that maybe it had like a short runway, but I knew how valuable it would be for people and maybe that one campaign wasn't going to be the thing that they do forever, right, but maybe it was good for a month or something, right, and maybe they could take that and they could do it with other tort offers or just apply to other lead gen verticals, right, and that's exactly what people did, you know. And I think, of course you need to be careful about leaking your alpha, right? I think everybody, all these affiliates in this space, we all have our secret sauce, right, and of course you don't want to just give that away, because then you're going to ruin your business, like, straight up, I'm being transparent, like I'm a guy that loves to share value with people, because then you're going to ruin your business Straight up. I'm being transparent. I'm a guy that loves to share value with people, but it has to be done in a way that isn't going to just permanently take all the wind out of your sale indefinitely in business.
Speaker 2:So it's like yeah, I had this one campaign. That was one of many things that we were doing. It was a short-term thing. People got a shitload of value out of that. Did it permanently take all the wind out of my sail with my next year in business or five years or whatever? No, but it was so valuable to people that that value came back to me.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I would challenge and encourage other people to share value in a space in a way that could really help other people, but be mindful to do it in a way that isn't going to necessarily wreck your business or take all the wind out of your own sail. I think there needs to be some um, some sort of smart way to do it Right and, um, I think the best way to do it is just to share what you feel comfortable with and just do it for free. You know you don't have to. I think where people get caught up is like if they try to, you know, you know get sucked into like selling a high ticket program or something like that. I mean, we sold one at one point that was extremely valuable, but like it kind of like ruined our business. I'm going to be honest with you yeah, why did it?
Speaker 3:ruin your business, because I know there's high margins behind that stuff. I said I was I was wondering that myself because I knew you guys did that. I wonder what caused you to stop so.
Speaker 2:I need to rephrase that it didn't ruin our business. It ruined the campaigns that we were running at the time.
Speaker 3:Could you take the focus away from those campaigns?
Speaker 2:Is that what it was, or so I mean at in that course, like we had about three different campaigns that we were running. It was like rent to own auto loan and like edu right, it was like nursing edu. We just took all the campaigns that were working for us and we put them in the course, right, and when 400 people went through the course and all 400 of them started running the campaigns, they immediately died. You know, yeah, and it was like our affiliate campaigns like immediately died upon launching it and we were like fuck, you know. But you know I had a longer term vision than that, you know what I mean. And we had to basically short-term pivot to like building that network business and, you know, do other things in the space before we built up, before we decided to get into these other paper call campaigns and do all that right.
Speaker 2:So I think it's important to share value, I think it's important to help others. I think you need to do it in a way that's not gonna just wreck your own business. So just be savvy. What you put into this world is what you get out, and the more people that you can help, the more value savvy you know what you put into this world is what you get out. And you know, the more people that you can help, the more value that you can bring, the more value will flow back to you, right? So I would challenge, I would challenge you guys to think about that. You know, everyone likes to keep everything so close to the chest. But, you know, is it really going to matter if you share with somebody something that you know you know isn't necessarily going to matter if you share with somebody something that you know, you know isn't necessarily going to ruin your business, but could help. You know, thousands and thousands of people get on track with theirs and, and you know, I I think that that's a worthy trade-off yeah, I agree.
Speaker 3:And at the end of the day you know everyone's looking for they're looking for there's hope, right, that's what I hope is. Politics is all hope. You hope this person wins that they're going for there's hope right, that's what hope is. Politics is all hope. You hope this person wins that they're going to change their life or whatever right People get. Like it becomes like a religion. So religion I'm not trying to get like all crazy here, but like everything's like hope. So when you provide value to somebody, that you give that person hope that hey, I can have a better life this person doing they're teaching me. There's like a commitment you become like you almost come like family to like you help them hit that goal and they feel loyal to you for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, um, I think I think in one sense like gratitude as a short memory. You know, like I think that there was a lot of people that I put on to this space that like literally changed their life, but then a month later, like they're pretending like they all did it and they all figured it out right. So it's like I don't know like you kind of need to expect that, but it's more about just like the, the, yeah, the general value that you're putting into other people's life is going to come back to you in ways that you won't expect, right, yeah and what happened?
Speaker 3:though? Those people, they're not in your wavelength, or they're, they're, they're in a different wavelength. So you, you won't. You won't attract those people, they'll go their yeah, the ones that are on your wavelength. You'll attract those people. And then that becomes and you don't need a huge circle, you just need a tight circle. Yes, good people. So that's, it's like natural.
Speaker 2:Like I don't care if you know a thousand people took it and you know maybe 10 of these people are like super loyal media buyers that work with us for years and years and years and we do huge numbers together and, you know, build massive loyalty and have a long-term relationship. It's like all right, cool, like you know. Now, now we're getting somewhere. You know what I mean, um, but anyways, you know it's it's been a lot of up and down in this relationship, in this um, in this um, in this industry and um, you know I'm grateful to be where we are today, um, you know I'm grateful to to have done what we've done, but you know, to me, like it doesn't even feel like that much, you know, I mean I guess I've done maybe more affiliate revenue than than more than most affiliates, but like, to me it feels like I'm just getting started in it and it feels like there's so much more of this um journey that's yet to play out, you know, oh, it's great.
Speaker 3:So, can you start at 17,. Right, you were 30 now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So 13 years, that's a long time to be dedicated. So you but you're still a lot young man. I mean you do another 13 years. Imagine where you're going to be at 43. So this ties into my next question to you what's the next goal? I mean you hit nine figures right. I mean you're trying to go to a billion or like what's what do you? What is, or does that even matter anymore? Like what is, like what's the goal?
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think at this point, one like we've just been focused as being like pure affiliates right, and like we've proven that we can, you know, run massively high volume campaigns and you know, put up some of the biggest numbers as affiliates right. But I think, um, what I feel like I want to move towards, maybe like in an you know q1 or q2 of next year, is actually starting to build something that I, that I own on the offer side. So I don't really have like concrete plans yet, but I want to own, I want to be the advertiser, you know, um, and I think that's the next transition for me because you know this affiliate model is great for like a lifestyle business, like you can make you know millions of dollars and have, you know an epic lifestyle. Like I live you know a block from the water in San Diego and you know a $3 million house I live right from, you know a block from the most epic surf break where, like, every weekend, my life is like a vacation man, like it's it's sick, right, but the affiliate business in itself, being a media buyer is sort of like a lifestyle cashflow business and I think that, like, I'm kind of ready to move into more of like the sellable business you know, maybe owning like an insurance agent agency, right, I mean, that would be kind of the next goal for me and at that point I wouldn't necessarily be as focused as, like you know, I'm just the revenue numbers of just like hitting a billion or something, right, it'd be more like okay, let me build an insurance brokerage where I've got a hundred license agents and like I've got you know, concrete, sellable, you know value, where I could sell this business at any time for multiples on multiples of just the revenue, right, and honestly, like we're not, we're not even there yet.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think we're gonna put in another big quarter here, like in q4, and just be focused purely on the traffic and the media buying. But I think, like in in 2024, is gonna begin to be a transition for us from being pure affiliates to like owning it. You know, and in our, in our space, like we're mainly focused like insurance paper call, right, so owning the insurance brokerage that you're driving the calls into is a huge next step for us. That that you know in in my, in my mind, I know is the right way for us, you know, for the next like 10 years I mean, it's all the sense in the world.
Speaker 3:You know how to generate the leads. You got that down pat.
Speaker 2:Now you get the second part of the equation and only offer yeah, yeah, I mean like doing doing 100 million a year is like cool, but like it's like, yeah, like it's like when you go try to exit and like your whole business is just like an ad campaign or something you know, and it's like you don't even own the offer and it's like the offers are up and down, the ad is like up and down every week. It like that's that's not really that attractive to like an actual, like buyer. You know, and like I feel like that's something that not a lot of people talk about. But there's nothing wrong with being an affiliate. I've, I've enjoyed being an affiliate for 10 years. You know, we've enjoyed. You know the money that can be made as an affiliate. But you know the bigger step in business is building like a sellable asset, you know, obviously, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3:The thing is, too, it comes down to you. Strike me as a person. I think this is what makes you successful. You do a lot of read, a lot of books, right? You listen to a lot of podcasts, you're always self-developing, you look to optimize yourself. So, as a business owner and I think that's really amazing what you said, because the fact that a lot of people were listening to, like man, if I did a hundred million in revenue, man, I'd fucking, I don't know, I'd retire or whatever they, they, they, like I don't need to do anymore.
Speaker 3:But you don't see things that way, cause it's all about the journey, right. At the end of the day, and at 30 years old, like, your dream is to hit. One of your dreams was to hit 100 million. You hit that. What's the next dream Right Now? Your next dream is to own your own offer, right? So once you hit that, there'll probably be something else, right? So that's really what it comes down to at the end of the day. It's the pursuit of your dreams and it's not always a number man.
Speaker 2:There's always something else behind it, right. But it's like these days off that I have are like, like I could, I could be on vacation I'm euphoric, you know just to have two days where I could just do, do me and, you know, do only what I want to do, right. But I think you know, as a man, in your life you need conquests, you need something that you're actively conquering, right. And this whole mindset of like I'm going to hit a certain number amount and I'm just going to retire and I'm going to, you know, kick my feet up in a beach chair and drink coconuts, you know, try doing that for two weeks, you know and see if you're happy.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean and you'll realize immediately that that's not what's going to make you happy. You know, every day is like a battle in business. You know, especially as you get bigger in business, every hour day there's problems.
Speaker 3:Challenges.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, especially as you start working with more and more people and there's more and more things that you got to manage. I mean, every five minutes I've got messages coming in ham, having a problem with this. Okay, this isn't working. All right, you know, whatever, right, it's like it. It quite literally feels like war. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:But it's like I feel like, as a man like you kind of need that, for me at least like I feel like I need that that level of like chaos in my life, you know, and um, I kind of like, I kind of like thrive off that shit.
Speaker 2:You know, like at first I at first I sort of had like a negative attitude about it, like when I first got started, like I wanted to work the least amount possible and make you know the most amount that I could, working the least.
Speaker 2:But now it's just like I'm just going to grind and and you know, do it in a way that I can do sustainably, you know, while keeping these other areas in my life in check, like my health. My health is my number one priority. I work out every single day. You know, my relationship's a big priority. I make sure to spend quality time with my wife every day, and it's all about keeping these areas in check, right, but it's not about just like hitting a certain number and just like kicking your feet up. It's not about just like hitting a certain number and just like kicking your feet up, I mean I I think that that's something that a lot of people like strive for, but it may be at a certain age of retirement. It makes sense, right, but I mean at 30, that that's absolutely crazy to be thinking about doing.
Speaker 2:You know, um, so anyways, it's um, embrace the chaos. You know, that's what I say. And and um, your, your ability to manage stress is going to be the ceiling of your potential. So the more business that you do, the more stress that comes with it. It's, it's, they go hand in hand. So in order to make more money, you need to make, do more business. And in order to do more business, you need to handle more stress right.
Speaker 2:And that's where sort of this personal development comes in, where a lot of stress is perceptive. You know what I mean. A lot of stress comes down to like your own self-talk about it. You know what I mean. You know a lot of people will say things to themselves like, oh, the stress is killing me. Or oh, I can't do this anymore. You know, but it's like I. I tell my I like, even when the most stressful shit's going on, I'm just like all right, like bring it. You know, like when a day's going on where it's like quiet, I'm like all right, like bring it on, like let's, let's get some more shit going, like I, let's, let's spin up more business, like I'm not, there's not enough chaos going on right now like, yeah, it's interesting like if, if I have like a quiet day, I'll immediately be thinking about like okay.
Speaker 2:Like do we need to go into a hiring round? Do I need you know like five new hires that I'm trying to train at once? Like, do we need you know 30 new clients? Like what do we need right now? Like if things are too calm and like comfortable, it means that you're doing something wrong. You're right about that.
Speaker 2:You need to be living in an uncomfortable area, but not to a point where it's going to destroy your life. I think in that one point, when it was just the two of us running the network, it wasn't good. But I think you need to go up to your comfort zone and you need to basically push it right above. That is like, let's say, like you know, uh, uh in, in, uh an eight out of 10 or something on like the, the work side, like push it up to like a 10 out of 10, or like you know, whatever, whatever you're going to be like slightly uncomfortable doing, and that'll just become the new norm and then you'll adjust to that, and then you can, once you adjust to that, you can push it up a little bit more. You know, yeah, Guys that was amazing.
Speaker 3:Well, you said it got me thinking too. You know it's it's. That's what I love about this show is that we get people like you, that you, you have a different mindset than the other guests, and each guest has a different mindset, but you, there's always gonna be chaos in our fucking business, any business, no matter what you're in yeah, yeah, I mean, um, a lot of it's just about staying calm too, right?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think one of the most important qualities of being in business, or even just being a media buyer, is your ability to stay calm, because things are going to be so volatile that, you know, a calm, a calm person is somebody who's going to be making better decisions. They're going to be, you know, able to communicate more clearly with other people, and they're going to be able to manage their own emotions and not, you know, blow up themselves, right? So I mean, of course, everybody has their like you know, tricks or whatever that they do, you know, to stay calm, whether it be exercise, whether you know, for me, I like I like surfing, I like you know, to stay calm, whether it be exercise, whether you know, for me, I like I like surfing, I like you know going, even if there's no waves, I'll just go sit out in the ocean for an hour and it's like I'll, I'll literally go from being, you know, you know, stressed. I mean, yeah, of course I get stressed every single day, right, but I've learned how to bring myself out of those States and, like, when I'm out in there in the water for an hour from, like you know, let's say like six to seven o'clock or whatever it is. I'm on, I'm on vacation, man, I could be, you know, I could be in Fiji. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It's like, when I come back from that, like I'm completely calm. You know what I mean. It's like you need to, you need to figure out, like, how you're going to manage your own stress and and you know, I think exercise is the best thing to do. I mean, some days I'll wake up at six in the morning, get a workout in for an hour and then, after work, at six o'clock, I'll go surfing. It's like these are like two things that I've I've learned how to do to.
Speaker 2:You know, manage my own stress and that allows me to grind even harder during that work day. You know, manage my own stress and that allows me to grind even harder during that work day. You know, and take on even more responsibility and you know other things that people couldn't even think about. You know managing or handling, and you know all of the, all of the problems or whatever. Right, it's like cool, like I got it. This is just what I do every day. Right, this is just what what I do, right? I mean, it just becomes the norm, you know. So, yeah, that's sort of my approach to business. And you know, of course you need to keep everything in balance and prioritize your health as number one. You know, sometimes, you know, people throw the health out the window just to, you know, be on top of the money pile, but when the health goes, you don't have shit.
Speaker 3:You make bad, good decisions and you know it subconsciously. You know that, yeah, that's what it comes down to, and then you make bad decisions because of I think it affects the confidence when you're healthy. It's true, I work out like crazy. I'm doing pilates man. Yeah, I'm like the only dude in these classes, but, bro, it's like it's humbling, yeah, shaking, like I'll freaking leave. When I come out, I feel great when I'm in there, why I'm in this fucking place, but I come out for them.
Speaker 2:Great, you come out, you get like a little six pack, you get cut up. Yeah, like, oh, what was I worried about before?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's handled, it gives you that it gives you like that little bit of an edge, man, yeah. It's so important.
Speaker 2:Adam Young talked about that too.
Speaker 3:You could have all the money in the world. Man, you die of a heart attack. You know 35, 40, it happens all the time. Yeah, it's crazy Totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's huge. I don't think enough people talk about that. You know about that aspect of it, yeah, but man, this has been amazing. I mean I feel like we can talk for hours and hours and hours. You know, I mean this was great. Um, the optimized convert podcast, which is amazing. I recommend everyone listen to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the optimized to convert YouTube channel. Peter has a podcast that he's done, called the Peter day podcast, which is on the optimized to convert YouTube channel. I'll put out various, you know, affiliate marketing or mindset related content, um, you know, a couple of times a month or or or so. Um so, yeah, tune into our channel and um, yeah, appreciate you having us on, having me on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure it's great. I've been wanting to have you guys on for a long time. I think that I was expecting I was going to talk a lot about the media buying and all that stuff, but I think what you talked about, that's important. The mindset is so important. Your story is amazing how you had like $20 a day you would spend. Some people might think that you need, like you know, 20 000 or 100 000 no, you can start with 20 a day.
Speaker 3:There's guys who do 10 a day and you start little, you get small victories. That's what leads to the big victor. So, yeah, from from 200 I mean for 20 hours a day to you know, seven figure days, like it's just crazy. So I think that's just a beautiful thing and that's a beautiful thing about industry that you can start with that much knowledge. But if you have that obsession, you want to to get better, it'll happen. No matter what, no matter COVID, no matter, you'll figure out how to, how to win, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just bet on yourself. You know, I mean, in order to get to that point, we didn't take any money out of the business. You know, I, I took just enough money out of the business to cover my monthly expenses, which is, you know, um, not not too much. I mean, you know, maybe more than the average person, but, you know, compared to, I mean, everyone else, most of the other people in our company make more money than me. I mean, I have one of the lowest salaries in the company, you know, and everything that we make just goes back into growing the business. And and um, you know, I'd rather bet on myself and and you know, that's sort of the approach that we've taken.
Speaker 3:And yeah, Great way to end off Bet on yourself. That's what it comes down to. I love it. How can?
Speaker 2:people find out more about you. Yeah, so check out our YouTube channel, optimize to Convert, and go to wwwoptimizetoconvertcom. You can get on our email list. We send out, you know, regular value-based videos and stuff like that. Regular value-based videos and stuff like that, and yeah, just tune in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm on that email list. It's great. I told you on stage I gave you our CFO, like one of your first episodes. You guys were talking about cashflow, especially the more you spend I mean, the more you make, the more you're going to have to spend, right? You have to spend on the business and it gets tight sometimes, right? So you guys, that was one of the best episodes because no one talks about that. I feel Everyone's talking about the numbers are hitting, but they don't talk about, hey, shit gets tight, what do you got to do to make that work? So that's a great. I can't emphasize enough how great that is. Great resource and it's out there for you to get it. So the Day Brothers great people in the industry, great guys, always adding value we're going to do more shit together.
Speaker 2:Definitely. Let's fucking go guys. Let's fucking go Christian. That was awesome, man. Thank you. Cheers $100, man yeah.